Avoiding Widget Slowdown

Mike Davidson: How To Keep Widgets From Slowing Down Sites: WEDJE. I’m thinking about making this a requirement for all external widgets on WordPress.com.

5 thoughts on “Avoiding Widget Slowdown

  1. The other piece of advice I’d offer is to ask: do I really need a widget in the first place? Do those Flickr photos really add anything to the site. Does anyone care what’s on your iTunes playlist?

    When your blog starts looking like (shudder) a MySpace page, it’s time to consider whether you’re overloading visitors with extraneous stuff…

    (Then again, I’m one of those cranky minimalists…)

  2. I like this idea. When I was dabbling with advertizers, I dropped a few, as they were making my poor site (on shared hosting) really slow or near unresponsive. I have a blog aquaintance, as well, who has dropped a lot of the slower code (the javascript, mostly) in favor of widgets that are a bit more hard coded. Fun times on the horizon.

  3. Oh yes, please do think about working this into WordPress as a stable feature – widget slowdown is a huge problem, and widgets are simply too useful not to want to use. Someone has to solve the issue, and Mike Davidson’s approach looks like a good beginning.

    Thanks to you for a great product!

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