Forum slow with skin with adv
 

Hi,

my forum is slow when users use the default skin:
http://www.interfans.org/forum/?langid=1&styleid=35


With the Vbulletin skin (less adv banners) runes faster:
http://www.interfans.org/forum/forum.php?styleid=28

In particular browser Firefox and Ie are extremely slow. Chrome works better.

What is the issue that slows down my site?
My adv or other scripts?

Your site is attempting to load various ad scripts and what not that can't be reached, causing a strain on the server:

Yes there are adv banners on my site.
What should I do about them?

Switch your ads to ones that actually load and are optimized. The ones you have dont even seem t be loading.

Mmm actually the banners all show so I am confused

No forum optimization needed?

Oh, hah! So sorry, forgot I had ad blocker enabled.

Yea, some optimization is definitely in order. You're making various calls to 3rd party scripts, fonts and css files that are all loaded from other servers. This means before your site finished loading, it needs to request all of these resources from other websites.

Attached is a screenshot with some of the resources and the timeline.

I would try and consolidate as much as you can into single js and css files and look into hosting them locally and compressing them or use a cdn.

Also of course make sure you're not calling resources you don't even need (ie: old mods, old code, etc)

Here's why your forum is slow....
https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.interfans.org/sEACuXaL

And as for redirects...
You have alot of work to do... click on Minimize Redirects on that report to see the very long list.

Also, holy crap dude... 1.2MiB of JavaScript is parsed during initial page load. My total page size is under 300KB.. just your JS outweighs my page by quite alot.

I know, in fact skin with no adv runs faster
http://www.interfans.org/forum/forum.php?styleid=36

Because default skin has more than 6 times less requests then other skin.

91 Requests : https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.interfans.org/Rn64GE4Q
602 requests : https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.interfans.org/sEACuXaL

I know

The question is how can I fix this?

The simple answer is removing external products.. such as advertising banners. The hard answer for you is, which ones will you remove, if any? So long as you've applied their code correctly, you've done all you can on your end. It's up to your provider to fix the rest, when it comes to external requests & external errors.

Advertising from external sites ALWAYS slows down how fast a site loads. It has nothing to do with the actual server the site is on. It has to do with the speed the site that hosts the advertising sends the advertisements. The server that hosts your site does not wait for anything to send the pages.

Simply put... Usually the server that has the actual site on it sends the HTML to your browser and it's done. Your browser then waits for the info to come from the advertising sites.

Ok I understand it is the adv banners...
Is there a way to fix it?
600+ requests are too many

As final kaoss said, reduce the number of advertisers/advertisements on your site.

I have about 3-4 adv positions.
They are the average for a news site

Any requests compressor or way to decrease the page's size?

A request happens for each item on the page. That can't be stopped. The only way to reduce requests is to reduce the number of items on the page.

Take a look at the waterfall report from gtmetrix and hover over each request. It will tell you what is being requested and from where. Then it's up to you to decide what to eliminate/change.

And I count 10 to 11 advertisements being loaded.

With the style in question items are coming from these sites...

Even 91 requests from your other style seems insanely high to me. And on that page, items are coming from these sites...

Another alternative would be to not rely on such major third-party advertisers, if you don't have people banging at your door to advertise on your site then that might be your only option. If however you have quite a few people wanting to do banner style ads, you can include them by hosting the banners directly on your site and simply linking to theirs - some prefer to track impressions and clicks so then you could use the Rotating Banner System available here on the org OR Revive Ad Server OR Ad Peeps software if hosted on the same domain which will be less to load.

Quite a few options but when you're loading too many ads from third-party providers as others have noted above in previous comments those scripts must load and if too many or not optimized it's just going to take time, that much time though is just overboard. There always comes a point where you must decide when enough is enough, that includes ads and the time it takes to load your site. Everyone wants to benefit from ad revenue certainly but when it's in the way of the end-user loading the site in a timely manner and if it does not load fast enough they might close the tab/window because it's taking too long for the site to load, then your ads just failed in more way than one.