I recently added a paypal donate button to my blog (as part of a huge update to my blog).

Since the blog was running slow, I ran the great little utility called Firebug (within Firefox 2 seems like it doesn’t work with firefox 3… yet), to see where any slowdowns were happening.

Well, I found a lot of scope to improve the blog load speed, but one file was a concern: pixel.gif (which was part of the paypal donate button code).

The full url was: https://www.paypal.com/en_AU/i/scr/pixel.gif

And putting that into the address bar returned a 404 not found error.

OK, looks like paypals right hand isn’t talking to its left hand.

Will removing the entry cause any problems?

I tried it out, and it works normally (I’ve received a donation).

So in summary, if you have some paypalcode on your website, you might be able to speed things up a fraction by removing the pixel.gif code (but keep a copy in case you need to put it back):

<img alt=”” border=”0″ src=”https://www.paypal.com/en_AU/i/scr/pixel.gif” width=”1″ height=”1″>

Your code might be slightly different from mine, but its worth a try.