This morning I noticed that my website (dougdraws.com) was loading really slow in my Chrome browser. I'd called my host to see if they were doing any maintenance and the tech reported that my site was loading fine for him. So then I thought it was Chrome.

I downloaded and installed Firefox and then the Firebug extension and followed this tutorial here to diagnose what was taking so long to load on my site.

According to the status bar at the bottom of the Net tab in Firebug it took 16.47s to 24.34s to load. Not sure what that means, but it doesn't sound good.

It wasn't slow like this at all until this morning. I don't know what has changed. I haven't added any new plugins or anything. Checking the "All" tab in the Net window of Firebug I could see a lot of the images were taking a while to load, along with some bizarre things. Like a small 11x11 GIF was taking 13.8 seconds! That seems a little ridiculous.

I don't know what's going on with my site, but if anyone can offer any suggestions, tips, or advice I'd sure appreciate it.

Thank you.

Nobody, eh?

I went through and compressed some images. I needed the transparency of the header image so I tried a PNG compression trick - Posterization. I don't know if it made it any smaller, but it seems to load faster. There's really no way to get that image any smaller, unless someone has some suggestions or tutorials on it.

Anyway, I also reduced the file sizes on the featured images, saved them as JPEGs instead of PNGs. Reduced most of them by well over half. Got some pixelization happening now, but at least their smaller. I found a couple optimizers - pngcrush and OptiPNG - but I can't make heads or tails out of how to use them.

Rendering time or loading time?

Problem is with the latest anxiety attack inducing metric is that it is so dam*ed vague.

The browser, how full (or large) the browser cache is, your location, your connection speed, if you are using a router or a modem, if you have any remote scripts to load etc etc. With javascripts IE may be slightly slower than other browsers, because the JS engine can be a little "clunky".

Personally I see it as just more thing not to pay attention to and simply carry on with the idea that building sites for users is STILL the best way to be.

Does it differ with browser

Thank you everyone for your input. I have a made a rather bold decision. I have decided to “slim down” my website. I've been test driving some new themes now. WooThemes has this neat area where you can log into an actual WP dashboard and upload their themes to test them out. Pretty cool. My plan: no more big graphics, blog, or tutorials – focusing just on my artwork, front and center – period.

Ok, maybe a nice subscribe box…..

I'm thinking it's your connection, but we can't be sure until you post the link to the site. If you go with a new theme and it doesn't fix it, I'm leaning even further toward your connection.

Link: http://dougdraws.com

The biggest bandwidth saps on your site would be the background and the header. Even then, your site loaded just fine. I still think it's your connection. If you don't already use http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/, I'd suggest using it to help out your server a little though.

If any of the images on your site are linked or pulled from another site that is having issues or down it could make your page or site hang and seem to load slower. I prefer to host as many of the images I post on my own space to prevent this. Not sure if you do this or not. That could make it load decent one moment and not.

Originally Posted by Madman340

The biggest bandwidth saps on your site would be the background and the header. Even then, your site loaded just fine. I still think it's your connection. If you don't already use http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/, I'd suggest using it to help out your server a little though.

I already have WP-Super-Cache.

Originally Posted by gameutopia

If any of the images on your site are linked or pulled from another site that is having issues or down it could make your page or site hang and seem to load slower. I prefer to host as many of the images I post on my own space to prevent this. Not sure if you do this or not. That could make it load decent one moment and not.

All my images are local.