Website Load Time

[dehawkinz]

I have imported this article from the old forum, as it is a topic I often refer to when people ask me about overloaded pages, and why their site was paused.

Ever wonder if your page is taking to long to load?

Well now with StartXchange, the time it takes your advertisement to load is recorded, and you can see the average over the last 24 hours!

Here are some tips to bring your average down:

1) Cut the clutter! (use less images, movies, sounds, frames, etc)
2) Get a faster host! (if your host is slow, it'll take longer to load)
3) Use less trackers/rotators! (rotators within rotators just take longer to load)

Note: During the first 24 hours the times will become more accurate, as data before it was added is not available. This'll make your page load average appear faster than it may be.

See the Average Here (the number in seconds, next to the clock):
http://www.startxchange.com/members/websites.php

[eagle27]

Wow De a new pic, I like this one better because you are smiling.

Sandra

[dehawkinz]

LOL

I had to change my pic, because I lost my other pic when testing the SX photo upload tool.

This one comes from my design site :)

Just be glad you haven't seen the 'lean, mean hawkinz machine' pic ;)

DeHawkinz

[revjoybunny]

I took that pic and I have always thought it much nicer than his other one but then Im biased

isnt he lovely :)

lol

[biz2001]

My computers page loading time has increased to 7 to 10 sec.for the last 5 or 6 days on StartXchange . I have clicked TOOLS, Clear Private Data.Re-booted and run Norton. I run DSL ,and other exchanges load in a flash. What do you think to do now...?

[drkelp]

Of course he is lovely, you have good taste RevJoy

Grant

[nsant46]

Hi Deha...,
It's better your last photo.
Noemi

[xxclixxx]

My computers page loading time has increased to 7 to 10 sec.for the last 5 or 6 days on StartXchange . I have clicked TOOLS, Clear Private Data.Re-booted and run Norton. I run DSL ,and other exchanges load in a flash. What do you think to do now...?

Do you mean surfing on StartXchange is slow or do you mean the clock next to your URL is increasing?

[frederickding]

If you really want to speed up the performance of your web site, take a look at the Yahoo! Developer Network's page: Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site (http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html).

Combining multiple stylesheets, multiple external scripts, and using CSS sprites are good methods of reducing the number of HTTP requests.

Using the Expires header to encourage browser caching, as well as the ETag header, will reduce the amount of bandwidth consumed since browsers won't be re-fetching supporting items as often. You can also use the Cache header (eg. "Cache: max-age=3600, must-revalidate").
NOTE: if your CSS stylesheets or external scripts have a query (eg. "?version=2.3.3"), most browsers will not cache them regardless of the headers.

If you use PHP, you should also compress your output. DON'T USE THE ob_start('ob_gzhandler') method. Instead, try zlib.output_compression (using .htaccess or php.ini). You can read an old blog post (http://www.geekie.org/technology/web-dev/php/2007.09/47.php-compression-without-ob_start.web) or a more recent blog post (http://www.geekie.org/technology/web-dev/php/2008.02/154.compressing-js-css-html-using-zlib-in-php.web) about compressing JavaScript and CSS using PHP's zlib.output_compression.

If you don't use PHP, you should try mod_gzip or mod_deflate on Apache. They also provide excellent compression ratios and reduce file sizes. The only trade-off of using compression is bandwidth vs. decompression times. Older computers (5+ years) may take slightly longer to decompress encoded content.

According to Yahoo!, you should also decrease the number of DNS lookups to no more than 3 or 4. This means confining external scripts, stylesheets, and images to a few subdomains. Actually, they also say that placing scripts and stylesheets on a different hostname than your site can speed up your website load time because of parallel downloading.

I certainly hope that this helps.

[biz2001]

StartXchange is slow. I'm talking about viewing other pages. When not on StartXchange, pages load in a flash.

[biz2001]

OK today is 3-25-08 , Pages are loading fast again. Most pages I view are loading in 1 or 2 sec.