We were recently notified by a client that when he visited his department site from China, the site would take a very long time to load. Everything seemed fine on first inspection, so we tested the site using WebPageTest with the Beijing, China (Firefox) location. After waiting in a fairly long queue, one glance at the waterfall made the issue clear.
As a preface, this site is quite old. The site was launched in 2010. It has mobile styles, but was not using RWD (Ethan’s article was published only two months prior). The site is “we were still using gifs” old. We’ve always tried our best to create fast sites, but a common practice of the time came back to bite us.
Before
The inital test showed us that site was taking over 100 seconds to load. Here’s the beginning of the waterfall.
Our problem was happening on line six. We were linking to a Google CDN version of jQuery which was blocking rendering for 90 seconds. A single render blocking request in the head for a domain we don’t control was all it took to create a subpar user experience.
After
To quickly solve the issue, we grabbed a copy of the Google CDN hosted jQuery and moved it local to the site. After running the test again, we were presented with a much improved load time of approximately 14 seconds.
In higher ed, it’s not uncommon for 9+ years-old websites to be lurking on the network. I’m sure we’ll find more sites with this same issue. Big thanks to WebPageTest for making it easy to diagnose the problem.