Technical Question: How is the Website Working for You?

Loads slowly a lot even on broadband at work. On home dialup, I will click to it and go get my coffee it is so slow. This is about 70% of the time for me on dial up and 50/50 on broadband. The other times it pops right up no matter what system I am on.

I'm okay with slow loads in general, but Treehugger pages also take over the full processing power of the computer for 30-60 seconds, which stalls every other browser window. I'm not sure if it's trying to load scripts (or scripts with errors?) or bandwidth-heavy media, but it adds a lot of time overhead to reading Treehugger.

the page takes upwards and 45 seconds to load (on fast business class cable) -- the frame of the page comes right up - but the content takes a long time. Then I also hate the fact that the text is not selectable - you try and select a line or two to cut and paste - and it will not let you. I hate that design.

So - those are my three issues! :)

Works fine for me at work but my net connection is crazy fast and pumped to my location via a GigaMAN leased line. I'm sure I'm the exception rather than the rule.

Hey, we finally got a comment section ;)

It takes an awful long time to load. I get the same problems from IE as Firefox.
The status bar tells me it's the ads from Blogads and the Google ads slowing things down. The ads also 'flash' at me very annoyingly as they load.

I also noticed a bigger slowdown around the time the NEW COMMENTS section was added.

The slowdown also makes the page 'jump', if you start scrolling and then the page tries to return to your previous location. I often click on the wrong link because of this.

OK, enough griping. Can ya fix it?

I've been having a lot of really slow load times lately. And as much as I understand the need to make money through advertising, I think that a lot of the problem comes from the intense amount of ads that need to be loaded from external websites. I use Camino primarily, as it's usually faster than Firefox, but recently it hasn't made much difference.

Another problem I've had, is the fact that whole posts don't show up in stand alone RSS aggregators. Again, I understand the importance of advertising dollars, but with such slow load times using an aggregator is much more my style. Perhaps if you advertise companies like newsgator as working aggregators, you should at least make the whole text of the post available to the aggregator. (I personally use NetNewsWire)

Aside from these issues, I really love the site, and think that you guys are doing a great job of getting really good, current, pertinent information out to a huge audience. So props, but please fix up the speed and consider allowing whole text RSS aggreation, that would be excellent.

Never had any problem! They load quickly for me.

Half of the time the page won't load at all for me except for the frames...it's very frustrating to have to wait so long for my Hugger fix! :)

My complaint is when you click on a highlighted link to an 'outside' website for more information, the new link does not open in a separate window. So when your finished reading the several pages you have just surfed into, you can't just close that window and be right back in the same spot on the treehugger site where you started at. It would also be nice if the site loaded faster via my ADSL line as well.

I don't really visit the page very often, just read the news feed. That way I have no problems with ads and the like. Just the good TreeHugger content.

Thanks

Using win2k and IE6 behind a large corporate firewall, about 75% of the time I get the basic page info, bannder and maybe the text ads (left side), then stop for as long as five minutes to wait for the rest of the page to load. washingtonpost.com does the same thing. Other 25% of the time it comes right up. No problems with firefox on any platform.

I use IE 6.0 on a T1 line at work, and just in the last couple of weeks, it can take upwards of SEVERAL MINUTES to load the entire page; have NO idea what happened to make it so slow; always loaded fine before. Echo Patrick’s comments about not being able to select text, although from my home computer it works OK from Firefox.
Usually when I post comments, I get an error, and when I refresh or go back, it will post several times.
Sometimes there are comments in the New Comments section to articles that I don’t see on the main page.
Content-wise, y’all are spot on. Keep it up!!

I browse it with Firefox on DSL and Corporate 1.5 pipe. All machines are running XP SP2. It loads within 2 to 3 seconds and pages pop with the same speed. I have never had problems. GRRRREAT WEBSITE!

Very slow loading using various internet connections - same computer (Win XP) and Firefox:

via cable - a little faster, but still about 30 seconds to load

via DSL - slowest, about 45 seconds to load

via T-1 - depends on the page that is loading. Sometimes as quickly as 20 seconds (!!!) and sometimes as slow as 1 minute. OUCH!

There are some REALLY slow loading advertisements - you might want to look into those.

