Delay on navigation // cache issue?

Question

one of my customer told me that he was seeing a white page during site navigation. The white page he was talking about was just the browser empty pages; he sees it while navigating between the website pages, as apparently there is some kind of delay // or // cache problem with the browser. It isn't a big issue, and it's something that I can't relate to ExpressionEngine, but it's there, and I would like to fix it.

You can reproduce it navigating on the main menu, sometimes the browser just load the new page, sometimes there's a delay that returns the empty page for some seconds.

Do you have any clue? I've changed the busted css to absolute path and turned on cache for templates with no luck. This happens on all browser, it's like he's re-loading all the files.

Do you have any clue/hint?

thank you.

Here is the Site

Answer 1

First step is to move all CSS and JS out of EE templates. You will see improved load times just from this... If you minimize and combine into less files, that will help even more.

The http://visiosuite.org/index.php/javascript/plugins file is consistently loading slowly which you should be able to see in your browser's Network tab...

As currently coded, your images, css and JS are still using an absolute link (www.domain.com/filename) instead of a root-relative link (/filesname) when loading.

I also suggest you move your main CSS file up near the top of the list if subsequent css files aren't overwriting styles in that main file. One larger minimized CSS files is better than 5 smaller files that are not minimized.

Additionally, you are loading Modernizer JS file in the header but if you aren't using it, I suggest removing it.

Also, change the "Enable GZIP Output?" setting in EE to "Yes".

If you have caching enabled in EE, it's not evident... The page loads here are ~ 5-6 seconds. You might want to spend money on the CE Cache module. The static driver will make the site amazingly fast.

Answer 2

I can't say for sure, Firefox seems to have little to no issue, Safari defiantly has signs of the issue.

One thing I did notice, are you using EE CSS templates ? It looks like it via the URL they're being called from.

This could be slowing things down, I'd remove them from the EE system, I'm yet to see any scenario where they are of any real benefit. Having them as traditional CSS files kept in a folder makes everything simpler.

You could also try some caching via htaccess to help speed things up as well.