[Eric Bobrow]

I have a member directory page that takes upwards of 30 seconds to load. There are currently 134 members, and eventually the list may become several times this size, so I am concerned.

http://www.domesticviolenceintervention.net/member-directory/

This page has the member listings shown using Slim Plus in two different groupings: one of them is set up by country, with shortcodes for each one; the other group displays the entire member list.

1) Is there any way to speed this up?

2) Is there a way to allow the page to load normal static content, then load the directory listings in the background, showing them when they are ready? This would allow us to include a message on the page that people should be patient; without this option, when people click the link to open the page, it appears the site is frozen (the page does not open) until the directory contents are finished loading; I imagine many people may give up, since they don’t know that it will eventually appear.

This would be similar to the “lazy load” option found in some slide show plugins, or perhaps could be achieved with Ajax calling of content from another page. I’m not expert enough at coding to do my own Ajax scripting, so I’m hoping there is an easier solution you would recommend.

One thing I have not done to this point is to separate the two viewing options (display groups) on two different pages. While that would help in the short term, it still doesn’t answer the question of optimizing performance as the number of members grows.

Eric

[Steven Zahm]

@ Eric

This really is not a Connections bug or issue… the same would happen if you attempted to load that many WordPress posts on a single page. Displaying that many on the page is resource intensive and on inexpensive hosts a page with that many posts fail to load.

You need to use a template which support pagination… any included in your purchase of the Pro Pack will.

It looks like you are using either the Slim or Slim Plus template. If you are using Slim, switch to Slim Plus as it will automatically paginate, 20 per page. If you are using Slim Plus re-enable the pagination by removing the enable_pagination=false option from the shortcode.

If you really, really, do not pagination for some reason, then your only other option would be to use a page caching plugin like WP Rocket. That way the page is cached and served as static HTML to most visitors. Someone will get a long page load because the cache does expire and will have to be recreated. YOu would have some control over that though by setting a very long cache time … which would be fine if your site is mostly static.

Hope that helps!

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