Web Design and Development
Why The Alexa Widget Is BAD For Your Website
Most webmasters are familiar with Alexa, the web information company which maintains traffic rankings for websites on the internet. Alexa is important to us because it can help to verify our website’s popularity and increase the value of our advertising spots.
So webmasters often do anything necessary to boost their traffic rankings. The most common way to do this is to place an Alexa widget on your website. The way that this widget works is that (1) it proudly displays your traffic statistics, and (2) it collects information about your visitors. It boosts your rank because it is maintains an accurate count of visitors and pageviews. Whereas websites without an Alexa widget do not have all of their visitors and pageviews counted. (Note: Earlier this year, Alexa claimed to have revamped its ranking algorithm, but webmasters still notice that placing widgets on their websites does indeed increase their Alexa rank.)
Why Adding The Alexa Widget to Your Site Can Be A Bad Idea
Unfortunately, there is one big problem with using the Alexa widget. Webmasters find that it is often unavailable. (In fact, it was unavailable for a non-trivial period of time this very morning.)
What happens when the Alexa widget is unavailable? Pages that display the widget will load incompletely or load very slowly. This is a big problem if you display your Alexa widget on all pages of your website. Fortunately, there are solutions. We suggest two ways to fix this problem:
1. Don’t use the widget. Of course, this might mean that your traffic rank will suffer, so this is probably not the best solution.
2. Place it at the bottom of your pages. To still retain the benefits of using the widget, yet avoid any negative problems that might occur when it is unavailable, it is best if you place it at the very bottom of your website, preferably at the end of your source code. Unfortunately, this might mean that it will not be positioned exactly where you want it to show up. (To fix this problem, you can use CSS to absolutely position it wherever you want it to be.)
Beware of Other Widgets & Third-Party Applications As Well
Like the Alexa widget, other external applications can similarly hurt the performance of your website by slowing it down. Back in 2007, for example, popular website Techcrunch experienced a huge slowdown due to the use of external applications. So to make sure that your website runs as fast as possible, limit your usage of external applications, widgets, and images.
Not having a problem with widgets? For additional information on what might be slowing your website down, see our article "8 Reasons Your Website Is Slow".
Tags: alexa rank, load time, widgets26 Responses to “Why The Alexa Widget Is BAD For Your Website”
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This is interesting. I have not heard that Alexa widget actually slow down the loading of the site. Thanks for sharing this information.
Cheers
Wei Liang
Hi Wei Liang, yes Alexa can slow down a site. Every month, it experiences intermittent downtime or sluggishness. And when this happens, all of the websites that display the widget are affected.
For this reason, we always suggest that the widget be placed at the end of the source code because websites load from the top down. If the widget is at the end, then the entire page gets to load regardless of whether or not the widget can be displayed.
Thanks for visiting and Tweeting.
I don’t really see the importance of Alexa. The A bloggers don’t have the widgets installed on their site. I feel alexa ranking is important just for your advertising page and nothing else.
Smallblogger, thanks for stopping by. Yes, many of the top bloggers do not have the widget, but you’d be surprised how many popular bloggers still throw it in with their ads and other buttons in their sidebars. And yes, I don’t think any one really cares for Alexa, except advertisers.
Hi Shirley, my comment here is 2fold. first and foremost, thank you for the awesome comments over at my place, and I hope to see you around more often!
I also followed your commentluv link as this intrigues me. I too have the widget installed to help traffic numbers (and it does work), but I’m glad to see I’m doing it somewhat correctly.
It’s not at the very bottom, but it is underneath all the other stuff on my sidebar. No load issues as far as I can tell.
Oh and as far as “only for advertisers” is concerned, isn’t that the 2nd-3rd reason why we do anything on the blog? Assuming you wish to make money from it…
The 1st being for the readers of course, and you need to throw the search engines in there somewhere.
@Dennis Edell, yes most people blog for money. So Alexa is VERY important, since advertisers often use that as a key metric. And yeh, installing the widget does have a positive effect on your rank.
And I’m glad that you threw in ‘readers’ as your #1 motivation for blogging. haha. Yeh, I agree with your top 3, but I won’t reveal the order in which they rank for me.
Ut Ohhhh, sounds like I’ll have to keep an eye on things here.
Yep readers are first, then I’ll comb over it before publishing to throw in some search engine treats (or even delete some unnecessary) and everything combined racks up the stats to make advertisers happy…..that’s the general plan anyway. LOL
I tossed in an extra little nugget which I’d bet is very under-utilized.
