Why is this site so slow?

[Sally Dickson]

Hi,

Can you take a look at http://www.miffyshop.co.uk?

Is it my imagination or is this site slow? How can I improve the site and make it quicker?

Thanks,

[NormanRouxel]

You aren't using the Compact HTML/CGI option in Design / Options / Miscellaneous / Generation Options. A consequence of this is that your HTML pages are a lotbigger than they need to be as they're full of Actinic comments.

Otherwise everything else seems fast enough (using 1Mbit ADSL from Turkey).

[jxm28788]

Is it my imagination or is this site slow?

That particular page was a little slow, but not that bad, maybe too many graphics? The rest of the site seems ok.

[Mike Hughes]

Again, the web server is fine, it just looks as if you have too many large images on the page.

Your home page has 143 KBytes of images (out of 176 KB total). That's probably fine on a broadband connection, but anyone using 56 Kbps dial up is going to be sitting there for 20 - 30 seconds waiting for the images to load. Even on a 512K broadband it will take 2-3 seconds if they get the full bandwidth, 5-6 seconds is more like it.

One thing to look at immediately is your header image which is 32 KB and in Jpeg when it should really be a GIF image.

The advice used to be that web pages should be no more than 20KB which on dial up would take about 3 seconds to load. Broadband has changed that but it's still only about 60-70% across the UK that have broadband.

Personally I would aim for pages being no more than 80KB in total. That way, even people on 512K should be able to open pages in no more than 2-3 seconds assuming they get 50% of the available bandwidth.

Mike

[sgreenway]

Sally,

You can use software such as Ulead's SmartSaver to optimize the images. I have just tried it with your 165-blocks.jpg, the original size was 17,656 bytes and I got the size down to 6,307 bytes without any lose in quality that I can see. Think how much smaller the total web page would be if you did that to all the images.

Sam

[Little Lou]

I didn't find a problem with the page - had a good mooch too - nice products !

We're having a slow loading problem on some of our pages and I'd love to know where we can find out the size/download speed of a page. Can anyone help there?

[Mike Hughes]

There are plenty arounbd. One is here: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

Mike

[sgreenway]

A good tool I found is the developer add-on for firefox. It can tell loads of information about a webpage such as speed, image sizes,download times and lots more.

First you need the firefox browser if you haven't got it.
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

And the plug-in can be found at:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/60/

Sam

[Sally Dickson]

Thanks

Thanks to everyone for these comments, I have printed out this thread and intend to work through them one-by-one.

Sally