I've been wanting to use the Atahualpa theme, but I notice that all the examples I've looked load v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y. It this a problem inherent with Atahualpa?

Would you go to http://www.larchmontgazette.com/ and scroll to the bottom and tell me the speed you see?

I don't know what you mean by "the speed you see". I only see a blue bar, no numbers. Is that what you mean? FYI it didn't load as slowly as some, but not as quickly as both my current website and blog.

In the footer, I have the elapsed load-time showing.

I'm getting under 2 seconds, but I'm on a fast FIOS connection at home. The site has a ton of widgets and plugins, calling a lot of different information in the sidebars, so it's not going to be really fast-loading. But moving from prohosting.com to hostgator.com did speed us up a lot.

Sorry, yes I saw you're under 2 seconds, still that's not very zippy, is it?

You mean it depends on your host? I've been thinking of using Taproot -- they're green and that's important to me. Should I ask them about the speed?

Does anyone have a really fast-loading blog that I could look at?

Speed can depend on many things, including what kind of server you're on.

Try http://anglicanwomensempowerment.org, another Atahualpa site I did. It has a very simple front, static page, so it's very fast to load.

The previous site I showed you is just very complicated, and I'm told it could be faster only if it were on a dedicated server. The Featured Content Gallery plugin is also a hog, but we like the effect.

You mean the web owner's server or the visitor's server?

My site is likely to be sort of complicated, with lots of photos, for one thing.

Obviously, many things contribute to speed of loading, including the hosting site and the viewer's connection speed, the browser being used, time of day, how busy the server is at that moment, etc.

Sites like my news site with a lot of "calls" for data to be shown, like all of those sidebar lists of posts, are going to take longer to render in the viewer's browser than a site with a smaller number of calls.

There are ways to speed things up, like various caching plugins.

My original question was whether the Atahualpa template is slow to load -- all other things being equal was implied.

I've seen enough sites using it now to conclude that it is slower than I would like, slower than I'm accustomed to.

I'm just glad I found that out at this stage.

Thanks for all your help.

Gina

slow is a very hard thing to define, I use to think that 30 seconds to fill a page with 40 lines of 80 characters was really fast because it saved having to drive an hour each way to the computer. As Paulae said, there are so many factors and trade offs. IF I hard code a site, and have each bit of html optimized for the fastest preformance, it will run blazingly fast (all other things given) but it would probably take me weeks to develop it and each time I needed to add something it could take a bit of time.

On the other hand, I can have a Wordpress site up and running in about 1 hour, adding things minutes at most.

How do you factor that into how fast a site is?

I think you all have mentioned many of the factors in speeding up a wordpress site or what might cause it to take a while to load. My experience is that using wordpress caching, options like apache's mod_deflate for image or content heavy sites, making sure mysql is optimized on the server can all help. The content of course can be a huge factor. Are your sidebar widgets pulling data from other sites that is slowing down your site load, do you have video or audio content loading etc.. Even which database engine you chose depending on the site activity level can get you different results. A great tool to see what is loading slowly is firebug on firefox. Under the "Net" option you can select all and watch all the page load items. I have solved a few slow loading sites with that. With that you might be able to get a better idea of whether it is the theme or the content that is loading slowly. The server is of course another factor. Is the server overloaded (oversold) with sites like many of the huge mega hosts go for (unlimited everything offers etc), are there low php memory limits set, is mysql tuned at all. These things of course will also effect your site load. That's my two cents on it all anyway. Glad to hear you are thinking about going green too!

Cheers,
Chad
www dot taproothosting dot com