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Thanks for the offer. I could be wrong but I think our page is fairly optimized at this point--I think any delay may be DNS-related since the majority of it seems to occur while the domain is resolving. Not sure what's up with that...



> but I think our page is fairly optimized at this point

I took a quick look via Firebug/Networking on your site:

31 sub requests, of which 5 form a chain so they can't load in parallel. The server at www.facecash.com waits 2.5 seconds before it sends back the content (this is not DNS waiting time!). On s.facecash.com which you use for the other page components, those are just 0.2 seconds.

The page has 409 KB in total, of which 97 KB are JavaScript code and 135 KB are the main picture (home1.jpg). This big picture changes on each request, smashing the browser caching and ensuring subsequent page reloads will be slow, too.

WTF?!

You should really overcome your ego and to make use of the offer given to you.

> I think any delay may be DNS-related

Here in Germany, your domain resolves within a few milliseconds. However, your whole site takes 12-13 seconds to load. (FWIW, I have a 16 MBit internet connection)

You'll have to learn a lot about basic things like: how to compress images properly, how to decrease web server latency, how to get JS code out of the critical path, how to ensure proper cache use on client side, etc.

Don't get me wrong: It is perfectly okay if a young company's system isn't fully optimized. That's fine, nobody expects this. But if you claim to be "quick like a fox" and to be "fairly optimized at this point", you're saying that you think you are fast enough, so customers can't hope you'll be willing to improve your speed much in the future. And that is a problem, unless you were really optimized, which you aren't.


I do appreciate your suggestions, but this doesn't have anything to do with my ego. I took up the volunteer above (whose name I don't know) on his offer. Meanwhile, the site is fairly optimized. That doesn't mean everything is perfect, but it's not like we've totally ignored speed either. You may think the site is slow, but were it not for a lot of details you've ignored, it would be far slower. All I'm saying is that a lot of work has gone into this and you don't have to imply that we're idiots.

Also, 400K isn't all that much; one of our competitors sends over 4.2MB on their home page alone and it's a very professionally-done site. Aside from all of that, if our server configuration needs more looking at, we'll look at it.

It's great to have constructive criticism like the points contained in your comment, but had it been written without the sarcasm and small insults I would have found it that much more compelling.


I do appreciate your suggestions, but this doesn't have anything to do with my ego.

It's great to have constructive criticism like the points contained in your comment, but had it been written without the sarcasm and small insults I would have found it that much more compelling.

Sounds like ego to me. There was no sarcasm in his host, and its critical tone is probably warranted when your site takes that long to load.


Take his advice or not, but please, move those 4 <script> tags from your header to your footer. It would take you 2 minutes and your site would feel 2x as fast.

Its a nice site, which could be even nicer with some extra speed, and it won't take you any time.


Done! Thanks for the tip.


For me, it spends about 1 second getting the page, then it spends about 1-2 seconds each re-downloading the js files: jquery, jquery-watermark, shared, and shared-jquery. They're all loaded sequentially. The rest of the assets seem to be properly cached.


> The rest of the assets seem to be properly cached.

I don't think so. See my other comment. In short:

The main picture changes on each request so it can't be cached properly.

The cache parameters of the assets force the browser to reload them on each request, although the server then just responds with a "304 Not Modified". This can still be improved by making the browser not reloading them in the first place.

Finally, a first time visitor doesn't have anything in the cache, so the assets should be small and well-compressed, which they aren't.


This is correct from what I'm seeing. We know about some issues with the Apache configuration that seem to be delaying the JavaScript downloads, but otherwise we actually have spent a fair bit of time optimizing things.

To clarify, I really appreciate everyone's feedback here, I just don't think it's a page problem, I think it's a DNS or server configuration problem.


Well, seems like you fixed the caching of the js assets at least. That made the pages load in one second for me, instead of six seconds. Quite an improvement! :-)




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