Date: 01/07/06 (WebDesign)    Keywords: cms, php, java, web

I work for a non-profit website which gets a ton of traffic, and is bascially all ad supported. At the present moment, most of the ads are hosted in column #3 of our three column layout. Most of these ads are 125x125px button ads, some are animated gif, some a flash, and some require some javascripting. Basically though this column is about 9000px long (OYE!) and our page load time can take up to 5-8 seconds. On cable.

I removed all the ads (but one) and the page loads in .9 seconds. So the load problem is defintely coming from the ads.

Now, I'm not able to reduce the quality of the ads, as people have paid for these spots, and that's pretty much how it has to be.

Currently the ads are stored in a php include file. Someone suggested using an iframe (which I tried, but load time didn't differ) but wouldn't that be the same as using an include? Just a different method (and a lot more code?)? I thought perhaps it may make a difference if I took the entire column, and broke it up into three more includes (so on the main index we have include col3, than inside the col3 file we have 3 more includes for the top, middle and bototm), but that didn't really make any differnce either.

So what can be done in the meantime, (as we discuss and prototype a "realignment") to reduce pageload time? This may help - some of the ads repeat. Actually they all repeat at least once or twice.

So any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

BTW, thanks for the suggestions yesterday to my Multiple Author CMS question. I've ultimately decided to go with Wordpress for the ease of use, ease of customization, easy interface and no rebuilds. Plus, we have over 5 writers, and we're not in a position to spend the 99bucks on MT at the moment as we are preparing for our next paper publication this spring.

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/webdesign/1038430.html