My website is incredibly slow loading, and I'm wondering what the options for adjusting preloading are. At the moment my landing page is very simple, just one image and a header text, but it can take almost a full minute before it shows up, which is very offputting for a new visitor. I can only assume that's because it's loading all resources for the full site before displaying anything.... right?
Is there a way to have pre-loading per scene or something so at least the user gets into the website rather than absolutely everything loading before it shows? Apologies, I'm not super experienced here.
(I've tried turning off pre-loading for all offending objects, but then new pages are showing up in a really clunky way, so ideally I'd set things so that the landing page and then home page load quickly, then the rest can load in the background.... is this possible?)
There's unfortunately not an easy way to do preloading on a per-scene basis, though this is a popular feature request (at least, to have significantly more control over what gets preloaded and when). There are manual/non-hype methods in which you could do preloading, but it is a bit of work and code to properly maintain this method.
The canonical post to help with general performance issues is:
It sounds like you've already gone through the Resource Library and unchecked preloading on individual resources.
A lot is dependent on the document and your resource sizes. While Hype can try to resize/recompress images in a lot of cases, there's many cases where it either can't resize, or perhaps won't do as good of a job as the performance demands. I'd recommend using Chrome's network tool in its web inspector to see what exactly is taking the most time to load and why - if possible resizing or recompressing any assets if possible.
You're welcome to upload a zip of your .hype document for more specific suggestions to improve performance.
Thanks Jonathan. I'll have a dig through that post now. I'm trying to upload a zip of the hype document here but it's 16MB and the max file upload size here is 3MB. Does that in itself suggest I've done something daft? (i.e is my site stupdily large?).
I'll try to get my head around the chrome tool too and start editing media files down later on. I think I trusted the Hype optimization too much sounds like; maybe some things are still huge.
You can share larger files with services like wetransfer.com or Dropbox. That's not a crazy size! If you have many scenes and images it is definitely smart to delay the loading of most images, but it sounds like there are some key images you'd prefer to load immediately.
One thing you can do is place your images you wish to load for the rest of your document off scene within your first scene -- if they are set to not preload, they will start loading in the background only after:
Your entire Hype document has loaded
Your Hype document is shown on the page and all images which have preload checked have finished downloading
Only at this point will images set to not preload (though present on the currently-viewed scene) will begin to download.
I can see that my new landing page image is too big (though Hype would have optimized it but I can do that myself obviously), and a noobie's glance at Chrome's network tool seems to show the longest loading thing currently is a vimeo video, so maybe I should be hosting that on youtube or something instead.
This current version has most of the objects unchecked for preloading so it is faster, but very clunky to use and my little animations and stuff are kind of tanked by that. So ideally it would all be back to being pre-loaded but would need to load in an acceptable time; I'm worried it was taking so long it just looks like a broken website!
P.S I highly suspect I've just done something stupid because it isn't a particularly fancy website so I think the long loading is an error somewhere rather than me breaking the internet with my dazzling animation genius:).
I reduced the size of that first image (just made it smaller in resolution) and this seems to help a lot. Zoom out in the first scene and you can see some of the other images I setup to preload on the first page: paulmichaelhenrywebsite.hype.zip
(i.e is my site stupdily large?).