Sidebar Widgets Suck

Wednesday, February 7th, 2007;
-- Andy Beal |

I’ve just removed the external sidebar widgets from Marketing Pilgrim. As much as I loved having them on the site, they just slowed down the page load-times too much.

Looking at the click patterns via Crazy Egg, it appears few readers were actually clicking on them anyway, so why frustrate the 99% of visitors who had to suffer slow loading pages.

As a compromise, I’ve added a “pilgrim’s picks” section to the sidebar, which includes links to the Link blog, MyBlogLog community and job board.

I think widgets are fun for a blog to have, but when they start adding 8-15 seconds to a page’s load time, it’s time to rethink.

2 Responses to “Sidebar Widgets Suck”

  1. Joe Dolson Says:

    Cheers to that! There’s little more irritating than having to wait because of something you won’t be using.

  2. Jamie Parks Says:

    Smart move…

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