Force Slides to load sooner?

Support Area Forums Bottega Force Slides to load sooner?

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URL to the page in question: http://theatretallahassee.org
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  • #31872
    Melissa Findley
    Participant

    We’ve been using this theme for a couple of years now, I think, and for the most part it’s working wonderfully. However, my boss (and his boss) are constantly complaining about how long it takes for the top slideshow to load.

    I have tried tweaking it so that it loads the space earlier (as you suggested to someone else), and have tried to keep it to no more than 2-3 images in the slideshow rotation. I’ve also reduced the size of those files (most of them are around 40kb). But it still hangs quite a long time before those slides load.

    Is there ANYTHING else I can do to speed it up, or even to force the slides to load before the rest of the page?

    #31875
    Bill Robbins
    Moderator

    Good Morning Melissa,

    I took a look at your site and analyzed its loading with http://tools.pingdom.com to see where the bottlenecks are. You can see the results at http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/b2fKjN/http://theatretallahassee.org/ . Here are a few things I would suggest changing.

    1. The logo URL still points to your staging site. That’s causing an extra DNS lookup and redirection. Make sure that image file is on the same domain as your site.
    2. It looks like the site isn’t using caching. I would give the WP Super Cache plugin a try. It’ll create a copy of each page as it loads so that the database doesn’t have to be accessed every time a page is generated. Right now it appears that the front page takes about a second to generate. You can probably cut that in half with caching.
      It can also compress the content on your page with something called gzip which will help too.
    3. The Shareaholic plugin is making a call to the wp-admin ajax function. That call can add a quarter second to page loads so you might try a different sharing plugin. I work a lot with WooCommerce and that’s been a performance issue with that plugin that they’ve only recently fixed.
    4. Are you running ads on your home page? I noticed some calls to doubleclick.net which will also slow things down.

    Each one of those items does slow the site down a bit. Try tackling those and see if it doesn’t speed up the slideshow as a result.

    Let me know how it goes,
    Bill

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