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Enfold Media Element Images items load e-x-t-r-e-m-e-l-y slowly… Why?
On our main website landing page there are four images. We used the Enfold Media Element to insert an image, then configured it for Lightbox “image link”, with Image Caption text and only on hover, image alignment “center” and image fade in animation “none” and image styling “none”. Any image within the browser window loads so slowly you can watch it fill from the top down. This happens on Chrome, IE and Firefox. Once cached in the browser the images are, as expected, very fast to load.
This has been a problem since we first installed Enfold six months ago. First we thought it was our server, then we thought it was WordPress, then we tried various caching solutions thinking it was some piece of backend code slowing things down. Our hosting company can show it’s not them, and no matter what caching system we use it does zero to increase the speed of the loading of these images. We can’t find any WordPress issues, so it seems to be down to an issue with Enfold code.
We want to tick this issue off of our To Do list and are looking for some feedback to fix the problem. We are using the latest release of Enfold — and this problem has occurred on all previous releases of Enfold.
The website is:
http://www.therapyhelpcenter.comHey davevi!
Your page is loading for me in 3.3 seconds so it’s pretty fast. Perhaps it’s your internet connection?
One thing you will want to do though is optimize your image sizes. You have them in a one fourth column so you could really use a thumbnail version instead. The garden image is almost 1MB itself. I would aim for around 100 – 200KB.
Cheers!
ElliottThanks Elliott. I’ve asked my IT friend in the US to also test and he saw the lag mostly in the first image on the home page. I checked the image sizes and they average 400k — the garden image is not 1mb so I don’t know how you calculated that, unless you are talking about the top header image (being the garden) which is about 760k — but has always loaded quickly.
I’m guessing that the Enfold code is loading the page’s thumbnail, plus the code to do the “on hover” text, plus the code to do the lightbox display of the full size image, plus the full size image — all together on the page load, when I think the better approach is to load the full size image at the time the thumbnail is clicked. Or, could Enfold pre-render (to cache) the thumbnail of the full-size image on the server — because the delay here could be the Enfold engine rendering the full size image as a thumbnail on-demand, and not when clicked on, and this is the cause of the slowdown. Not sure? Your thoughts?
Elliott, our technical wizard in the US just filled me in on the what and why of this issue. I understand now that that the whole picture loads and then is translated into a thumbnail, so any large-ish sized image file will cause this issue. He filled me in, in detail, on how the code functions — and this is helpful to understand the issue.
In the end it comes down to what you said initially, it’s the file sizes that are causing the problem — but now I understand why it’s happening. I’ll shave the file sizes down and I think this will make the issue just about go away.
We can close this issue and thank you for your time Elliott.
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