Earlier this evening I discovered that my sites were hanging. I could see that it was the blogcatalog widget that was hanging. I guess they had a problem with their site late in the evening.
That’s the trouble with widgets and badges and banners that have to pull data from another site. If the site is overloaded with visitors or is having a problem it can affect how your own site loads.
I’ve noticed many times that the mybloglog and the blogcatalog widgets have slowed my sites and others that I’ve visited, but it was the worst I’ve ever seen it tonight. So I took both widgets off of all my and my husbands blogs.
The sites seem to load much faster to me now. Well unless something else causes it to slow down. I’ve noticed that in the early morning hours Adbrite, Technorati, and the Truth Laid Bare codes can cause a bit of slow down in loading.
Have you removed your widgets or any other links to speed up the loading of your site? If so, which ones did you remove?
There are good points and bad points to the widgets. For example the MyBlogLog widget is nice because MBL users like to see their photo on the blog they are visiting. But from a blogger standpoint the widget slows down page load time and detracts from the content.
BeachBum
I have noticed problems with some of the banners/widgets I have on my site. I’ve had voting banners cause my site not to load right away, so I got rid of those. And sometimes the Amazon widget I have slows everything down if it doesn’t load right away. And when I work on my site at my boyfriend’s house, my Google ads take like 5 seconds to load, slowing the whole page down. UGh. I need to figure out how to fix this! I use IE, so maybe Firefox is better.