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.
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.
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…)
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.
I’ve found a faster way of dealing with widgets – I don’t use them, period.
yo matt, i think you got to check out this article of mine.
http://riteshnayak.com/blog/2007/06/18/selecting-a-good-theme-for-your-blog/
Its about almost the same thing, but its from pure experience.
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!