Slideshows don't load, photos very slow or broken, Bluehost problem or other?

I know very little about these things, but I use BlueHost and I have just been to your reflection-cambodia page…and I tend to doubt BlueHost is your problem. Using Firefox here in XP on my slow-WiFi notebook next to our old cat on my lap here in the living room, I did have to wait about two minutes for the first image to show up in your slider. But I think you problem is something like having to wait for a certain amount of content (or even all of it) to be buffered before something actually begins…and your slider does not know how to send “just enough” to get started and to then stay “just ahead” of what is being displayed. After watching your images change nicely for a minute or two, it took my browser almost as long to close as it had taken to first get started. But at one of my own sites with a slider, I only have to wait for the first one before the show can begin.

Edit: I have a dedicated IP at BlueHost because I have read that can help a bit, but I would also acknowledge the fact that BlueHost speed can sometimes vary even from one minute to the next…and yet at one of my own sites with a slider, I only have to wait for the first image to load before the show can begin.

Thanks for taking a look. Maybe it’s an issue with that default slideshow. When we imported the blog, we had to go back and redo all of the posts with slideshows, since they didn’t display at all. We thought the www.ads-software.com default version would be simplest, but maybe that was wrong. I guess I can try re-doing the Cambodia page using the new slideshow plugin we got recently and see what happens. I will also check photo sizes. I wonder if I need to resize the photos before uploading…maybe that would help. Anyway, thanks for trying to check it out and for your input! I appreciate it. We have some lovely photos, I think, but if they take more than a few secs to load, who is ever going to wait to see them? ;(

Are you using any caching on your site? That would be a good thing to try for sure – SuperCache plugin is one option, though there are many others.

You could also check your site on a speed test site like –
https://gtmetrix.com/

Not everything it will show is practical with WP – but it will likely give you some useful info.

The images might be loading slowly because they are extremely large images, relative to the size they are rendered on the page.

The image under the “About Us” section is a large, 1.2MB image that is set manually to 150px height and width.

The background image is also 500+KB.

Those seemed to be the 2 items that really slowed down the page load time. If you optimize those images, the page should load much faster.

Thanks so much for your responses! So if I understand correctly, I should try uploading resized versions of photos such as the About Us and background (and probably others) to see if it helps. I’m sure the photos we are using in our slideshows are full-sized images as well, so in the future, when we create new content we should be resizing photos BEFORE upload. Do I have it right? And I can do that with any batch photo resizer? Any suggestions for one that works well for any of you?

I’ll also try and check the site speed for more clues. Thanks again!

Resizing and optimizing image size isn’t always necessary, but you have a lot of content loading on your home page, and there are dozens of images. If those images are larger than they need to be, your page load time could suffer.

As far as a bath image resizer, I don’t have any suggestions. I’m old school and will just manually resize the image and save it as a .jpg to reduce the file size.

Thanks everyone for your valuable time and input. We think we’ve gotten a system down for optimizing and resizing images. We really do appreciate your help!