New WordPress AlexaRank widget

September 13, 2014

For many years I have had an AlexaRank widget in the sidebar of this site. When the site was still small and was not running a bunch of additional functionality the previous AlexaRank plugin worked just fine, albeit slowly. Over time this site has gotten slower and slower (primarily due to all the assets Jetpack loads) and I have been doing some trimming.

While reviewing the code for the AlexaRank widget by fliptel that this site used to use I noticed that it is creating a new image file often and doing a bunch of resource intense things on each page load. It was taking about 2 seconds to load the widget. Unacceptable.

So I created my own…

Screen Shot 2014-09-13 at 12.41.41 PM

Try it for yourself at https://github.com/blobaugh/alexarank-widget

This new AlexaRank widget is very simple. It uses the official AlexaRank widget. There is no user configuration as everything is configured automagically from site settings. The drop in load time has been dramatic, with this widget taking less than 200ms to load.

Take a look at the numbers from the P3 Profiler plugin

Screen Shot 2014-09-13 at 12.27.56 PM

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