Do Not Let Your Sidebar Slow Down Your Site

Content is king on the internet, right? Yet we keep throwing more and more junk into our sidebars.

I’m in the process of cleaning up the sidebars on another of my sites because it was starting to scare me.

Gayla at Mom Gadget was getting pretty frustrated because of how slowly her site was loading. I frequently joke with her about all of the gadgets and gizmos on her sidebar so I knew she should try to fix it before considering moving it since moving it probably wouldn’t help the pageload time much.

So I volunteered to find a way to get it to load faster and started hitting the refresh button to figure out what was going on.

The left sidebar would pop right up, the right sidebar would hesitantly follow and then up to 10 seconds later the content in the middle would decide to arrive. Not good.

It looked like the images from the MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog widgets were causing the delay.

But how could I fix that without getting rid of them.

I dug into the php files and noticed that the call to the sidebar was happening in the index.php, single.php and page.php files before the content. (There is not archive.php file in the theme).

Without even bothering to dig through the style.css file, I knew that there was something that slammed the left sidebar all the way left and the right sidebar all the right and then the content just fills in between.

So, I moved that one line call to the sidebar down to the bottom of those two php files and magic began. The page loads faster.

Technically the page doesn’t actually load any faster. The page just appears to load faster because the content shows up first. The right sidebar still trudges along but nobody notices because they are busy reading through the posts.

As a side benefit, in the html file, the content shows up before any of the sidebar information. So search engines will find the content earlier in the file. I’m pretty sure that I have heard that search engines like to focus on the text toward the top of the html file.

Anyway, if your site makes you go find a snack while waiting for the page to load, you might want to see if you can simply move the sidebar call to later in the process.

If you think you might have a similar problem and want somebody to take a look, let me know.