Blogs done with WordPress

[DrewKaree]

I don't even care if that's the proper phraseology for this thread.

Why do WordPress blogs take so friggen long to load?  Are people who blog actually aware of this, and just don't care, or are they blissfully ignorant?

[AtomSmasher]

They seem to load as fast as any other web pages for me 

[rotheblog]

Maybe cue us into some blogs in particular that you think are slow loading...

Wordpress blogs have a lot of plugins, and if the authors don't know how to use those sparingly, that can increase load time of the blog significantly.

[DrewKaree]

Dunno if these do it for you guys or not, but here's a few that are dogs for me (one page in particular, but these two in general bog my browser down if I open more than one page)

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/2008/01/20/11-asian-girls/

http://atomictrousers.blogspot.com/

Also, ANY blog with a YouTube video on it seems to take forever and a day to load, and once one video is opened, it's as if the browser doesn't want to "release" it, getting progressively slower.  Not nearly as bad a problem on forums such as this, but it still definitely appears as if it's holding on to the video.

I'm using Firefox 2.0.0.12 as well.

[patrickl]

The Stuff White People like site takes ages for me to load too. Seems like it's loading hundreds of avatars and other pictures and then it stops with an error.

The problem there is that they really make that page too long. It should break after a number of comments. Just like we have pages here. Imagine opening the light bulb thread and getting all the posts on one page. That would take forever to load too.

The Atomictrousers page works fine for me. That looks like an Atom blog actually.

I recently compared several Blogs for an implementation for the Dutch government and we actually settled on Wordpress. I never noticed any speed problems.

[DrewKaree]

I hadn't thought the comments would make it take too long to load because there's other postings that have roughly the same number of comments that don't do that, but....

I think the Atomic Trousers blog that was happening to give me issues had several YouTube video's on that particular page, because I stumbled across a slowdown while catching up on his posts.

I was thinking it was WordPress in particular because other blogs don't give me the same issues with the same "parts" that seem problematic (the videos and arm-length-long comments section).

Is Wordpress just the "wrapper" for a blog posting then?

[patrickl]

I hadn't thought the comments would make it take too long to load because there's other postings that have roughly the same number of comments that don't do that, but....

Well the page itself loads pretty quickly for me, but then it keeps on downloading 600 images. Mostly avatars from gravatar.com? I can scroll on the page already. In the end it runs into a syntax error on the page and then it doesn't actually show the avatars.

Is Wordpress just the "wrapper" for a blog posting then?

No, it's the main software. Like the SMF forum we use here.

I checked the Wordpress support site and apparently more people have been having performance problems. Apart from badly configured webservers of course, it seems like plugins can cause problems. There were some people who ran a site which had 6 second page load times and after removing the plugins it was down to half a second.