Force Slides to load sooner?
URL to the page in question:
http://theatretallahassee.org
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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?
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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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