SoFla Blogosphere: How Fast Is Your Blog?

Because I spend an inordinate amount of time cruising around the South Florida blogosphere, I am intimately aware of page load times. There is nothing more frustrating than to have to wait for a blog to load and by now I pretty much know which ones are going to drive me crazy.

So I decided to check and see if it was just my imagination or were certain South Florida blogs that slow to fully load.

Using the Pingdom page load tool, the first group of blogs I checked were SFDB's Top 5. These are the blogs that get the most links here at SFDB. Then I moved on to 4 blogs that, based upon past experience, I thought might be slow. The last group of 5 blogs was comprised of some other, widely read blogs, that I wanted to check.

The first test I did was between 8 and 9 PM last Friday night. That test is designated by the letter "A." The "B" test was done between 12 and 1 PM on Sunday. I also noted the type of platform the blog was using when that was known. The numbers represent how many seconds it took the full page of the blog to load.

Here are the results.

- Eye on Miami [Blogger].................2.6A (2.4B)

- Coconut Grove Grapevine [Blogger]......7.0A (N/A)

- The Reid Report [Wordpress]............7.7A (11.9B)

- Bark Bark Woof Woof [Blogger]..........3.1A (3.8B)

- Random Pixels [Blogger]................2.7A (6.0B)


- Nunez Photography [?]..................8.6A (7.5B)

- Boy Writes Miami [?]...................8.4A (8.4B)

- Beached Miami [?]......................6.5A (7.8B)

- Mike LaMonica [Wordpress]..............4.8A (7.5B)


- Miami Beach 411 [?]....................4.6A (7.8B)

- The305.com [?]........................13.0A (15.3B)

- The Heat Lightning [?].................6.9A (9.5B)

- Miami Faves [tumblr]...................4.8A (4.5B)

- Ipanemic [?]...........................7.5A (8.1B)


Trends

- The first thing that I noticed is that there is the potential for a wide variance in the load times from day to day. Pingdom describes what is measured in the full page tests...

The Full Page Test loads a complete HTML page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser.

So I suppose that depending upon what objects the "full page" of the blog being tested added or removed between Friday and Sunday, the load times could vary.

- Overall, The305.Com was consistently the slowest tested blog to load and Eye on Miami was consistently the fastest.

- Most blogs were slower during Sunday's test. The average speed on Friday was 6.3 seconds. The average on Sunday was 7.7 seconds.

- There is so much, well, junk, on Coconut Grove Grapevine's blog that the Pingdom tool couldn't complete the 2nd test because the object volume exceeded Pingdom's limits.

- Blogger blogs generally did better than the Wordpress or "other" blogs, although my sampling of blogs was obviously incomplete and honestly did not do a fair job in adequately measuring this trend. The lone Tumblr blog in this test [Miami Favs] did better than average.

So there you go. Not a scientific or well-controlled test by any stretch of the imagination, but still rather fun. And it confirmed some suspicions of mine.

Check out your blog with the tool and post your results in the comments if you want.

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