I tried uploading all of my image files to Photobucket and use them in my <img> tags. This increased my website's speed from 7 seconds to 4.5 seconds. This was because Photobucket's server is faster than my server.
I tried uploading all of my image files to Photobucket and use them in my <img> tags. This increased my website's speed from 7 seconds to 4.5 seconds. This was because Photobucket's server is faster than my server.
Not a bright idea. What if the Photobucket server(s) fail(s)? As a general rule, the external files should stay on the same domain as the HTML documents. There are many browsers which have, as a precaution option tool/addon, the possibility to block the images' loading if those images are not in the same domain as the document.
If your images are loaded in several seconds, that means either you are using too many images (or too big) or your images are not compressed at all (or not properly compressed). Use a tool (such as Photoshop, or freeware tools) in order to compress your images and bring them to a reasonable "weight" (usually no more than several tens of KB)
This is actually a common practice for large-scale websites. Putting your static content on external, dedicated content servers drastically increases page load times for a number of reasons. And the practice is actually recommended for high-traffic sites or sites with large payloads.
However, I'm not sure how typical it is to rely on something like photobucket. Usually, if your site's traffic or payload hits that critical point, you'd start using a Content Delivery Network: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network
Though, sites like blogger use external asset/image services by default. Blogger, for instance, uses google's photo sharing service. Same company, of course--but different servers under different domains that are dedicated to serving images.
ADDENDUM: However, if you're seeing load times greater than a few seconds for a payload of 100kb or less, it sounds like the issue isn't server-side. Either that, or the page itself is taking that long to load--which is an issue that can't be resolved by distributing your assets.
I've heard of CDN, but I can't afford multiple servers. I'm currently using a $40/year hosting service, which is the lowest possible quality (other than free hosting).
The site actually loads pretty quickly for me--renders in less than a second. So, I think the slow load times are due to a slow, mis-configured, or misrouted connection on your end. Do you experience the poor performance all the time, or just during peak times?
Actually, now that I click around a bit, I'm seeing some occasional spikes in load time on the initial pageload. The data transfer doesn't appear to be the issue though. It appears to be an latency issue--could be that either certain pages are too CPU intensive or the server is simply being overworked. (shared environment, I'm guessing)
I'm using a caching plugin, so I guess that's why it's fast. The slow pages probably weren't cached yet.
When I actually open my website using a browser, it loads it about 2 seconds. When I said it took 7s for it to load, that was my result from a loading speed test.
Edit: I noticed your comment about having too much spam. I added a math question to reduce spam (you must be logged out to see it), I'll try adding rel="nofollow" if this doesn't work.
We're getting a touch off the primary topic, but that still seems like somewhat worrisome performance. Are you using shared hosting? VPS? Dedicated? In-home?
Bite the bullet and go for something around $5-$15 a month. May be just a get what you pay for job. Standard shared hosting should be as fast as I've found photobucket.
I tried hosting an image on Google. The image loaded a lot faster than before (I used pingdom.com). However, Google only allow images up to 800px. Are there other fast sites?
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Originally Posted by narutodude000
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