Background image slows page load time

Support
#1

Hi,

The page I care most about in my website is


This page loads about 1.5 seconds faster without the background image than with it. My background image is only 78 Kb and shouldn’t slow down the website significantly. Is there a way to speed up the background image loading? I have seen posts unrelated to X-theme but I don’t understand them well. I am using the lazy load by WP-Rocket but that doesn’t help much. I appreciate any help as this shouldn’t be happening.
#2

Hi @masouds,

Thank you for reaching out to us. I checked your site and the first thing I noticed that you updated Cornerstone to the latest version but didn’t update X, this could cause compatibility issues and affect your site’s performance. Always make sure to update both X and Cornerstone.

After doing the updates, always remember to clear all caches (if you are using WP Rocket, WP SuperCache or W3 Total Cache) when updating so that the code from the latest release is always in use. This will help you to avoid any potential errors.

For improving the site load time I’d recommend you to compress your images if it’s taking a time to load, please follow https://theme.co/docs/how-to-improve-site-performance#image-compression

Let us know how this goes!

#3

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately, this is an ongoing problem, I usually keep X and plugins updated. I also compress all images using Tyni Png before I upload them. Again, my site without a background image which is only 76 KB runs about 1.5 seconds faster without the background image than with it. I am a Realtoe=r and not a techy, but it seems to me that something is blocking the background image from rendering. I can’t even find a link for the background image in the source code of my pages. Do not know how it is worked in your program. What I am looking for is to how to remove whatever is blocking the background image from rendering. It has nothing to do with a plugin being updated or whether or not images are compressed or not, it is a programming problem. How can it make the background image load right away. Lazy loading doesn’t help either. Thank you

#4

Hey There,

I’ve taken an extensive look at this and the reason for the wait time is not a script but the gzip compression of your web server. Simple said what is happening is that your web server is compressing the images sending them to the client and then the client is extracting those. This is usually helpful as when you have a resource rich website first zipping everything and then sending it to the client adds some wait time in the beginning but due to the smaller size this equals itself out on the client receiving side. If you really want to get rid of the wait time you could reach out to your hosting provider and ask to disable gzip compression. I hope this shed some light into this and if you have any additional questions feel free to ask at any time.

#5

Hi,

Thanks for the reply, I will try it and see what happens

#6

Great! Kindly let us know how it goes.

#7

This topic was automatically closed 10 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.