Light on the Left, Heavy on the Right

I got a fantastic suggestion (and an obvious one) on my slow page load post by Fred at WeBreakStuff:

Hey fred,

The thing causing the slow page load is the amount of widgets
running on both sides of your page (particularly on the left). The way
things are coded in this blog layout, content is read (by the browser)
first down, then to the right. This means, the browser needs to load
all the widgets on the left, then your content, then the widgets on the
right.

A bit technical, now: the fact is, the whole page load is around 144
requests (and way over 1.5mb) on a VC. If you look at the difference,
our blog (at http://blog.webreakstuff.com) is around 14 requests and
not over 120kb, meaning it loads in less than 1 second. There are other
reasons, but to put it simple: you have megs and megs of stuff on both
sides of the page that nobody really looks at, while the content is
given no real impact.

Hope that helped!

Posted by: Fred

Well you all know how I feel about my bling. It may be heavy. It may slow me down. But I am not going to go without it.

But I do have a new rule about my widgets. Heavy widgets will be on the right. Light ones will be one the left. I’ve already moved my video widgets to the right. And the page loads much faster.

Obvious. But I missed it. Thanks Fred!