Why does my site pause when opening?

They have: 43 posts

Joined: Sep 2005

Hey all,

Got a small problem here. When you open my site, whether with FF or IE, the top part's background displays first, and then a split second later the text of the top part appears as well as the rest of the page. (see it here)

It's not like there's heavy graphics up there... so does anybody know what's causing that?

Thanks in advance Smiling

Renegade's picture

He has: 3,022 posts

Joined: Oct 2002

Now too sure what the problem could be, and is it really of any real concern?

My guess would be the repeating background that you have. It loads the image first, and then repeats it. Just so happens that the height of the background image is about the height of the header, so appears to load the header first.

Busy's picture

He has: 6,151 posts

Joined: May 2001

Outside queries will be slowing it down, you have blogger, google, statcounter and anyone else you query for images or values.
If your using database queries for your select forms, this can pause to if big.
Badly nested CSS can also slow your load time a bit, have you validated your CSS?

They have: 43 posts

Joined: Sep 2005

Thanks guys. I'm gonna remove the background grafix, cut out that blogger toolbar at the top because it's pulled from blogger.com, and find some help cleaning up the css.

Busy's picture

He has: 6,151 posts

Joined: May 2001

Just do one at a time, it could be one small ad doing it, remove say the blogger bar and try for a day, if no change replace and remove google and repeat until you are just left with your code.
I noticed the other day one of my sites pauses for a second, it was the google ad (not the adsense) so put the code lower down the page (postioned with CSS so appears the same) but having the outside queries at the bottom of the page allows the page to load first.

They have: 43 posts

Joined: Sep 2005

Yeah, you know what, it was because of all the javascript.
Cuz after disabling the blogger toolbar, everything still loaded crappily.
So I was thinking about what you said about removing outside queries, and looking through the code I realized that all my javascripts pull from outside sources.
Then I disabled javascript in my browser, cleared the cache, loaded the site, and bam, there it is: my site opening quickly and flawlessly.

So now I'm gonna read up on css and positioning, because I need to keep those javascripts.

Thanks again buddy Laughing out loud

intruth's picture

They have: 61 posts

Joined: Dec 2005

Well what ever you did I just went there and its one of the fastest loading pages I have ever been to...

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