Slow loading text page

[jxm28788]

My newly revamped site (www.zestra-for-women.co.uk) went up last night, still got a few things to fix but only minor stuff.

The thing is that it seems rather slow to load - even on my broadband connection it's sits there for 1-2 seconds before appearing. This would be fast for my graphic filled aromatherapy site, but this site is pretty much text only.

There is a site logo, two buttons, a bullet point and a paypal logo but the rest is text and these graphics are small so why is it taking so long?

I do have two tracking things at the bottom of the html, which seem to connect to the sites concerned - could it be that it's trying to connect to these sites to register the 'hit' before it displays the page?

[Mike Hughes]

If the tracker image is at the bottom of teh page then i doubt if that's teh problem.

Your page is still 37K Bytes plus 5 KB of images and loads for me in less than a second on basic BT ADSL. That would seem to be about right allowing for network delays and protocol overheads.

Mike

Edit: OK. having looked at your page I would put the tracker code right at the end (and/or specifically size the image). Because you have a <table> after the code then the browser will want to know what size the image is before drawing all your tables and that will cause a delay while it fetches the image from your stats script.

[jxm28788]

the problem is that the track script varies by page (so it can track which page is being viewed). So it is the last thing on each page (home, order1, order2, order4), but of course actinic then slaps the footer etc on the end of each page and that's where that table comes from.

Is there a way of using an actinic variable with this code in the footer? I've no idea what the image size is so if I just make a size up will that still work?

[Mike Hughes]

Ah, right. So you're not putting it in the primary template. You could though if use a different primary template for each page.

Alternatively, just give it a 1x1 size as it's only there to call the tracking script anyway. It should still work fine.

Mike

[jxm28788]

Can I use a different primary for the checkout pages? (apart from the homepage those are the only other pages!)

home-->enter address-->choose payment-->pay --> receipt.... sweet

[Mike Hughes]

You can use a different primary for the checkout pages but it has to be the same one for all checkout pages. You set it in design > options > layout.

You might find that sizing the images fixes any delays anyway.

Mike

[jxm28788]

actually I think i could ditch the table in the footer as well!

[Mike Hughes]

Yup. I don't use the actinic footer. I just embed whatever I want into the primary templates I use.

Mike