The internet here seems a bit slow lately but I would say over the last week it has taken me two or more goes at loading the Sitepoint site every time I visit.
It is very slow to load ( about six seconds ) and the main page usually times out first time and I have to refresh to get it to load.
Anyone else having problems?
This is on two different computers in different locations.
EDIT
Pingdom test: 6.65 seconds - 11 connection errors
Two Polls being loaded which seem to take the longest time.
This page can’t be displayed
•Make sure the web address https://www.sitepoint.com is correct.
•Look for the page with your search engine.
•Refresh the page in a few minutes.
Servers often have slow periods. It usually ends, though! (Unless you’re in the U.S., I suppose, where slow loading of most sites is about to become the norm!)
Just tested again and 5.09 seconds with two “polls” taking the longest time.
I am not sure what it means but the first poll took 25.27 seconds and the second 25.3 second. That was probably the length of time I waited for Pindgom to finally display all the results; although the page load time was still 5.09 seconds
Yesterday evening the speed was better about 2.5 seconds and no time outs. Today even slower than yesterday ( 9.2 and 7.7 seconds Pingdom ) with time outs again.
Sitepoint was about the same 7.09 seconds although the page did load in about 2 seconds. I suppose there were items still loading in the background.
Looking at the results I can not believe how many items the main Site and forums are loading. 352 requests on the main site; does anobody write efficient code now? Also two broken requests to Google analytics; might be worth one of the web people running a site check.
I do not think it is a very good example to other webdesigners.
Also one of the adverts is broken on the forum as it just says “ADVERTISEMENT”, sometimes it just has the Google options links.
EDIT: I have just had a look at the main site after two attempts and did not realise it is a “one page” website now. Is this a good idea?
What browser (and version) are you using? Do you have an alternative browser available (which you could also test with to determine if it’s just the browser)?
On an older PC that used to runs Win 8, which used to run Win 7, I find that the new Firefox can be very slow and is very prone to hanging
The timings come from Pingdom; setting the location as Sweden. I assume Pingdom are running the test on some sort of independent browser on their website; so in that case my browser will not matter.
Basically I think this area is the problem - the green bars are about 25 seconds. As nobody at Sitepoint has really commented they must be happy with the way things are or I am the only one with a problem. Anyway I have now lost interest.
Today I’ve just stumbled upon Opera forums at https://forums.opera.com/ - I’m not sure what engine is behind them but the look resembles these forums to some extent and also appear to be mainly a js application so maybe it’s a modded version of Discourse? Anyway, what I’ve noticed right away is how fast their forums are - the response for clicks is instantaneous, their system just flies on all my desktop browsers. They even have a fancy fade-out/fade-in effect on page transitions, which to me doesn’t slow things down at all perceptually.
This is unlike Sitepoint forums where instead of the instantaneous page transitions I have to look at the rotating throbber for 2 or 3 seconds. This is not very slow but gives an overall impression of sluggishness and heaviness. And in my case most of the time of the page transitions is CPU bound, which suggests some heavy javascript work going on. Chromium browsers are slightly faster than Firefox but not by much. However, I’m surprised that Opera forums can be so lightning fast in comparison - I wish Sitepoint devs follow Opera’s example and made these forums equally snappy!
You want to look at the source code sometime. I do not know if it is still the same but the original Discourse forum used to load each post twice and the page was massive.
As I posted above there are errors and warnings which must slow things down. This page has a popup one:
That’s good point… Animated or not they might bring in external resources that take time to load and delay the page. It’s worth making sure that they’re being handled as gracefully as possible, since their very nature is intrusive
What do you mean? That it’s ads that cause the slowness? I don’t think that would be a good explanation since I don’t see that many ads here - at the moment I can see only one static ad at the top of the page. And when I navigate across pages the ad shows up immediately but I have to wait for the content to load while watching the uninteresting spinning wheel.
I’ve also noticed Vivaldi use a similar forum to Opera: https://forum.vivaldi.net/, also snappier than Sitepoint (but maybe not as much as Opera’s) and to me they look like built on the same engine. But looking at the source code I don’t think they are powered by Discourse - this must be a different beast. That would explain the better speed but would probably also mean that Sitepoint is stuck with the slow Discourse with no remedy. BTW, those Opera and Vivaldi forums look much nicer than Discourse, it’s a pity Sitepoint didn’t choose that engine…
I have noticed on many sites and also tested on my own sites that including only a single external advertisement severely slows page rendering.
Google has extensively researched advertising because it is their major income source. When using AmpProject.org web page templates, only approved adverts are allowed, all others fail validation and unable to take advantage of Google’s free CDN caching system.
