Need Help, Sites loads really slow

[Rocketguy]

Guys, I had a site made of the over the last couple months and unfortunately it loads really slow. I don't if it is a design problem or server/host problem. Can anyone take a look at it and let me know. Thanks

Is there a way to tell if it is a server/host problem or a design problem?

[AverageGuy]

there are many reasons that may cause the site slow:
1) the hosting over sold;
2) the database connection is busy;
3) the script on server is using too much resource;
4) someone is attacking the server;
....

It is impossible to provide details reason without check the site. I would suggest contact hosting service, and ask them whether others' site is ok. they can check the log which makes things simpler.


good luck


david

[SickHippie]

Can you please provide a link to your site? Hard to look at without a URL....

[Rocketguy]

Here is the site. Please let me know what you think

[Rocketguy]

Not letting me post links until I have 15 posts

[Rocketguy]

The sites is Auto Insurance Quotes - Health Insurance Broker - QuoteWarz and it loads way to slow. I am sure I am loosing customers because of it too.

[SickHippie]

Whoa! You weren't kidding! Well, it's not your host - I get the same ping from your site as I do from Google - about 50ms. This means it's not the host, the database, or a DoS attack.

Chances are it's because of all the javascript you have loading up. Some of those scripts won't let the page show until they are fully loaded. Javascript is all client-side, meaning all of the processing is done on the end user's computer rather than on the server.

[littlejake]

You could start with allllllllll those graphics....

Modem speed: Download time:
14.4k 388.13 seconds
28.8k 209.73 seconds
56k 122.23 seconds
ISDN (128k) 71.48 seconds
T1 (1.44 MB) 35.03 seconds

[Rocketguy]

So you think it will need a complete redesign?

[Rocketguy]

I guess to make it way simpler with less graphics and it will load quicker? It's weird because sometimes it loads quick, but then other times it is real slow. I think it might be that the computer remembers the page and loads quicker, but if I go to a new page that I haven't viewed yet it takes a lot longer.

Now the website is down and it seems to not be loading at all. So many issues it is frustrating I just want a nice website that operates quickly.

[edhan]

Tested your site from Singapore using 3.5Mb broadband.

It took about 11 secs to load the entire page. Doesn't seem slow to me.

Guess it is likely that your broadband is giving you some hiccups.

Btw, your site design is very nice.

[Rocketguy]

The site is back online. I thought the site was nice, but I am almost at the point of starting over. It just loads way too slow for me and I think it will turn customers away.

[AndyBeard]

Grab 2 Firefox plugins that work with Firebug

Yslow (form Yahoo)
Page Speed (from Google)

You will find this WP plugin will help a fair bit
Autoptimize | Turleando

[AndyBeard]

What is really killing the site is the number of images
Pingdom Tools

If you can somehow use CSS sprites, it will improve performance, but also look to use different CSS for different pages, as many images are not used everywhere.

[Grandspecial]

Is it always slow or is it faster during certain times of the day?

[havplenty]

If your customers don't have fast broadband then they are going to click away. I have been trying to load it now for about 2 minutes. And counting...

[Rocketguy]

Andy, I will try the plugin and see if it helps. So what are my options besides redesigning the whole site?

It does seem to load faster on pages that are not using word press. I wish there was a way to ditch word press all together, but don't know if that would fix it.

[Rocketguy]

OK, I just did a test between two pages.

Auto Insurance Quotes - Health Insurance Broker - QuoteWarz

QuoteWarz.com - Get Instant Health Insurance Quotes

The first page has wordpress used througout and the second page doesn't use wordpress. The second page without wordpress loads in 8 seconds which is good. The home page takes 29 seconds.

[snvservices]

It may happen that the wordpress page is having to many graphics that is why it is happening, check this out or redesign it.

Thanks!!

[tommen]

It took 10 seconds for me to load the page.You seem to have a lot of images and javascript, it slows the page down.On the internet people are not going to wait that long for a page to load.It should load in 3 seconds max.

[bobsstuff]

According to World Wide Web Consortium - Web Standards and their HTML validator, your site cannot be validated. This is the first time I have ever seen a page that they could not check.

It says you have an error in line 133.

Go to the w3.org site and in the left column find HTLM VALIDATOR. Put your URL in and try to validate your code. Fix it and then try the validator again.

[SickHippie]

Originally Posted by bobsstuff

According to World Wide Web Consortium - Web Standards and their HTML validator, your site cannot be validated. This is the first time I have ever seen a page that they could not check.

It says you have an error in line 133.

Go to the w3.org site and in the left column find HTLM VALIDATOR. Put your URL in and try to validate your code. Fix it and then try the validator again.

I actually had this one one of my sites last week - it threw me for a loop! What causes this is some character in the site that is not supported by utf-8 (or whatever character set is specified in the <meta content="character set"> tag up in the header. It's really easy to find the offending character in UTF-8, just look through the 'view source' for �. In this case, it looks like the culprit is in the commented code of the flash player.

