How to customize loading screen?

KevinWorkman

I have a little photos site at photos.kevinworkman.com.

When I first visit the page, I see this:

https://i.imgur.com/QQoRguS.png

None of the content has loaded yet, except for the text. It stays like that for a few seconds (longer on mobile), until finally the rest of the content loads:

https://i.imgur.com/6vgyGEw.png

This delay is a little awkward, so I'm wondering if it's possible to either show custom "Loading..." text while the content loads, or to not show anything at all until everything is loaded.

I know it's not the end of the world, but I'd love to get rid of that awkward "half loaded" state if at all possible. I tried clicking around the settings and searching in this forum, but I haven't found any way to customize it. Any suggestions?

JosieP

Hi Kevin, We are seeing the delay with the loading of that page and we're checking into that with our QA team now to see if we can help get a resolution to that issue. There isn't a 'loading page' option to add in the meantime but since the text is what is loading first and hanging for a bit, it may help to remove that text content block for now to prevent confusion, while we look into the loading issue. We're going to check in with our team here though and once we have some more information from them, we'll email you back directly to help get that sorted out. Thanks!

KevinWorkman

Thank you for the reply, I really appreciate it. I had been assuming that all pages took this long to load, so when you pointed out that it wasn't expected, I did some more digging.

I played around a bit, and I think a lot of the loading time was caused by a map that I had on my homepage. I got rid of that, and the loading time improved quite a bit. (And the map can only show 1000 pictures anyway, when I was hoping it would show all of them, so it's no great loss.)

I also played around with removing a couple of galleries, which further seemed to improve the loading time. But the map was definitely the biggest contributor.

There is still a little bit of a loading delay (around 1 second), but it's much less noticeable. I'll probably even put the galleries back, because I think they look cool enough to be worth the slightly longer load time.

Thanks again for the reply, it was super helpful. I've been a SmugMug member for a long time, but I'm mostly inactive, and this reminded me of why I keep coming back after all these years.