Web optimisation
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- dewongrass
- Jr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 28
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- Hi i am using versatility 4 and i realised my site is loading very slowly from ie and firefox. is there anyway i can optimise this?
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- Ben Lee
- Elite Rocketeer
- Posts: 4193
- Thanks: 42
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The two biggest reasons for sites loading slowly are hosting set-up and image sizes.
If you have a link to your site, people may be able to give you more input on this! In general though, the RocketTheme templates are pretty fast loading and Versatility4 is a very quick loading template with very few images needed to create it. It's more css and fewer images for styling which helps boost speed most of the time.
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- Penn Wooding
- Elite Rocketeer
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I agree, finding a decent host is advisable.
Who are you using at the moment? - http://www.Oscarfishlover.com - the website for great Oscar Fish advice and help
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- dewongrass
- Jr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 28
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Hi all thanks for the reply. Currently i am using hostdaddy. But more than that, when i install versatility4 anew and run a webpage analyser, it says that it has too many objects, images etc. the http request was as high as 130 when the optimum suggested was only 20.
I reckon thats why its slow. any suggestions?
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- dewongrass
- Jr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 28
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hi the link to the site is
www.intrillion.com/altus
Please take a lot and give me some suggestions to make it load faster thanks alot!
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- Ben Lee
- Elite Rocketeer
- Posts: 4193
- Thanks: 42
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dewongrass wrote:
hi the link to the site is www.intrillion.com/altus
Please take a lot and give me some suggestions to make it load faster thanks alot!
At first glance, you've got 6 images making up more than half the size of your site. This is a very large site and very large images to be loaded. By compressing these through any image program, you could probably cut this size down by 75%.
This would be the best place to start. A large web image, like the huge background images in Replicantv2 and Refraction are around 40 KB to 60 KB and those take up the whole screen.
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- dewongrass
- Jr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 28
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Thanks ben for your comments, however, i am sure you understand the tradeoff between size and quality. As you said, i will try to reduce the images to an acceptable size.
However, if you look through the other pages, even if there are not much images it will still take a long time to load. it seems that other objects are taking too much space as well. therefore i wonder how those content heavy site can manage this and load fast enough.
Thanks! I appreciate more suggestions!
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- Ben Lee
- Elite Rocketeer
- Posts: 4193
- Thanks: 42
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Sort of have to take things one at a time here as it's all stuff that will need to be done.
Aside from very large images, you are loading a lot of javascript. You have some 3rd party extensions that are using a java library that is different than what Joomla uses in it's core set up so you're loading at least twice as much there.
The images are huge and still have to get from your server to the users browser window at some point.
Just some general information on website page sizes...a webpage back when everyone was on dial up was said to be getting too big when it was larger than 30 KB. Now, with highspeed connections everywhere, a webpage is getting big when it's over 400 KB. Your site is more than triple that at over 1,300 KB.
In addition to the extra javascript for the extensions you've installed, it looks like you have a Google widget on your site which requires getting info from Google. Your site has to wait on this widget to finish before it can finish loading.
In short, the more files you have to load, the larger the files sizes are, and the more dependent you are on retrieving data from other sites, the slower your site will be.
After working on these items, if you're still experiencing slowness, you may need to try a different host. The hosting set up can make a very big difference in the load times of a site.
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- dewongrass
- Jr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 28
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Thanks ben, the information you provided are very valuable.
However, can you teach me how can i analyse my site like you did. Did you use some website analyser or anything like that?
Also how can i evaluate which extension requires too much loading eg for javascript etc? Cos now, i dont know at all how to do that and i am facing this problem of slow loading.
I understand that the 3rd party extension you mention should be the rotating banners that i am having. the 3 images are already at a whooping 300kb plus the javascript loading. but i dont know any alternatives, any suggestions for that as well?
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- JEM
- Preeminent Rocketeer
- Posts: 17917
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Ben will be back I'm sure but I think it's his nap time....
He may be using some different tools (which I'd love to know about) but many of us use FireFox, FireBug, and YSlow, a plugin for Firebug.
Firebug is a web developers best friend. It is a powerful addon for the popular browser Firefox. It allows you to inspect any element on a page and edit it...live. This proves to be a powerful feature when debugging a site or even adding new elements, without the laborious task of change, save, refresh.
Please learn more about Firebug in our Firebug Tutorials.
Watch our Video Tutorial about Firebug's HTML Tab.
Watch our Video Tutorial about Firebug's CSS Tab.
Watch our Video Tutorial about Firebug's Script Tab. - Thanks,
jim
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