Unresolved issue

recently spent time trying to get to the bottom of my site issues - namely pausing / stalling - ended up resaving out images keeping them all under / around 300kb - this helped a little but im still finding if you try and look through a whole gallery it will stall at some point and in a way that doesnt seem to relate to a particular image - ie in random places.

ive experienced the same issue from different locations and devices - id really appreciate any suggestions about how to fix this issue, thanks in advance

You still have a few images much larger than the rest of them some 2.2 MB, 1.9 MB. This could be part of your slowing. On the theme, you’re using it will load the images as you scroll through them. With as many images as you are loading, could be your host is just hitting contention with other requests.

You do have some errors on your pages console, none them should cause your slowing.

I would reduce the large images, and you may want to consider using Cloud Flare, their free account does offer to cache jpegs.

Console Errors:

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thanks Doug, i’ll check again, im hoping thats all it is as in my ignorance, I’m not sure I understand your other suggestions!

thanks for looking - appreciate it

CloudFlare is an online CDN that will serve your pages from their server.

It looks like these are still a problem:

2017-08-04_15-31-25
![2017-08-04_15-32-21|690x263]
2017-08-04_15-32-34(/uploads/realmacsoftware1/original/2X/0/027c67490e1c5faaff73f481d369b5ab5c5b3123.png)

thanks again - i’ll take another look!

It looks like there’s a JS call to include a script and the path is not resolving. Maybe a typo in the name of the file or may be that the file didn’t get uploaded on the last publish for some reason.

In any case, I’d fix that first. Depending on the platform you can see a long pause when the browser is waiting to try to resolve that – or give up.

To move along further – you really have to measure what is taking the time in order to know how to optimize. Old developer adage: never optimize before you measure.
Fortunately Safari and Chrome come with some good tools. I’ll use the Safari ones here – just because they’re prettier. :wink: Both work great.

If we look at the graph we can see that the primary page renders around 2.1 seconds. This will vary A LOT depending on connection speed, device type, screen resolution, retina, etc. So the numbers will always just be relative measures. That said, my details are: 1080p retina display on a very fast mac with a 1Gb/s connection. So load times tend to be a bit faster than average. So if there are long loads in these graphs we know they’re a problem.

Next we can look at what is taking up those 2.1 seconds by expanding the graph. There’s a lot to see. A bunch of JS and CSS files are downloading. But a large chunk of time is taken up loading a lot of thumbnail images. You can see when the last thumbnail loads, the page renders almost immediately afterwards.

The primary thing you’d like to show the user ASAP is pretty simple, namely: one very large photo and some basic menus and things.

The low hanging fruit are all those thumbnails: we’re not even looking at them. Why wait for all those thumbnails when the users won’t see them until they click. Just render the page after the one big image loads. Then download all those thumbnails in the background.

So, I’d try to restructure the page a bit so that the thumbnails use a JS to cache in the background. I don’t know if the script/stack/whatever will allow that – but I think that’s what will need to happen to improve things in any significant way.

If you’re using some other tool to generate the scripts/slideshows/thumbnails then I’d contact the developer directly and show them those timeline graphs. I suspect they just don’t realize that those thumbnails are in the critical path of the page-load. Or maybe they even know of a simple way to work around this.
If you’re doing this on your own, then go find yourself a background image caching script. Google and you’ll find a ton.

I don’t generally like to disagree with other posters – but in this case I’d recommend against the other suggestion. I would NOT cut down your images. Your site is all about images – scaling them down or cutting quality is only going to shave a few percent – and the cost to those meager savings will be reducing the very thing that you’re trying to show off.

Or, at least get that low hanging fruit first. Once there’s nothing else to cut or load later, then you can optimize the images a bit more.

Good luck with the page. It looks great.
Isaiah

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isaiah, thanks so much for taking a look and giving me such a detailed response.

You are absolutely right - it is in theory very simple, load one image and the menus as quickly as possible and to navigate through the images without stalling.

in practice not! i’ve spent so much time trying to locate the issue and trying to save out the images in different ways to optimise. Ive already gone too far on some images.

Ive backed myself into a corner, using rapidweaver for its apparant simplicity for someone like me that has minimal experience, the theme i purchased was close to what i wanted I just removed some excess design elements that i felt cluttered the design but there isnt really any support.

Would you say this is a big job for a developer to resolve?

thanks again for your time,

best

danny

no. the problem seems very straightforward.

if it were a Stacks page i could help you more directly myself – or at least point you in the right direction.

can i ask what tools you used to create this content? i might be able to alert the right people in the RapidWeaver community to help out.

Isaiah

Thank again Isaiah,

i used a theme called ‘photographos’ originally by a a company called archetypon, now seemingly rebranded as weavers kingdom - www.weaverskingdom.com - i have emailed them with no reponse as yet…

if you know anyone that can help that would be great!

i’ve sent a direct message.

it’s about 2am on a Sunday his time – so it might be a little while before he responds. :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

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ah great - fingers crossed he’s a night owl :slight_smile:

@isaiah thanks.

@db75 the theme is outdated and not supported anymore, please send me a message to support@weaverskingdom.com and I’ll help you on updating to the latest version.

@isaiah i’m told that i need to upgrade the theme, in order that it performs with current web standards and to get any support.

i have no issue with cost but this will involve me basically having to remake the site - do you think there is any solution to improve what i have as im not sure i can face that!?

alternatives:

  • use as-is.
  • make a simple landing page that loads fast with new/different theme (and leave the rest as is) fixing 80% the problem with 20% to work.
  • attempt the re-work yourself (difficult for someone unfamiliar with Javascript)
  • hire a coder to do the work for you (prob not super cheap).

i think there are several alternatives that are very reasonable and pragmatic. as with most engineering you can have: Good, Fast, and Cheap… pick any two. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: