Is there anything I can do to help my forum load faster? Such as hosting all images on our server; Is there anything else I can do to speed it up?
Remove the logo. - it takes more time to load usually. Remove stuff like online users. It uses a lot of resources. Reduce the number of subforums. Do not allow users to have images in siggy. Get a VPS or dedicated hosting.- You will not face much problem,. I hope this works for you.
If you have hidden codes like Quantcast analytics code, Goingup.com code....etc remove them because if they stuck for some reason the forum will not load properly.
Are you asking about the baseball forum in your signature? If not, lets just use it as an example.. The very first thing you can do is reduce the size of the images. The header image alone is 231.81 KB (237376 bytes). And entire home page should not be any more then 100kb. Some people say no more then 75kb - but either way, small is better. So right now, your header image is 2.3 times larger then the recommended size of an entire home page. As an example - the header image on my main forum is 18.3kb. Yours is 231kb. The header format is .gif. To save size, convert that to jpg and reduce the resolution a little bit. You should be able to take that 231kb and shrink it down to 20kb - 30kb. Besides the header image, the forum makes use of a lot of unneeded icons in the forum sections. I am not going to add all of the images up, but I am going to guess that your home page weighs in at around 300kb. That is 3 times the largest recommended size for a home page.
I agree with glitto here, remove unwanted codes because if they do not load properly and take time your forum will also suffer. And yes if you have large size images the forum will also load slow.
1 more thing. Put all unneeded links, like link exchanges, at the bottom of the page so that at least the main portion of the site loads and your visitors do not have to wait..
A smaller banner may help and using less icons on the index page, all images have to load first so the more images means longer time to load
No offense but did you even view the forum? There aren't any uneeded or link exchanges at the top portion of the site....
I did not see the forum. It is just a general suggestion. You header image is terrible large. Just follow what ~kev~ says.
In my opinion your site is not really slow, it loads perfectly well.. probably you can try decreasing header/logo size.. smaller..
Yes, site loading time is fine for me too. If it creates a problem for you, then refer to above posts. I do not have much knowledge about forums.
If you want to know what is slowing down your sites response time, let the web page analyzer be your guide.
Your logo is labelled a GIF but it's really a PNG. I checked it and you can compress it as a gif or even jpg to under 60k. It's currently 230k. That's a lot of space to save on each load. Check all your graphics. I have a feeling they can all be optimized.
What software you use? If its phpBB ditch it.. use fluxBB instead its built for speeds.. Also my forum loads a few sec slower with analytics and such so Id stay away from those and use AWstats instead.
Forums Can Be made Fater By Many ways.. some are 1.. By Installing Xcache,memcached..etc.. 2... By reducing the images ...( recent methods involve using CSS SPRITES) 3.....By remove unnecessary modifications ..