After I finished Saying Goodbye To My JavaScript Widgets, I knew that my blog would load faster. How much faster, I didn't know because I didn't have a tool of any kind to test it with.

Sometime yesterday, I stumbled upon (no pun intended) a blog where a tool was listed in the comments. I don't remember which blog it was or who the commenter was, or I would definitely link to both of them. The tool is a hosted one, at widxl.com - Internet Solutions, called "Meta Tag Analyzer". There are some other tools at their site you might want to check out while you're there.

What I discovered by running the tool is that my site loads via broadband in a second. 1 second! I tested some of my favorite blogs and found that most of them loaded in 2 seconds or more. That's the difference between having the JavaScript widgets and not having them.

There's something else I noticed since dumping all the JavaScript widgets. There's not as much disparity between Google Analytics and Clicky as there used to be. Clicky only registers a visit when the page completely loads. Google Analytics, because of the plugin I use, registers it much earlier. My guess is that visitors with slower connections were clicking on to other sites before the page they were on even finished loading.

As of right now, I'm boycotting any third-party widgets that use JavaScript only and I recommend anyone who's interested in speeding up their websites to do the same.