Response Times and Cascading Menus

[Highlander]

We have been having terrible problems with our site recently. Some of it has been down to our ISP – but some has been my fault for not watching the overheads.

Our main index page has virtually no images but still took a whopping 40seconds to load on a 56k modem.

On analysing the site something in the order of 70% was down to javascripts. I have been testing Norcascade and it takes 25k. Norman kindly pointed out that I had 47k unnecessary overhead as I had included 47k for Act Section tree which was unnecessary.

I have therefore experimented with a light foot print menu which has reduced the javascript enormously. This has halved the loading time – but it is still enormous. The Total page size is 93k – I believe 50k is acceptable – but we have 56k in images! Any ideas?

There is a very useful page http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ which will alllow you to evaluate a page. I tested http://www.highlandclans.co.uk with the following results:

Object Size Totals(bytes) was Now
HTML: 14067 20876
Images: 50794 56625
javascript: 127346 14693
CSS: 663 665
Total 192870 92859
Connection Rate Download Time
14.4K 149.68 seconds 72.17 seconds
28.8K 74.94 seconds 36.19 seconds
33.6K 64.26 seconds 31.04 seconds
56K 38.64 seconds 18.71 seconds


Regards

Niall

[NormanRouxel]

Remember that the JavaScript files will be identical on all subsequent pages and thus should be served from the browsers cache.

Norman.

[Mike Hughes]

I can't see where you've got 56Kbytes of images.

Of the images I can see:

Your banner image can easily be reduced from 13K to 6.5K by reducing the number of bits used to 16. You won't see the difference.

You have an image for your hotline number. Wastes 2K.

Each of your CC logos is about 1.6K, use fewer colours and 800 bytes is fine. Another 2.4 K saved.

I suspect each of the images used for your menu across the top are also 256 bit GIFs, so maybe we can just say that an simple estimate is that you can probably save half of your total image bandwidth by optimising them a little bit.

That would save about 28K bytes, or about 30%.

Mike

[Highlander]

Back from the Isles

Good Morning,

I am just back ftom the festivities on the Isle of Lismore.

Thanks for the replies. Yes, Norman the caching works. I just tested the site on a very slow connection on Lismore and it wasn't too bad.

Thanks for the heads up on the images. We shall play about.

Niall