Menu Shows Up Before Website Loads

When I first load my website, the menu loads and shows up before the website actually populates. It wasn’t a big deal until I saw how Google reads my website and it just so happens it reads it the same. Is there anyway to hide this?

This is more common with complex menus with mega menus where the items in the mega menu are changing fairly often and less likely to be cached (e.g., post loops, vs simply product info pages on a corporate site)… since a complex mega menu is in many ways an entire webpage on its own, it can delay the rest of the page loading as it’s a whole new set of page queries.

For fastest speed, don’t use a mega menu.

You might NOT be using one, but that has been my own experience anyway.

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.

Hey Chris,

That’s great insight! Unfortunately I’m not using a mega menu in this case, but the menu is pretty extensive with a lot of sub-menus. This may be the case, maybe not.

I think the tagdiv speed booster plugin helps with this in theory by putting all the css and js at bottom of page, but that can also cause some things to load in odd order since sometimes a menu might use jquery …. one of those things you kind of have to experiment with.

Probably need to put link to an example post page so the TagDiv admin folks can take a peek just to see whassup.

First thing they always look for is console errors (F12 in Chrome or IE11), and often that can reveal the culprit, if any.

Last week any of my pages with a YouTube video loading would slow down part of the page, when Google was having major hiccups. This would then slow down AddThis … since I had the video and Addthis loading in order last on page … the whole page would render except blank video box and blank addthis box … (not using this theme, but a home-brew thing). That worked as expected …. except that I wanted to share stuff via addthis and it was taking 60 second for video to load. Annoying.

Anyway… I digress 😉