FIXED: Blogger website scroll speed laggy / choppy

For a while now, I've been bothered by the choppy scrolling that I (and probably you too) have experienced while visiting Wargaming Tradecraft. I like Optimized, and I certainly don't like websites that lag.

After working on Tech Tradecraft, and seeing how smoothly it scrolled, I've been poking with the settings of Wargaming Tradecraft to try and get things to scroll smoother... you may have noticed the ugliness of the repeating background, instead of my nice static no-scroll. I was even pondering blowing away my nice theme with it's transparencies to squeeze out as much speed as I could.


Well, tonight I nailed it!

Turns out, the size (specifically, the height) of your widgets will significantly affect the performance of your Blogger website. I'm not sure how this problem / solution affects the WordPress platform, or if it's specific to all Blogger templates, or just certain ones.

I caught on to this when I increased my "Most Popular" links to 10 from 5... and the lag increased further down the page. Now, my "Topics" section was pretty big - I had it "list" formatted because it looks nicer than "cloud" and I was displaying every label, instead of selecting which to show.

Pictured left, is how they currently look, which seems to be a non-laggy respectable size. Because of the cloud "look", I've also cleaned my list of labels, only displaying the pertinent ones.

Sure enough, pictured right, the layout that INSTANTLY lags my site the moment I switch it from cloud to list. Trimming the number of labels only affects the length of the larger amount of lag your site is affected by... so it'll lag a lot, until you're past the list, then continue to lag some.

Yes, cloud is kind of ugly, but I'll choose cloud over lag any day. In theory, it might be possible to manually create links to all your label displays... maybe I'll attempt that in the future... but right now, I'm happy with my smoothly scrolling site once more. (I've also shrunk my blog-roll a bit, which also seems to help)

(Although, my archive widget can get pretty long when you open it up, and it doesn't seem to lag the site at all... so this problem may be with specific widgets, not "All long widgets lag")

** WARNING **

Blogger's bulk add/remove label features are apparently buggy... hence why I'm up later than I wanted to be.

They were adding labels to the wrong posts and deleting entire labels off EVERY post they were applied to, instead of just the selected ones... I had to manually crawl through a bunch of my posts and re-label them one at a time... ugh.

The perfect way to end a very long 4 / 04.