Speeding up a slow site

Best practices?

[conroy]

I recently launched a new site. The size is relatively small, total size including grpahics is 33kb. However, my site is loading extremely slow. There is a big pause before the entire page shows up.

I do use multiple server side includes. Could these be slowing things down? There are also 80 html links on the page.

The site is hosted on the same host as webmasterworld, a quality place so I don't think that is the reason.

Basically is there any reason the site could be loading slow other than just the size of the page?

[WebMan61]

Even though your total file size is not very large. Do you have your header in one large graphic or a large grahic image on the page that needs to load? I have better luck if I slice the larger images. Also how many tables do you use? That could slow it down some. :)

[Birdman]

On the server side includes, it depends what the scripts are doing. Are they talking to a database?

[Dreamquick]

Depends what those server-side includes are doing - messy database calls and other processor intensive actions can eat into your load times fairly easily. On the other hand simple SSIs should have very little effect on load times.

If you really suspect SSI problems then write out time (including milliseconds) on a test page; once when an include starts and once again when the include ends. Repeat this for all code / includes on the page and you'll be able to trace how long each one takes.

- Tony

[ncw164x]

If you have nested tables, that is a table inside a table and so on, the browser can't show the page until all the info within the tables has been downloaded so if a graphic inside one of these tables is a little on the large side this could be causing a problem.

ncw164x

[conroy]

Hi guys

Thanks for the fast responses!

The SSI is just used for navigation bars. The left column of links is inserted this way, as is the footer.

I did have a big 37kb logo at the top, but I was able to drop that to 8kb. That change didn't seem to affect the load time of the site at all.

There are some tables, about 6. The only graphic on the page is the logo. The rest is text. I think ncw164x
may have hit the problem head on. Is there any way to change these nested tables? I guess CSS could do it? Is there any easy way to convert a page to css?

[ncw164x]

Have a separate table at the top just for the graphic and any other navigation links if they are up there and then have your main content that way something will be loading for the visitor to see while your graphic is loading, basically you have split the page into two horizontally

You can do it using css but this will allow you to test it first

ncw164x