Load Delay is long

Hi @wonderwooman

The first problem that I see is that the TTFB ( Time to first bye ) value is around 600ms, which is a little big high. According to Google, the ideal TTFB should be below 200ms.

Next I also see that the images of your slider are getting loaded after the the images appearing below the slider ( coming from the Featured Collection ), and they will delay your slider’s images.

You should try preloading the images that appear above the fold. Here you can learn more about preloading:

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes/rel/preload

Finally you should optimize the page itself, as:

• your styles and scripts generate a lot of requests and the browser can only queue a limited amount of them at a them, meaning that the others will be delays. With a CSS or JS optimizer plugin, you should try combining the CSS and JS files
• you don’t use any cache, although a good caching plugin could massively improve the performance. ( A full page cache such as Cloudflare’s could further improve the speed. )
• you should use a CDN, that way the delivery of the resources would be more optimized

Tip: If you want to optimize your slider even further, then in our documentation you can learn some extra tips as well:

• https://smartslider.helpscoutdocs.com/article/1925-how-to-speed-up-your-site

where we also mention some extra features such as webp generation and lazy loading available only in the Pro version. However on this forum we are not allowed to discuss topics about commercial plugins such as Smart Slider 3 Pro, so if you have questions connected to Pro features, then please get in touch with us directly over the ticket system:

• https://smartslider3.com/contact-us/support/

Best regards,
Laszlo.

Hi @laszloszalvak

Thank you for your help. After activating a caching plugin, the site speed has greatly improved, but the slides are still noticeably slow to load on both desktop and tablet (tested on multiple devices and locations). Often, a blank window appears for a few seconds, sometimes even 10+ seconds, before the slides show up. Here are some reports from Pingdom and PageSpeed. https://snipboard.io/016bGr.jpg https://snipboard.io/91W2XB.jpgThe slider is set to load instantly, and it is preloaded, https://snipboard.io/XIteTB.jpg with the largest image being 110KB. I’d really like to keep the slides, but I can’t see much room for further speed improvements aside from the slider. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Hi @wonderwooman

Smart Slider loads in a way that it needs to run its JavaScript codes to show a slider and this takes time. Some of these codes can run during page loading, but others can only run after the page finished loading. Because of this, our slider will be one of the last things that shows up on your website. We can’t really do anything with this, because we are running our codes as soon as possible. So your entire website’s speed defines how long it takes for a slider to show up. Your slider is probably optimized, so from our end there are no other settings to improve on this, but something is loading for long on your website. I recommend taking a deeper look at the page where this 10+ second load problem happens. You can use Chrome to see what is loading for how long into your website:
https://smartslider.helpscoutdocs.com/article/1925-how-to-speed-up-your-site#why-slow
If you eliminate long-loading files on the page, our slider will also appear sooner.

Hi, @robertnextendweb ,

Thank you for your quick response. I’m learning as I go. I don’t quite understand why the desktop score is almost perfect with the first content shows up in 0.6 seconds, and the whole page loading quickly except the slider. I believe there must be something that I didn’t set it up correctly in the slides. Here is the site link. Would you please take a look? It seems that the slide images are preloaded. https://snipboard.io/XIteTB.jpg

At the moment, we can see on the page that Litespeed cache delays the loading of the JavaScript file, which contains our code, and also delays the loading of the images used in the slider, until the page is hovered over. Even if the cursor is right on the page, these files are still delayed, so currently we see the problem with Litespeed cache. You could turn it off temporarily to see if that resolves the problem. If it does, you can find out what setting does it by enabling the plugin again, and disable its settings one by one till you find out which does this delayed loading. The option will be called something that resembles delayed loading. I am not familiar with their settings, but in their docs I found “Load JS Deferred”:
https://docs.litespeedtech.com/lscache/lscwp/pageopt/#js-settings-tab
Possibly that is causing this.

In page speed tests, you often get a better score because of such optimization solutions, but in reality, your content is displayed more slowly due to delayed file loading.