Site loads slow

[alan johnson]

can anyone explain why our site runs so slow? granted there are some large images on tehre which i am about to reduce but 700kb shouldnt take 90 secs to load ona broadband machine. can anyone take a look and offer advice?

the site is www.thesleepshop.co.uk

the page redirects to the home page, which is teh page in question.

Cheers

[Duncan Rounding]

Seems all your pages are slow. You shop home page is very large in size as you know but the cgi-bin response is noticably slow on all pages. Other pages with direct links load quickly.

[dave_finlayson]

If you download the shop home page to your computer the files weigh in at 2.46MB. Most of this is the Section Tree javascript (with Act_section_tree_names.js being 771KB and Act_section_tree_URLs.js being 1.43MB). You may want to consider changing your navigation to hard coded links.

David

Edit: In actual fact, the page your site forwards the customer to when they first visit is actually weighing in at a massive 3.97MB! Ours, which I would say is slightly to big, is 220KB!

[Duncan Rounding]

The size of the js files are due to the large number of sections that you have. You could perhaps look at ways to reduce that number significantly or as David says change to hard coded links - whichever is te easiest.

[pinbrook]

Normans collapso menu can be PHP driven which cuts down on subsequent menu page loads, a good solution for large menu sites

[NormanRouxel]

This site uses JavaScript to display several sets of Navigation.

You are using the complete section_tree structures. The huge size of the section_tree structures must be killing sales.

Why not investigate using

NETQUOTEVAR:TOPLEVELSECTIONS_NAMES
NETQUOTEVAR:TOPLEVELSECTIONS_URLS
NETQUOTEVAR:TOPLEVELSECTIONS_IMAGES

instead.

[alan johnson]

instead of having the java script list of comapny images on the right, we were considering creating an image with hotspots to the relevant sections. would this reduce size significantly?

[NormanRouxel]

Not by much. The the company images are quite small and the map will be a similar size to the sum of the images.

However losing the section list JavaScript arrays completely would speed things up.

[alan johnson]

yeah i was planning to replace the java script with the image map. i have made an image map and its 86kb, certainly better than the 1.43mb script. is the script produced in actinic? if so how do i remove it?

[NormanRouxel]

In your primary template Act_Primary.html (and possibly Act_BrochurePrimary.html) remove

<!--@act NETQUOTEVAR:SECTIONTREE_RAW -->

Note that this will break the YahooSections listing on the left hand side.

It's also a bit hard to see your site as looking at

http://www.thesleepshop.co.uk/acatalog/

redirects to a faulty

http://www.thesleepshop.co.uk/acatalog/index.htm?http&&&www.thesleepshop.co.uk/acatalog/

[alan johnson]

thanks for that.

yes when you bypass the front of the site and go straight to the acatalog pages, they all redirect and crash. you have to follow the links through www.thesleepshop.co.uk using the frames. i dont know why it crashes when teh frames aren't there. Perhaps you could explain that? Thanks, Alan

[NormanRouxel]

Having an Actinic site in frames a terrible idea. You'll make it hard for customers to bookmark particular pages, search engine will have a job indexing the site, etc, etc. All that trouble so you can fix the top banner in place.

[alan johnson]

yes one of the next tasks is to remove the frames.

the person who designed the has since left our company (so dont blame me haha!), hence me having to ask for advice all the time.

[wjcampbe]

Since removing frames only involves clicking the mouse in Design | Options - once on the Brochure tab, and once on the Miscellaneous tab, this might be a priority.

[alan johnson]

the homepage www.thesleepshop.co.uk isnt part of actinic and this is where the frames begin, so i dont know if removing the frames in actinic would make a difference.

at the moment in Options-Miscellaneous 'use frames in catalog' isnt checked, nor is 'Brochure is framed' in Options-Brochure.

Accessing the pages without the frames in Internet explorer causes them to crash e.g. http://www.thesleepshop.co.uk/acatal...ries_3374.html