I have been receiving mixed feedback about the speed with which the blog now loads for people.
Let’s try this again, with a poll.
Please pick the best answer and then give your observations about the speed of the blog loading below. Restrict yourself to the speed issue, please.
Since the blog update, the blog is loading ...
- ... faster. (50%, 567 Votes)
- ... about the same speed. (41%, 461 Votes)
- ... slower. (9%, 103 Votes)
Total Voters: 1,131

I have a very fast internet connection, and your pages “snap” into view. It’s amazingly fast.
OSX 10.6.4
Safari 5.0.2
My page loads at about the same speed as before, but the Z-cam takes forever to start playing.
I’m having no problems on Firefox, either on my Mac or my Thinkpad. If anything, it’s faster. Given TomB’s comment above, perhaps it is an IE problem? Otherwise, it might be version specific, which can be a much bigger pain to resolve.
It is faster Fr. Z; but like the person above, Z-cam takes forever.
Bruno
I don’t know how fast the blog loads compared to before the redesign because before I could read almost everything in the un-truncated feed. *cough*
Very fast on Google Chrome.
It can take anywhere from ten seconds to a full minute for data to transfer from lphbs.com to my computer. I am running Firefox 3.5.13.
I’m not having problems with the page load time, but I have noticed a quirk with the post preview function. [Which can be discussed, perhaps, elsewhere! o{]:¬) ]
faster, but not sure if it’s your renewal, or because I upgraded to IE9 around the same time…
Faster using FireFox vs IE8…
Fr. Z — where do you prefer to have blog issues not related to the page load speed reported? The topic specific to the Preview function has comments disabled, as does the most recent generic “Blog Renewal” topic.
Hello Father,
From what I recall, it’s loading about the same, if not a bit faster.
One tool I like to use when developing a website is this online website optimizer:
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
For WordPress the following 2 caching plugins are pretty helpful in speeding things up:
WP Super Cache – Fairly basic caching tool
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/
W3 Total Cache – A much more advanced tool. Caching, compression, minifying and much more. Use caution with this one though…
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/
Thank you for putting so much effort into this wonderful blog!
Loads the same speed for me—I’m running Google Chrome on an XP platform, if that matters.
I haven’t been able to pin it down, but occasionally, some sort of script hangs on the page (or something else) and blocks the whole browser (Firefox on Linux). At first I thought it was only when I had two tabs open to different pages in the blog and closed one, but it seems to be deeper than that. It could be that our firewall is blocking some element that is needed for proper loading, I suppose.
When I first get on, it loads kind of slow.
I use Safari on Mac OS X.
Using IE 7 on Windows Vista. About the same speed.
I’m shocked that only a small amount of people are experiencing slower load time. Since the design update, I have to wait at least 60 seconds for the page to load on my browser. Other web pages generally take no more than 5 seconds. I do like the new design, though. I love your blog, Fr. Z. Since it loads so slowly, I open a separate window for your site and keep browing in another window until your site finally loads. If it were another site that I didn’t care for, I wouldn’t bother waiting; however, your blog is worth the wait.
jmcj: Give me some idea of what elements are loading slowly, please.
Faster using Firefox. Thanks!
Fr. Z: The entire website loads slowly for me–when I first go to the website, when I login, when I post a comment. It generally takes around 45-60 seconds. I wonder if it’s because I use Internet Explorer; however, I don’t remember having this problem before.