Codezwiz >> Forums >> General PHP Nuke Help >> Fast page loads

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Hi everyone!

My problem is (I think) a bit strange.....

When my site first loads in Internet Explorer the page load times are sub 0.200, which really pleases me. I have GZipped the site and whenver you click on an internal link such as Forum it loads quickly. The problem is the page "graphics" the header and cells around the blocks etc - they seem to build really slowly.

Can someone please tell me if there is a way to speed this up as I am on a fast connection and it annoys me - I can't imagine how some of my members who are on slower connections feel!!

You can see for yourself here: [ Register or login to view links on this board. ]

Any help appreciated

see what you mean... i think it is because that there is a lot of graphics that make up the header. If you try and condense the amount of images in the header this should speed things up.

I may be wrong but it is the first thing that came to my mind when i looked at your site.

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Thanks for the quick reply

Normally I would agree with you BUT if you visit the site that I purchased the theme from [ Register or login to view links on this board. ] they don't seem to have the same troubles...

I would like to think that there is some magical tweak that I can apply to a .php file to speed things up.

Any more suggestions?

i have had a look at your site and the site that you bought the theme from. your headers aren't identical. when i right click on the other site in the header section what i see is not the same as what i see on your site. they might have made modifications to their site which may include the images.

As far as i know there are 2 ways in which you can resolve your problem:

First one as already stated above reduce the amount of graphics on your site by combining them or use some kind of preloader where only once the whole page has loaded is it then displayed to the site viewers.

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Originally posted by dkwds @ Thu Oct 14, 2004 10:46 am:

i have had a look at your site and the site that you bought the theme from. your headers aren't identical. when i right click on the other site in the header section what i see is not the same as what i see on your site. they might have made modifications to their site which may include the images.

As far as i know there are 2 ways in which you can resolve your problem:

First one as already stated above reduce the amount of graphics on your site by combining them or use some kind of preloader where only once the whole page has loaded is it then displayed to the site viewers.

I like the idea of the pre-loader, I will speak to th eauthor of the theme and see if he can help me out there. BTW - how do I "condense" the graphics in the header?

Nice to see you're a member @ PCHF too dkwds

Nice looking theme.

Loads fine for me. .259, .181, .139. Hard-refresh in between each load.

I wouldn't worry about it.

Originally posted by Hengis @ Thu Oct 14, 2004 12:16 pm:

BTW - how do I "condense" the graphics in the header?

Nice to see you're a member @ PCHF too dkwds

condense i'm guessing is reduce the amount of individual images by combining them.
An example: 2 is better than 20.

Well i had to join it

i have so much to learn.

oh and btw the site that you bought this theme from uses a preloader.

Actually, that's not true. The larger the graphic, the longer it takes to load. Better to have several smaller graphics which load quick than a large one that takes longer. At least that way peeps can see something loading. Also, the total file size would be the same whether it was 2 graphics or 20.

If you want to try to reduce your page load, my first suggestion would be to see if you could optimize the graphics any to make the file sizes smaller. I didn't look to see whether they were gifs or jpgs. If they're .gifs, try reducing the number of colors to see how low it will go b4 you begin to lose quality on the image. If it's a .jpg, try increasing the compression.

just to add, you can also cache your images among other things as explained here:
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Also if you can use an .htaccess file place this in it:

#better caching of images
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000