My website is taking a long time processing and opening pages. Why?

Question

I have developed a web portal in Joomla, which is completely images oriented, hence there are lots of images on the site. My website is taking a long time processing and opening the pages. What could be the reason, and how can I resolve it?

Answer 1

One major thing to check is simply that you are optimizing all your images. The link that Nick provided in a previous answer to Yahoo best practices will provide some good information. If you are working with Joomla out of the box as they say, the most likely culprit are the images you are using. Make sure you're images are the correct display size, not larger. Don't use the html to size an image with the height and width command like this:

<img src="someimage.jpg" height="400" width="600" >

Use a photo editor to make the image the actual size you need.

Answer 2

My first test would be to run the website hosted on a local network and then check the performance. If it still works slow, its nothing to do with the images. There's something wrong with the code. You will need to trace and find out which path is taking too long.

If images are the problem, suggest you host images on a fast server like Amazon's AWS. Even then images are cached by the browser and subsequent visits must be fast.

Also use google chrome and find out what is taking time. Press Ctrl-Shift-J on the chrome window. You'll get some pretty interesting statistics of what's taking time and network resources.

Answer 3

Get firebug for firefox, it is a very useful utility that I use everyday. It will show you exactly what is loading, how large it is and how long it is taking.

Yahoo has a good article on best practices. Here

There is a ton of things you can do, but I would start at the link above and then come back and ask any questions you still have.