14 DAY TRIAL // Google's obsession with speed is well documented and there isn't one Google service or product that doesn't put performance at the top of its priorities. This is also true for products Google has acquired along the years, like YouTube, which is getting a major revamp very soon, but it's also true for Blogger, one of the most popular blog-hosting platforms in the world. Several weeks ago, Blogger introduced a small but significant change that was aimed at making pages load faster across the field.
Now, the team is releasing the initial results of the switch and the numbers are impressive, as Blogger notes that blog pages have seen a ten-percent decrease in load times.
"Five weeks ago we rolled out Auto Pagination, a major milestone in our efforts to make Blogger faster for you and your readers. We are very happy to report a ten percent overall decrease in page loading latency across all Blogger blogs and a twenty-seven percent decrease on archive pages," Noah Fiedel, Blogger tech lead, announced.
"Just how significant is a ten percent latency reduction? It's not often that software engineers get to save lives, yet in just the past five weeks we’ve saved eight human lifetimes spent waiting for pages to load! Every week saves an additional: 1 Million Hours, 114 Years, 1.6 Human Lifetimes," he added.
The change itself is actually quite subtle, but the effects, as you can see, are huge. Several weeks ago, Blogger started serving a variable number of blog posts per page depending on the size of the HTML file and the number of images on the page. Cluttered blogs now list fewer posts and lightweight ones, the other way around.
The change has had its detractors, but Blogger says that most of the sites impacted negatively were not 'really' blogs. In any case, this is just the first step and Blogger wants to introduce further changes to enhance page load times. The next feature heading for a revamp is the ability to embed third-party JavaScripts in the blogs, one of Blogger's most appealing options, but the developers aren't saying what the changes might be.