The TH site always loads fine for me. I use Firefox 1.5.0.4 over a 100Mbps corporate LAN and my home 1.5 Mbps DSL connection with out any apparent delays.

In the past week the middles story section of the page has been taking up to a minute to load.

The ads are there instantly.

Treehugger is very slow loading for me in Opera 9 Beta 2. I get the outside frame with the ads, etc quickly, but the actual content is very slow loading on a .75 DSL line.

Sorry, I wish I had some helpful constructive comments, but ya see, it appears (to my system) as 'nano-near' perfect. My only comment is that I can't wait for your quality efforts to spell over into Hugg.com!

Works very well for me, but I have firefox with script-blocker, so no problems with ads as described above!

Loads fast (5 seconds?) both at work and at home. I too get the flashing ads as they load, especially the lifehacker thing at the bottom.

I think reducing the # of posts on the main page would speed up loading for a lot of people.

Using firefox btw. I wonder if the slowness people see is related to geographical location, browser, etc.

I like to browse the web on the train with my cellphone (T-mobile Sidekick II). The site is usable, but there is a whole lot of scrolling involved to get past the ads to the actual content. This probably happens on any small-screen device that tries to reformat the page or browsers that don't support CSS. Try disabling CSS in your browser and you can see the scrolling problem. Love the site otherwise!

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Hi Jenny. Try the mobile edition of TreeHugger:

http://www.treehugger.com/mobile/

the main page always loads fine for me (in firefox with dial-up) although the adds down the sides can sometimes flash annoyingly during load up time.

I agree with Patrick about being unable to highlight just one line, and I also don't like how the links don't come up in a different window. There have been a couple of times when an entire post would not come up, but overall this website is great.

Hi there,
first of all, congratulations on your excellent site, I consult it every day now.
Since a couple of weeks I keep getting a very slow download at upstart and on every page I consult. The progress bar gets stuck at the end. I'm a Mac user and I browse with Safari.
I assume it has to do with the increase in traffic to your site, I patiently wait until the traffic resumes as I do every day in my electric car, standing still in the jams, no motor idling, relax. Hope you can fix it though.
Cheers,
Roby

This is by far the slowest site I ever go to. I usually just read the feeds but sometimes you refer to a picture, or it's a particularly long article and I visit the site. In those cases I will click the link, and I usually end up going back to finish my other feeds and hope it is done loading by the time I'm done. I have the same problem both at home (DSL, Opera) and at work (big fat pipe, but very, very shared, Safari). I have to reload the page about 5-10% of the time, unless there's a poll, and then it's more like 40-50%.

Same problems as Carl reported. I'm using the latest Firefox on a quick cable modem connection. I don't experience these problems on any other sites I visit. It's getting to the point we're I visit the site less because of these issues.

This is the slowest website I go to every day. Way too many moving things on the sides. I use Firefox and If I didn't like the writing so much I would never come here just because of the over-powering ads. You guys do a good job and I I'll stay but it would make it much more pleasurable if you had text-only ads or just dropped a few. Please? Thanks ;)

in the last week or two, i also started having problems with everything but the article itself loading. it would look like the page load was finished and after awhile i found that the article would finally load if i left it alone for a bit. before that, it loaded quickly. seems to be a bit better today.

i use IE on a dsl connection.

I use Firefox. It has this handy feature of being able to enlarge text on websites. For Treehugger and Treehugger alone, trying to enlarge the text causes the center column (everything but the ads) to disappear. I have no idea why this happens, but it's incredibly annoying for those of us who don't see that well.

I second being annoyed that you can't get whole posts on RSS feeds. I like to listen to RSS feeds with a voice simulator when eye strain gets too bad and the partial posts just aggravate me.

I too have been waiting for up to a minute for the pages to load. This has only been happening for the last few weeks. I need my fix quick!

On my DSL connection, it takes between 1-5 minutes. The outer frame will load, then it hangs when loading from pagead2.googlesyndication.com and then 3.adbrite.com.

I'm not having the loading problems others have mentioned, except that the site IS slow. Part of the problem are some of the ads, which are actually huge images. For instance, the same 160x600 pixel ad is repeated three times in the column at the right, along with a second 160x600 ad which is repeated twice. That's 26 KB, five times. The real kicker is that most of that real estate is blank black-space, and a little bit of text.

