How to speed up this sites loading

sra

Gingham_Ribbon wrote:

I get the ignore button's function, but what's the buddy one for? I hope you don't mind me asking???

If you click Quick links and then 'Open Buddy list', you can see if your buddys are online or not. If they are, you can click the green light next to their name to view their profile - and see what they are doing

You also have the option of PMing up to 5 of them at the same time.

hjb_2

wow, lots of replies since I started this.

I have a couple of things to add.

Firstly, until 100% of people use broadband, webmasters should still be designing for 56k. It isn't difficult to optimise a site. Minimise Javascript and remove large images.
Second. A large % of people still use 56k. The reason? Because getting broadband is a false economy if you only view a few web pages a week and use it for email. Also a fair part of the world do not have the choice of broadband even if they wanted it.

A quick example of speeding a site up:

http://img.moneysavingexpert.com/img/buttons/but_ins.jpg

This is a button from the menu on the left of this page.
It is one image and therefore large. It could easily be created with a background image with text over the top. Ideally it could just be an orange background with the text over the top. Who cares that there is the shadow of the menu options word underneath it? Not I.

Most sites could load in half the time they currently do just by taking a few simple steps. Why alienate the users who don't have broadband just for the sake of a few fancy image?

(and for your information I do have broadband ;-))

hjb_2

Well your down to 34 seconds with the first lot of home page changes Martin.
A 6 second saving in the first go is not bad at all. Love the new menu by the way.

A couple of suggestions:

remove the system you use for polls at the bottom of the home page - that is where you include a whole other html page. You could use a much simpler script and save a good few seconds just there.

cut down on the number of recent articles you show on the home page. If anyone is going to look through all those I think they would probably search instead.

and looks wise cut down on all the different colours and fonts you use. Way too many near the top of the page.

Generally though I think the web design team are doing a good job. Keep up the good work.

MSE_Martin

Hi hjb

Glad you approve

And i have made sure the techies have seen your feedback

We are one step at a timing at the moment, there are lots more changes planned, but one by one. Remember this site was born for £100 and there was no anticipation of what'd happen, reverse engineering isn't easy

There are many changes to the site in the pot

Servers to start, the news managment system, upgrading vbulletin, improving navigation and search, and redesign

We're just trying to prioritise at the moment.

squeaky

V-Bulletin is a prime culprit.

It seems to ask for my cookies beofre it draws every single item on a page, instead of just once.

I've done zero downloads today but so far, having been busy on the forums I have downloaded 13,554,280 bytes.

I response to VB cookie requests I have UP loaded 9,253,529

And upload speeds are considerably slower than download ones and gawd knows what it's like on dial up. Must be horrendous.

MSE_Martin

Also Im doing a front page articles prune - so it'll decrease a lot down to about 12 or 13

2ax

hjb, I'm not techie about html at all, so I'll leave that to the others, but I have a suggestion for how to speed up the site loading on an individual basis ...

sign up for Onspeed. I think there is a referral link somewhere on MSE that helps the site too, but apologies, I can't remember where it is - I was already a subscriber.

Onspeed compresses different file types by different amounts. The highest compression factor of 10 to 20 times is on text, which constitues a large part of MSE, and means that even though I have my thread view set to 40 posts, loading takes 5 to 8 seconds for a 250k page.

Image files are compressed a bit less, and can look grainy, but for the colour blocks here, that doesn't matter. When you want higher picture quality, like when I loaded those Øresund Bridge pictures, switch it off.

Mr_Skint_2

2ax wrote:

hjb, I'm not techie about html at all, so I'll leave that to the others, but I have a suggestion for how to speed up the site loading on an individual basis ...

sign up for Onspeed. I think there is a referral link somewhere on MSE that helps the site too, but apologies, I can't remember where it is - I was already a subscriber.

Onspeed compresses different file types by different amounts. The highest compression factor of 10 to 20 times is on text, which constitues a large part of MSE, and means that even though I have my thread view set to 40 posts, loading takes 5 to 8 seconds for a 250k page.

Image files are compressed a bit less, and can look grainy, but for the colour blocks here, that doesn't matter. When you want higher picture quality, like when I loaded those Øresund Bridge pictures, switch it off.

Save some money and in IE do this,

Tools, Internet Options, Advanced Tab, and Scroll to Multimedia
and take out the tick in, Play Animations, Play Sounds, Play Videos, show Pictures, and that will give you the same if not faster speed than Onspeed.

I do admit though it makes sites slightly boring in content, but if yer not that worried and its speed your after at no cost then this will do the trick.

2ax

I just tried that and it didn't make much difference - 8 to 11 seconds on the index page I think - if the images are already in cache, do they reload every time? And I'd miss your avatar anyway.

I downloaded several Excel files the other day which were compressed by a factor of about 5.5 - impressive for me to see 31kB/s (the download manager still works it out from the file size), or a 270k page in a few seconds.

It's only £15 a year - I might even keep it if I go broadband. Although the apparent acceleration will be less, with a cheapskate capped service, it might be helpful. It's got 9GB down to 914MB in the stats at the moment.

hjb_2

although the comments you have left are all helpful to those people who are slightly technically aware, I am looking to help out those 56k users who are also mostly techonophobic. The people who are on 56k, will stay on 56k and if a site doesn't load quick enough without any additional software or changed of settings they will go elsewhere or not go at all.

There will always (until broadband costs the same as dialup or until dialup is abolished) be people who use 56k. If web designers are only going to offer one option of there site (no text only or low bandwidth version) then they should cater and aim to please those with the lowest speed.

Also while we are here. New regulations are now hovering about requiring all sites to be accessible to disabled users. Whether they are blind(and use screen readers), colour blind(and need colour alternatives) cannot use a mouse(and need access keys setup), are partially sighted(and need text size alternatives) or any other disability. The very least a site can do is to have a text only version and alt(alternative) tags on all images.

Most sites have a long way to go. It may take a big court case where a big site loses for people to take some notice.