Some of the pages of my site are extremely sluggish in IE8. The pages with lots of content load slowish in all browsers but slower in IE8. I assume they load slow to begin with because there is a lot of procedural PHP and database queries.
But my main concern is how lumberingly slow these pages are after they load in ie8. There are some jQuery slidedown effects and I'm wondering if ie8 just sucks at rendering them.
Here is a page with very little content: http://searchfornutrition.com/?pageid=topic&topicid=acai
The slidedown from the buttons work fine and the jQuery is fast/normal.
Now here is a page with lots of content: http://searchfornutrition.com/?pageid=topic&topicid=vitamin_d
The slidedown from the buttons is sluggish.
I've checked another computer with IE8 and it's the same. I did all the unique programming for this site and I'm no expert. Doing this site was how I learned everything I know about web development so if it's not IE8 then it's probably me.
thanks for any help you can give.
Edit:
I just tried out the network tab on Chrome dev tools and it was very helpful as far as why my pages load so slowly in the first place. Some of the unnecessary .css links take seconds to load but mostly it's the document itself. Sometimes it can take up to 30 seconds alone, which means my code isn't efficient. I knew my code wasn't efficient since I did most of the site before learning about functions and OOP, so it's procedural and very redundant. I will have to start updating it.
As for the IE issues, I'm still not exactly sure. I'll try some of your suggestions and then maybe make a virus that installs FF or chrome in place of IE whenever IE requests a page :P
Edit 2:
If anyone is wondering how this turned out - I've managed to decrease the loading time significantly by loading only what is initially visible and having ajax (via jQuery) load the data associated with each button slidedown on the event that each button is pressed. It's much faster now, and I still haven't omitted the several unneeded CSS files. It's still sluggish after load in IE8 but I'll tackle that another time and take your suggestions on that into consideration. Thanks for all your help!