Too Many External Scripts Are Hurting Your Load Time

This is a fundamental issue with all websites, The Daily Exposition our main site, had this issue until I finally said enough is enough already and I started removing all external scripts except essential ones such as advertising, share buttons, and anything else deemed necessary. However, there is still a major issue on Blogger based websites when it comes to external scripts. Facebook comments, follow buttons, scripts like these have to be external as they request information from their servers and it may not display properly on your website. Reduce these scripts replace all those external follow button scripts for simple follow buttons if you need to. Remove those external comments and spring for the default comments.

If you are using external scripts from Drop Box use Google Drive instead it is much faster and has been proven to load faster than Drop Box. If you are using scripts from someone else’s server and you can’t access them and control them you need to fix that, move them to your personal Google Drive account.

However, some of your external scripts are needed to stay so what do you do? Load them with a sync which simply means you lazy load them the scripts are not loaded until the end when all the content has already loaded this is a necessary item for all websites. Load the animation and functionality after the items are drawn. Think of it like this you need have the object (HTML) before you can color it (CSS) and then animate it (JavaScript). Animations should always come last unless it is Jquery in that case you must load the Jquery before the element in most cases Jquery is loaded in the header and you can’t load it with Async. Every other script advertisement, comments, share buttons, should be loaded with Async to improve your load time. Otherwise, you will have a hang time were nothing but a white screen is shown then it will go in and start to draw everything.

Not to mention don’t have too many external scripts from too many servers because then it will need to look up that DNS server which is means more cookies, and another request. Blogger is not a complicated system, but it can be a major pain to optimize properly, especially on content heavy websites.

Reducing the total number of external scripts will improve your load time greatly and thus make a better viewing experience for your visitors.