Haha. Thanks for the followup. Yeh, a combination of all three make for a successful blog…
You’ve just reminded me of this great article that I read a while back, it was entitled something like ‘Write for your readers, not for search engines.’ And it basically said that: ‘Readers make a successful blog, search engines keep them coming, and advertisers pay the expenses.’
Bingo! LOL
Velvet Blues
Interesting, I don’t have one on my site but am thinking about removing some of the badges currently on it. Useful tips. If it were me, I’d drop it! There’s more than just site ranking.
You can’t always control site ranking so focus on the things you can control like site activity, your writing and so on. 
Thanks for sharing.
-Mig
Oh yeh, you have quite a few goodies in your sidebar… You know, it really is a tradeoff, as most widgets do indeed help a website. (Your widgets, Bloglog & BlogCatalog, help make your site more popular.)
Speed issues aside, I have received A LOT more sign-ups to both MBL & BC having the simple text links above the fold then the widgets below.
Well yeh, placement is everything. You’ve put all of those text links in a great location so they definitely have an advantage over the widgets.
To be frank, Alexa widget sucks in appearance and that’s the primary reason why I don’t display it on my blog. I’m not aware of loading issue either.
Yan
@Yan, yeh, Alexa is hideous. You know, I am surprised that they’ve never updated the look of their widget. After all, it would encourage more widespread use.
I’ve had the Entrecard widget freeze up my page loading several times when their site was down so I recently moved that and a couple others to the footer. I feel content should be above that type of promotion anyway.
@Brian, the footer is a great place for widgets. I see on your site, you have a few of them in the footer and one at the end of the sidebar. So if they decide to act up, you website will still be functional.
I don’t really use widgets here, but I did finally decide to allow Gravatars on this website, only because, after much waiting and observation, I deemed their service reliable enough.
It wouldn’t be right to open Webster’s Dictionary and find the word Bird before Animal. That’s what is wrong with most search engines. You can PAY someone to get your site ranked higher than their competitors. Then they come back and PAY someone to get a ranking higher than the original. Those who PAY get a better ranking. Like slipping the greedy door man $100 to let you into the $5 night club. Alexa rankings, Google rankings all can be “played with” or altered based on how well you can build your site to be Search Engine friendly. If a web site sells antique brass it makes no sense for them to become an expert on optimizing their site, or PAY to have an expert optimize or TRICK the search engine into ranking them higher. They should be ranked on their expertise of antique brass. It makes no sense to polish and shine the brass to be other than antique just so a search engine will rank it artificially higher. Google is wrongly skewed to favor those who know SEO rather than those who know their product. When will they rank a site based on the content alone? Then we all can remove the widgets on our sites and return to making the best antique brass available.
@Videogician, you have some good points there. It is rather unfair to use SEO because it can cause a website to rank highly, whether or not they should be ranking highly for certain keywords.
But when it comes down to it, how else will Google determine subject matter?
There really aren’t any better alternatives unless Google manually visits and regularly re-categorizes and re-ranks every site in its index. Unfortunately, that is not feasible.
Oh thank you for this information, although this article is old but I’m inspired for carefully put any widgets in my site.. But is there any light widget with useful info like PR and Alexa within one apps?
Best regards,
Donna
Donna´s last blog ..Error lagi? Ohhh… Gak Cantik deh!
Really? ok.. so I will try to follow your tip.. I dont want to slow down my blog because I know that many readers don’t like to wait. But does the alexa widget really improve the rankings?
theheatweb´s last blog ..Transfer Files Fast, Easy, And Free
hmm.. so that’s why my website load very slowly.. thanks for this information.
So, if I use this widget in an asp.net application, this can be a very huge problem. Thanks for the advice.
Thanks for noticing this trend! I was unaware of this occurring? Now I’ll have to do some reconsidering/repositioning the Alexa widget.
The one thing I am wondering before I install a Alexa Widget is will it help me with Google search engines results as this is what I am after. I have a feeling it wont.
I came to this page looking to learn about Google’s view of the Alexa widget. But one thing I have learned here is that the Alexa widget can slow down page loads time.This is very interesting, if I install it it will be near the bottom of my page.Thanks for the info!
Phil DeMassa´s last blog ..Article Writing starting at $4.95