Embedded calendar not displaying immediately

A

Alvin63

Well-known member
Just uploaded our annual advent calendar, which @Mr Lucky kindly talked me through the process of how to embed it 2 or 3 years ago. I've done the same again, but for some reason it doesn't load immediately when opening the thread and a flashing dark red line loads first. Any tips on how to get it to show straight away without that happening? It does it both on mobile and desktop.

I still had the same custom bb code set up from last year and just changed the embed link/html replacement for this year's. So can't see anything I've done differently.

www.thehamsterforum.com

Hamster Advent Calendar 2025

www.thehamsterforum.com www.thehamsterforum.com
 
Edit - I'm guessing it might be because I now have image optimisation which I didn't have before. That converts all images to webp. This is one large image with 24 doors and each door has a png image behind. I'll try converting those png images to webp and see if that makes a difference.
 
Changed the 24 images to webp and it didn't make any difference - but it does take a while for changes to filter through via the embed.
 
I took a quick look and it looks like that the CDN the calendar is loading from can be slow loading for the first view. On refreshes, it's a bit faster since some assets are cached in the browser. There's not much you can do when relying on a 3rd party to load the content. I'm seeing the content loaded as noted below: (2.72seconds from the CDN noted in the domain column)

1764557272197.webp
 
Thank you. I don't quite understand that :-) They do seem to have improved/made changes to some of the software this year, so maybe it's just a bit "heavier". Didn't have this the last three years. One way round it is to have the post/text before the calendar as by the time people have scrolled down from the text, the calendar has already loaded. But I wanted it at the top of the post really.
 
Alvin63 said:
Thank you. I don't quite understand that :-) They do seem to have improved/made changes to some of the software this year, so maybe it's just a bit "heavier". Didn't have this the last three years. One way round it is to have the post/text before the calendar as by the time people have scrolled down from the text, the calendar has already loaded. But I wanted it at the top of the post really.
Click to expand...
Essentially, that calendar and its data is being loaded from a Content Delivery Network, which isn't served directly from your website. When a user loads that page, it calls the data from your site directly PLUS the added content from the CDN that is providing the calendar data to be shown to the client visiting your site. The speed of the CDN can be affected by the quality of the CDN, location of the local server that's actually serving the data. In the sample I showed above, it looks like I was being routed to Germany to get that data.
 
Thank you for explaining that. Yes the software company is from Germany. So they need to sort that as the old software didn't have this issue before they improved it! Maybe I'll just live with it! It's not that bad. Just slightly annoying. I've emailed them - maybe they can do something at their end?
 
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