Page loading delays

We've chatted elsewhere about apparent delays experienced by some of us with page loading times. I have attempted to explain the contributing factors that are beyond our control, being a free site and all, namely server loads and the loading of the personalized targeted Google Ads, etc.

Following up on that, I have been paying a bit more attention lately to what exactly is holding things up by watching the loading status box in the the bottom left of my Firefox browser (other browsers have similar displays).

Indeed, a lot of the wait is caused by the forum's hosting server (https://illiweb.com/) as well as their associated images server (forum icon images are hosted by their subsidiary server at www.imgserv.com). The Google Sense Ads at the top of the page are loaded separately via yet another server at http://www.criteo.com.

Depending on time of day you check in and the server loads at that time, the response can be slowed a little. And when you are dependent on more than one server the effect is of course accumulative.

To that end I have also been watching the Social Bookmarking activity in the widget column. It does not appear to be generating a lot of interest and indeed it too is connecting to each of the various sites that it feeds such as Twitter, Facebook, and the usual suspects. Based on all this, I made an "executive decision" to remove it in an effort to lighten the page loading requirements. If you'd prefer to maintain it let me know and I can reinstate it, but let's watch things for a little while and see if anything improves.

Be interesting to see if it speeds up the loading any... thanks for doing all this stuff, man!!

Seems to be quicker at this end now.

I have also made a couple of additional changes to the header area which may also have helped:

• scrolling announcement/link to westoneguitars.net removed
  
• new link to westoneguitars.net added to navigation bar
  
• search box moved up into the header area
  
• height of the navigation bar area reduced
  

I haven't heard any further complaints so I'm assuming all is well with everyone??
I'll leave this thread open for another day or so to allow for any further feedback, then I'll consider it "solved".