My website is not working. Help?

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  ththursday · Member · Jul 7, 2014 at 12:23 am

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  My website takes a very long time to load, if it loads at all. This problem is being experienced by viewers all over the country. I contacted y’all within the last few weeks, and Robyn cleared the cache on the site and told us to do the same. So we did – we cleared the cache and the cookies on our computer. There was a little improvement, but now it is back to the same. Virtually all the pictures are jpeg and optimized for web use. Please help! Thanks!

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  spencerwberry · Member · Jul 7, 2014 at 10:25 pm

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  Paul,
  There are some gigantic images being loaded right up front with your site that stop it from loading with any sort of timeliness. Even trying to load your most recent post took quite some time.

  I’ve done some investigating, and you not only have some large images, but you also have a lot of them trying to load at once. No matter how efficient/powerful our services are, everything is going to be bottlenecked by a user’s internet connection.

  Just because an image is a jpg doesn’t make it small enough for web use. Some times you’ll want to shrink the dimension of the image to something reasonable, but generally you want all images to be less than 1MB, and most, even big images, can be compressed between 100kb and 400kb. There are tons of guides you can find through Google if you need help learning about image compression.

  Right now a single ~3MB image on your site takes as long to load as 10-20 web compressed images (even full size, full screen images). On top of that, your posts are very photo heavy, so usually 10+ are loading at once.

  As an example, look at this page The Big’uns. It took me about 6.5 minutes to load this page, and it comes in at a whooping 139MB. No page should be more than 2-3MB, but ideally less than 1MB.

  Hopefully this gives you some perspective and you can start working on getting your image sizes down. If you need more specific guidance, please let me know.

  I would advise starting with your latest post and working backwards across any posts that take more than ~10 seconds to load. That way you can get the front page loading sooner than later.