There are many reasons for slow pageload times, and very little we can do about it.
- The social buttons and especially their integrations with other websites over which we have no control
- The DNS IPs in the visitor's router (or PC)
- The broadband network the visitor is on (their ISP)
- Browser issues on the visitor's computer
- Software issues on the visitor's computer
So let's look at what can be done about a situation where some people get pageloads of 3 seconds or less, on any page, any time of night or day, even when they have never been to that page before and it has to load completely from scratch, even thousands of miles away in another country; while others get pageload times of 30 seconds or so.
Incidentally we tried CDN variants but this just made it worse for some people (distributed servers for our static content).
Social media integrations
Firstly, the social media integrations: we can't get rid of them, they are now a feature, and won't be going away. We might be able to find a solution where all that stuff loads well after the main page has loaded - we're looking. It's not easy to do that on our forum software.
Otherwise, people badly affected by this could try script blocking in their browser - Firefox has some plugins for this.
DNS
The next biggest factor is your DNS service. Some ISPs are very poor here, and their DNS service is slow. It should be transparent but often isn't; and the routes they send you on may not be optimal. Solution: use a different DNS service. It is comparatively easy to change the DNS IPs in your router, or even in the PC. We can't get into that here, but google for OpenDNS or GoogleDNS and resources can be found. For some people this will make a magical change.
ISP
Broadband networks have a massive difference in their performance. Download speed has absolutely nothing to do with it - it's a question of the contention ratio on port 80 services. This means: do they have enough equipment to service all their customers browsing the web at any one time? The answer is: no - they never do - they have to gamble. The 'contention ratio' is how many customers there are for any modem in their data centre, and it's commonly something like 20:1 - they have 1 piece of hardware to cope with 20 customers who potentially might want to use it. Bad ISPs have very slow networks - and the download speed has no relevance to this. It's all about port 80 (web browsing) contention ratios. Change your ISP and get a 5 times better (or worse) speed. Ten miles up the road, you'll find someone with half the pageload speed you get. At the office, you get double the speed as at home; and so on. How to find a good ISP is the big question: trial and error. Cable service providers are often better because they have to have lower contention ratios. Phone line ISPs can be really bad. Did you get the cheapest broadband on offer, by any chance?
Browser issues
Sometimes you can get a faster speed just by changing browsers. Install Chrome or Opera and see if it makes a difference. Don't load it up with plugins, because every plugin installed on any device will slow it down.
PC issues
Lastly, PC issues are occasionally responsible for slow browsing. You can test it by getting a clean, new PC and seeing if there is a pageload speed gain. What many of us do now is:
- Buy a PC without any Windows or other software - this avoids getting a PC preloaded with 'crapware'
- As soon as you buy a new PC, wipe the disk absolutely clean
- Install a clean new Windows OS, then Acronis or similar
- Immediately take a disk image with Acronis or Macrium Reflect etc
- Store the disk image on a USB external hard drive
- Make another image after 3 months; make it a completely separate one, not an incremental image
- Every 6 months, save your data, then wipe the disk and start fresh
- Use the 2nd image you made; if it has problems of any kind, you can ditch it and use the 1st clean image
- You can reinstall Windows and all your working programs and data in 15 minutes - magic!
It's not my end I tell you.
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