<!-- Esta etiqueta param indica a los usuarios de Flash Player 6.0 r65 o posterior que descarguen la versi�n m�s reciente de Flash Player. Elim�nela si no desea que los usuarios vean el mensaje. -->

Looks like someone put ó instead of the proper alt code. Either find/replace and put in the proper alt code, or remove those comments altogether.

If anyone is wondering what characters are UTF-8 safe, check out Table UTF-8 Character Set - if you need to put one of those characters in your code, use the alt code.

Also, for foreign characters by language, check out http://www.thesauruslex.com/typo/eng/enghtml.htm

Edit: tried to put in the alt code, and it parsed it!

[Rocketguy]

Guys, thanks for all the comments. I am confused about this whole thing because I am a newbie when it comes to coding and design. I wanted a beautiful website with lots of images, but it looks like it has backfired on me. Now I need to figure out a game plan to fix it. I think the first thing I need to do is get rid of the wordpress. It seems all the wordpress pages load really slow.

[Rocketguy]

How can I tell what portions are Javascript so I can have those removed?

[spicer]

Wordpress is not really the problem. Although the theme you have chosen might be.
as everyone is saying there is just way too many images and java scripts on these pages.

Global Statistics
Total HTTP Requests: 145
Total Size: 2237097 bytes

Object Size Totals
Object type Size (bytes) Download @ 56K (seconds) Download @ T1 (seconds)
HTML: 21276 .44 0.31
HTML Images: 368186 78.58 7.15
CSS Images: 1526929 325.11 28.89
Total Images: 1895115 403.69 36.04
Javascript: 249074 51.44 3.12
CSS: 71632 15.28 1.38
Multimedia: 0 0.00 0.00
Other: 0 0.00 0.00

External Objects
External Object QTY
Total HTML: 1
Total HTML Images: 26
Total CSS Images: 104
Total Images: 130
Total Scripts: 9
Total CSS imports: 5
Total Frames: 0
Total Iframes: 0

Download Times*
Connection Rate Download Time
14.4K 1762.86 seconds
28.8K 895.93 seconds
33.6K 772.08 seconds
56K 474.85 seconds
ISDN 128K 165.54 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps 40.85 seconds

*Note that these download times are based on the full connection rate for ISDN and T1 connections. Modem connections (56Kbps or less) are corrected by a packet loss factor of 0.7. All download times include delays due to round-trip latency with an average of 0.2 seconds per object. With 145 total objects for this page, that computes to a total lag time due to latency of 29 seconds. Note also that this download time calculation does not take into account delays due to XHTML parsing and rendering.

[Rocketguy]

Ya, I guess the sad fact is that I need a complete redesign. I worked so hard on the site too. This time I just want a very simple and clean design. I thought I found a new designer, but I guess he is all booked for the next 2 months.

I think that removing the word press might also help, but not really sure at this point. Will probably have it removed just in case that is causing any issues.

[Rocketguy]

UPDATE- I have been talking to a technical guru on here and he suggested the following to fix my issues. Let me know if anyone has experiences with these plugins or softwares to fix my issue.


WordPress Super Cache


Here is an example of a program that does that. Image optimization shrink gif jpeg graphics by NetMechanic

[SickHippie]

Both of those would be great! I had forgotten about Super Cache. I use it on my site - it keeps the load off the server. Optimizing your images should be your first step, though. Get that image size down, and you should be good.

[Rocketguy]

OK, guys I have changed servers and hosts. I am now on hostgator and the site seems to be a lot quicker. Check it out and let me know what you think. The next step is a complete re-design which I am working on at the moment.

Auto Insurance Quotes - Health Insurance Broker - QuoteWarz

[mikemcmillan]

You can go to netmechanic.com and enter your URL and get the loading time for each image at different connection speeds. They also have utility for letting you see what your images would look like at different resolutions. You can even downscale them there. As said above, there is a lot of javascript stuff going on there as well. Good luck!

[reapr]

There is a FF plugin called YSlow that may give you some insight as to what may be goining on ...

[Philarmon]

A few suggestions:

Get rid of this 650 kb Flash animation - i am sure the people will visit your website for insurance quotes and not to watch some fancy flash image transitions. Replace it with an optimized image (shouldnt take more than 35kb for this size). If you can't live without it, optimize the images within the flash source file (FLA), i bet you can get the size down to around 200 kb for these 5 images. In Flash, right click on the images in the library, choose Properties and set the quality to around 50-60. Republish the flash movie after that and choose an optimal filesize / quiality ratio.

Do you really need all these Javascript files ? For my taste, 280kb in 9 JS files is a lot for a single site. I am sure it slows down the site a lot. If you really need all these JS effects (think twice) you might want to combine them all in one file rather than do 9 server requests to load them separately.

Do specify width and height attributes for ALL images - this way the browser will leave a placeholder for them when rendering the page and load the images later. If you don't specify the size, the browser will need to load them immediately since it does not know how to display the rest of the site (after these images).

My general rule for commercial sites - keep em simple. Do a good design but a lightweight code. People are there to get their information and content, so it is crucial to deliver that to them asap

[Rocketguy]

Great suggestions and I appreciate the feedback. I will post a link to the new site shortly.