Site loading very slowly.

[Xcynic]

Hello.

I'm experiencing very high loading times for my site. The design is a very image heavy design and I'm not really sure what to do. I've been looking into the possibility of saving the images in formats that make the sizes smaller but it didn't have much of an effect.

I'm no expert in how and what I should do to increase the speed of my site. I know it isn't my host because other sites load fast and they have a pretty sick connection speed.

Any advice would be appreciated.


www.pixlicity.com is the site.

[Boofo]

It looks like you have to make a choice between beauty and speed. Not a lot you can do when the site is so image laden. Nice style, though. ;)

[Disasterpiece]

After analysing the network timeline with firebug, it seems that the problem isn't the amount of graphics, but rather the webserver being hopelessly overloaded. Over 3 seconds transfer time for a graphic element which is 3kb in size?
Maybe you should think about changing your host.

[Xcynic]

@Boofo: Thanks!
@Disasterpiece: The webserver I use is hosted by http://www.heartinternet.co.uk and I have a 10GBIT network and multiple 10GB connections to the internet. I doubt that the webhost is causing this but I could be wrong.

Are there any other steps I can take to make it load faster?

[snakes1100]

There isnt much anyone can do here as we cant visually look at the server itself, via ssh for example to see whats causing the load.

Whats the typical server load when it slows down?

Has the server been optimized previously?

[Xcynic]

Well, I've had report from users that say it loads so slow that the page stops loading and just turns white. Any other domain I've tried out that is hosted with the provider I use load fast and without any issue. So I'm pretty confident that it isn't the host provider.

The server has not been optimized as far as I know, I have no clue how to do it :P.

[Disasterpiece]

The network size is not relevant when it comes to an overloaded webserver. It's like saying "I can't get caught in traffic jam, because I have a fast car."

Anyway, we can't help from this side. Ask your webhost for assistance and if it doesn't get resolved, change your provider.

[snakes1100]

There is no reason to change providers, if the issue is server related, optimizing a server requires many skills in numerous areas, including simple ssh.

There is a paid request forum here for job postings, as well as posting for a free opt request at vb.om, but you are required to make all those changes.

[Max Taxable]

Use CloudFlare CDN, it will speed you up greatly. And, it's free.

Horrible, horrible test result from Google's Patrick Meehan:

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120105_F6_2RG6F/

It also caused a warning on that browser, "A script on this page is causing Internet Explorer to run slowly..."

Try disabling the plugin/hook system and try that Meehan test again. Also, set the default vBulletin style as the default style, and see what happens. I don't think you have a server or hosting issue, since your first byte time is decent.

There's third party content from "getfirebug" that looks suspect.

In fact, when you view the details of the test you can see the "getfirebug" stuff is causing alot of load on the CPU of visiting computers:

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120105_F6_2RG6F/1/details/

They appear to all be images, but the third party server they are hosted on doesn't seem to be responding very well, slowing you down massively. Try obtaining these images if they are important, and hosting them up on your own server, eschew third party sources. You can't rely on them.