Question

Is there way to show users that the website page started loading. My homepage is a bit slow and when the page is loading users can only see a blank screen. And gives a impression that the page is not working. Is there a easy solution for this?

Answer 1

Probably the best bet is to see why it’s loading slowly. If it’s server response, there’s nothing much you’ll be able to do. Who is your host? GoDaddy is NASTY slow for large Joomla sites. I’ve seen extremely well optimized sites that just ran slow as molasses on godaddy – if the server isn’t responding quickly, whatever loader you’re wanting to show will still take a while for the loader to even get brought up.

If the server responds quickly and the site is just huge or there is a lot of content being downloaded, then some sort of a javascript component would probably be the best answer to put up a temporary ‘loading’ sort of icon.

My guess is though that the site size is fine and it’s the responsiveness of the server that is causing your issues. I really like Rochen Hosting for Joomla (they host Joomla’s own site!) and they’re not that bad pricewise. Their shared hosting is about 100x’s faster than godaddys and I think you’ll notice immediate, amazing performance gains.

So ultimately – what is the issue? Which version of Joomla are you on? If you’re on anything remotely modern, Joomla typically runs fast. I’ve seen large Joomla sites that will take 2-5 seconds to load on a very fast server. On a over-shared server? That same site would take 15-30 seconds.

I would also recommend downloading/installing Firebug (if you use firefox) it can give you amazing detail on how the page is behaving including load times, sizes of everything being downloaded and gives you a better insight into exactly how to optimize for best performance.

Good lucK!