Speeding Up Page Loads

Page load times are complicated....depends on network speed (which is much slower at school vs. at home due to network congestion) and how much “stuff” you have on your site....of course, the more you build up your course, the longer it will take to load....this is true of any platform you use whether it be Moodle, Canvas, Google Classroom, etc.

I’ve run benchmark reports for us using nerdy, technical tools and most pages load in less than 0.2 seconds (which is awesome), but main course pages can take anywhere from 2-3 seconds (acceptable) to 4-14 seconds (unacceptable)....

Basically, the more “stuff” you have on your course, the longer it will take for the page to populate since it all has to load for students to access (and also to be able to use the super handy and unique “Search” tool to quickly find anything within your course!).

There are a few things you can do to speed up your courses:

Split your course into semesters / quarters (best practice): makes it easier for you and students since you can organize your course into smaller “chunks” and you will effective double or quadruple your page load times.

This is pretty easy to do and easy to get all of your students into the new course with 1 click (using what’s called metasync)—let me know and we can knock it out together in about 5 minutes.

2. Embedded items (Google Docs / Google slides / videos—this one is the killer!): if you embed items, this can really slow down your page load times since Chrome has to load up your embedded Google Docs / Slides.

Videos directly stored in your course really slow down page load times, which really bloat your course backup files and slow down your page load times!

Solution: don’t upload videos directly into your course—rather upload them to YouTube / Google Drive, etc. and then embed them (so that they get served up from another server and don’t impact your page load time directly).

For Google Docs / Slides: embed your calendar as a “Page” vs. as a “Label” or in a Section heading. This way, the Google Doc / Slide only loads when you click on the “Read More” button in a nice little expanding pop-up that also collapses nicely--this is called "lazy loading" (advanced nerdy trick!).