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.