Sexy Bookmarks, anyone using it?

Sexy bookmarks is a really popular WordPress plugin that I sort of hacked together to get to work on a non-WordPress font site of mine. Let it sit there for several months and got under 20 social shares from it. It was like 3 or 4 a month. Not much, and the more I looked at the page the less i liked the look.

Looking at stats today I noticed Analytics was giving me a 4.3 second average load time on that site. With load time rumored to be a factor in search engine results, this seemed way too long so I dug around a bit to figure out how to speed it up.

Ran through a website speed test and it was giving me a total page size of 290,614 bytes for a 6.14 second download at T1 speed, and a total of 23 individual file requests.

The first thing on there was the image sprite that Sexy used at almost a quarter meg. Went through and removed the bookmark deal from the page template it was on, stripped out the JavaScript and CSS calls, and the page was down to 57,559 bytes. And I was loading jQuery, but only for Sexy bookmarks so took it out and got it down to 28,135 bytes.

So, 90+% drop in page size, dropping the page load to 11 requests at 2.3 seconds instead of 6.14.  Lost a few inbound links from social media sites each month, but hopefully the page load times will more than make up for it.

And yes, I know that giant image file was cached for most visitors so it only had to be loaded once. But it still had to be loaded, and it's possible that search engine traffic was taking a hit because of it.

Next step is to merge the 8 image files into a CSS sprite file and drop the total requests to 4. Of the 2.35 seconds, the speed test is estimating that 2.2 seconds is due to latency at 0.2 seconds per each of the 11 files.

Oddly I was thinking about putting the Sexy Bookmarks deal on this forum. Not going to happen now.