Virtua Gallery - A photographic Journal

Well - after having some gimmicks installed I noticed such an increase in loading time for the site,
that I decided to drop them all for the most part.

Though it is nice having enhanced options - when it comes to decide, if they warrant the site
being slowed down, just because they are there - the answer is easy. Nope.

It would be a different issue, if they were heavily utilized - but they simply were not.

Not the social bookmarking tools, not the “Rate my blog” thingie, neither Polls nor stats did
find much notice in the first place.

The speed increase however was noticeable - pages load about twice as fast as they did before.

The reason is on hand as well. These gimmicks and badges rely on other servers, that can be slow at
times and if you got more than one of those it could be a real problem, when their response is sluggish.

So - they are gone and I’m happy, since I hated the slow response of my pages.

So what’s to learn?

More is less, I guess. The less you have to rely on 3rd parties the better it is.

The more if you offer more than text content - but images.

When installing gadgets and badges - it pays to check the performance of your site.

None of these gimmicks are worth enough to live with a slow loading page.