I just hosted a porfolio site and using my custom domain : nhtoby.com . However, I’m experiencing a long “content download” time for couple of my .png files, namely it took ~20seconds to download a 4MB .png . I have other site which also experiencing the same slow content download speed with a similar file size.
Is this the normal content download speed? I’m using Netlify’s free planning.
The x-nf-request-id:
c7cbc317-62e5-4cdb-846e-37ddc43babef-53534368
@toby311 Welcome to the Netlify community. I’m not seeing this when I visit your site from Southern California – the whole thing loads in under 3 seconds. Could you be seeing this because of a local issues?
You also have some sort of built-in delay between the appearance of your splash screen and the appearance of your #home section.
You also have a bad link to a jsdelivr asset.
At any rate, you should expect some slowness with two 4MB files, even over relatively fast connections. You might want to re-evaluate whether you really need images 2,540 pixels wide.
Probably because I’m located in Europe, so downloading contents from near America server might take quite a time, right? How do I know which server my website is hosted at?
I use onload for the splash screen you mentioned because I expect the page load in just 3 second and serve to viewer.
If my website serve by a nearer Netlify server, would it improve the download speed? Would it possible to relocate with my current free plan?
Netlify servers content via a CDN, not from its servers, but I guess it depends on where in Europe you are located.
I’m locate ~ 1000km to Frankfurt CDN. Could it possible affect the download time that much?
Update: Probably the CDN that hosted my website ran into some issue yesterday since it’s work much better today, the download content peak at only 7s.
Greetings @toby311 
Glad your site is working better today! As a general rule of thumb, Netlify doesn’t always cache larger single files on the CDN for network performance reasons — these files instead are loaded from Netlify’s origin servers when requested, and will take longer to download. I don’t believe Netlify publicly discloses its origin server locations (although it does give us general locations for CDN nodes) but in general it’s fair to assume that origin-server pulls just will take… longer.
From the looks of it, your images do fall below the 5MB threshold, but I wouldn’t surprised if they’re still loaded from Origin. Netlify’s CDN is intended to be used for smaller files, generally.
That all said, I would definitely encourage you to pursue other forms of compression or file resolution. My personal take would be that 2560x1440 is larger than you’ll need for web users and/or that PNG advanced compression algorithms can help you get smaller file sizes. Jumping down to 1920x1080 and using advanced compression will probably get you closer to the ballpark of 1MB files… which is still large, but perhaps more cacheable. Just my 2c.
Cheers!
–
Jon
