Site Loading Slow – How Do I Speed It Up?

Setting things like your logo and all those images on the homepage as a background image will reduce your loading times – you don’t seem to have you logo wrapped in an h1 tag either for SEO either.

Thanks for your response. I’ll do that asap.

What other optimizations can I implement?

Make sure all that social media stuff loads last, it’s a bitch for slowing things down. Why do you need it on the homepage anyway?
By the way in Firefox it’s not in a straight line…
If that content’s going to change frequently then you shouldn’t have a cache.

Addthis probably has a solution for the social media stuff. I use it on our site at work because it doesn’t stop the page load time slowing down

By “social media stuff” do you mean the share bar on the right hand side? Or the links to social sites in the footer?

I assume it’s the former… if so, how could I speed it up, since it’s pulling info from third party sites?

And regarding the cache, the homepage will randomly serve up articles (whether they’re brand new or a few months old). Do you think caching the homepage would therefore slow the site down?

Caching won’t slow it down but it’s up to you .

It may be your random content script generating the slowness? It’s not that slow for me to be honest.

Yes the social media sidebar – try AddThis and select the social media buttons you want from there. It loads it in an iframe so doesn’t slow the rest of the page down.

Yes, I think you’re right.

I just got off the phone with our Content Delivery Network, and he mentioned the script is pulling images from our server rather than our Content Delivery Network.

Somehow, we need to change the script so it pulls images from the CDN (which I need to figure out how to do).

I really appreciate you taking a look. Not a developer, so I’m trying to wrap my head around the problem.

I’ll look into Add This, too.