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I have turned off Navbar. For a long time, I preferred to have it on my blog because it provides a search box and simple sharing method. However, I finally realized it costs 2.1 seconds of loading time.

But the story started with the Next blog link, which always redirects to one blog about Pentadactyl, it's obvious to me that there was something wrong with Blogger. I found some discussions about the issue:

http://productforums.google.com/d/topic/blogger/yurRm7gOiMo/discussion
http://productforums.google.com/d/topic/blogger/hq7dcykLLOc/discussion
http://productforums.google.com/d/topic/blogger/MnCkBCXlXYk/discussion
http://productforums.google.com/d/topic/blogger/6G-D9g8kpGA/discussion
http://productforums.google.com/d/topic/blogger/bnwvUVIvkNs/discussion
http://productforums.google.com/d/topic/blogger/z97M2nAIycc/discussion
http://productforums.google.com/d/topic/blogger/XnEUJ48aIAg/discussion

I'd thought about posting a new thread, but then I saw the loading time, the issue didn't matter anymore.

I used this post and FireBug to time the loading. Before, it's ~4 seconds. If I turned off Navbar, it's ~1.9 seconds, that's 2.1 seconds difference. If I only blocked the Google+ share button (the plusone.google.com domain), it's ~2.9 seconds.

The number speaks it all and made the decision for me already: get rid of that now!

What functionality would be missing? Well, basically nothing. I have a more powerful search page and more options for sharing, which already accessible from top navigation menu. If I have to list, then the Blogger brand icon and Report Abuse are the only two missing.

2 seconds page loading time for very simple post on my years old computer, not many blogs can give you that. I don't like fancy or over-stuffed blogs, so that's the way my blog should be.

Think about it: 2.1 seconds, round it down to 2 seconds and only take 10% of it, 0.2 seconds, which is overly underestimated, even for recently built computer I believed. Anyway, 0.2 * 22,100 pageviews (current last 30-day pageviews in Blogger Stats), that would be 4,420 seconds ~= 1 hour, 13 minutes, and 40 seconds. That's the energy I save for Earth.

More than a year ago, the loading time was around 6.4 seconds, I took few steps trying to reduce it. After that, I didn't pay anymore attention to it. A new post about Site Speed in Google Analytics got me looking into page load time again, which I have known before, but didn't pay attention to it, either.

I checked out it and it reported that it is about 5.66 seconds in average in last 30 days.


There seems to be two hiccups, I believe those views were from Poland and Hungary according to the data in Map Overlay. I am not sure what the problems really are, I don't believe that's because these two countries have slow connections to Blogger's servers.



I am quite happy to those numbers, though 5.66 seconds isn't something that you can call it a huge improvement. The global mean loading time is near 7 seconds based on the chart in Google Analytics' post. My blog is better than that, though I wish mine can be faster than mean value ~3 seconds.

The distribution of page load time is shown as the following image, it looks like the pages of my blog, 85.54% are loaded within between 1 and 7 seconds. This sounds very great.


I want to continue reading this data, so I updated my Google Analytics report script [diff]. This way, I don't need to constantly log in for checking it, I only need to read the daily report generated by my script.

Since I actually didn't do anything, in fact, I added more stuff. Maybe it's just computer gets faster, Internet connection are improved, or browser works more efficient. Anyway, I hope the number keeps going smaller.