If being a treehugger is about judicious use of resources, the ads on teh right of the page aren't setting a very good example.

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editor note: Actually, repeated tall ads on the left are just loaded once each, and after that they are cached by your browser, so the image is not downloaded again on subsequent visits. What takes time is contacting the server, and we're working on that.

I find it annoying that every link is tied to treehugger - just give us a direct link and stop making me go through your site!

I have a 2meg broadband line at home using Firefox. I have no problems downloading the site.

At work I use IE and the connection speed is probably T1, however, as this is via a proxy - which gets pretty slow at lunch times - the page can end up being very slow to load because of the large amount of ads in the sidebars.

I still want a "Next Post" button at the end of the comments too!

Sucks big time - I have to use the feed. I just borrowed a lameo computer (one that someone bothers to update IE on) to reply because on fire fox I can't and all of the pages are very hard to display; the middle banner ad on this column jumps up and down all the screen all the time.

Funny...I've been contemplating how to contact you guys about this very issue, over the past couple of days.

I use Firefox, and occasionally Safari. Generally, whether I'm on cable or dialup, it's slow loading. On dialup, I can click the page, go into the kitchen and make myself a pot of coffee in the time it takes to load. On cable, it seems to take an inordinate amount of time, given the bandwidth.
I've noticed that the biggest hangups with speed are centered around 3.adbrite.com, time spent looking for, contacting, and transferring data from.

Like someone else said, this is the slowest website I go to everyday. I usually have to save it for last, and end up not being able to focus on it because of the downtime for loading; I end up having to tackle other things, and get back to it when I can.

Works fairly well for me, I'm on cable. On dial-up, it's pretty bad though, some code optimization or compression may help. The only thing that really bugs me isn't site related, it's other users, who insult you for asking a question.

The site content is great. A little hard to read sometimes though. Usability wise.

I posted earlier about how slow the website loads from work (IE 6.0). At home here using Firefox, so problems at all, quick and spiffy.
In Firefox, I CAN select text.
Agree with Caldini about getting "Next Post" at bottom of comments. Especially as more ad more folks comment!
Thanks again TH.

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editor: Yes, the "selecting text" bug seems to happen only in IE. It is not intentional on our part and will eventually be fixed along with a lot of other things. Thanks for the feedback.

I'm using Firefox on a broadband connection and it loads pretty fast. My main problem is when I follow a link then click my back button. If I'm half way down the page it takes ages for it to load and to get me there. I love the site but it is one of the slowest I regularily use. Sadly I suspect it's the adds that suck up the bandwidth (cause they are animated etc).

The new google ads are slowing your site down. The page stops loading for at least a minute when trying to get your pageadd.googlesomething.whatever, advertisement. This happens on your hugg.com site too. Is google's ad on the left, worth more to you than the whole right side of individual advertisements?

Don't be greedy! The faster the page loads, the more times a day I will check it.

Bored and wandering off now...

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editor: That's strange. Google ads here and on most of the sites I visit are quite fast, and there are no google ads on Hugg.com.

But we are working to increase the speed of everything, both by speeding up the server and by cleaning up and improving the code of the website. Thank you for your patience.

Treehugger technically works fine for me.

What I would like to see in the comments section allow for more real time debates rather than having someone check through each message before it is posted. Would make things a lot more interesting in my opinion. I have a lot of stong opinion in the area of energy conservation I would like to voice but simply dont bother here due to the present system.

Just an idea.

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editor note: We're working on getting a more real-time commenting system. The reason for the moderation is that we have hundreds and hundreds of spam comments each day..

Much faster today!! Thanks!!

The site is loading much faster now, that was some fast work. Nice to see a site with both user comments, and quick responses to the issues brought up.
Somebody buy the admin a beer!

I never have any problems, it loads 100% 99% of the time. It loads straight through Websense at work (thank goodness) which ussually causes IE to go freaky on graphic-intensive sites like this.

I'm not sure what the previous post is talking about , but treehugger loads pretty fast in my web browser whether it's on my dial up or using my T1 service connection . I would say pretty fast.

I was trying to figure out how you ask a question to someone on this website? My question is: I am looking to see what career I could go into in the "Going Green" Industry, and where I could take courses online to eventually make a career out of this? Any suggestions, please?

Thanks,

Caroline