I clicked a link I found on TheGoodBlogs**, and came across this article by 1 Good Reason-Google and Microsoft are both making some major changes that will affect many bloggers. First of all, a new version of Internet Explorer is coming out, so those of you who use that will need to update and then see how the changes affect your site.

And as for Google, they have announced that they are going to begin to consider the load times of a website when figuring Page Rank. If you use Google Ads or Adwords, the longer your page takes to load, the more your ads will cost, and your search engine positions will be affected. You’ll get less traffic from Google, basically.

I remember when I had Page Rank, back before Google cruelly snatched it away. But never mind that-the point is, that article by 1 Good Reason had a link to a Web Page Analyzer that scans your page and tells you how long it takes to load at different connection speeds, and what exactly it is that is slowing down your page load time.

For me, it’s pretty much everything on my sidebars. Those badges that display all the sites I hold near and dear to my heart, the award buttons, and even my ChipIn Donation widget, are all slowing the site down way too much. So, I will have to move awards and badges off the main site and onto separate pages. I’ve replaced the ChipIn widget with a PayPal donation button and some text, I’m hoping with my fingers and toes all crossed that I’ll get some donations to help me get to BlogHer-and thank you so much the five of you who have donated already.

Anyway, hopefully the changes I make will help the site load faster. It’s so hard not to get seduced by badges and buttons, people work so hard on them and it’s like when we used to wear jean jackets with pins all over the front, except on our blogs instead. And who knows, maybe some day Google will come back and say “hey, Table for Five is awesome and deserves to have Page Rank”.

It could happen.

**Ironically, one of the scripts slowing down the load time the most is the widget for TheGoodBlogs. **