-Loading Problems and Browser Checks

A couple of weeks ago I noticed that this blog and all of the Answers For The Faith blogs were taking forever (30 seconds) to load and at other times not at all. At first I attributed it to a possible database attack like I had experienced early last year.

After checking all my databases, running ‘tracerts’ for my hosting co. and doing a bunch of different things to get a grip on the reasons for the slow load I finally figured out that the WP theme that all these blogs use was not working very well with the WordPress 2.71 upgrade and with the latest Firefox browser which upgraded about the time when I started noticing the problem.

In the meantime, overnight I had lost nearly 1/2 of the normal traffic on my sites. I checked them all out on Internet Explorer and found that they still loaded ok using that browser, that’s why I still had at least retained half of my normal visitors. Then I checked out how this blog and the others worked on Safari and found that they would not load up on that browser at all.

After downloading the most up to date version of the theme for this blog and spending a week tweeking it–it is still slower than I like but it at least loads up on every browser and my traffic is back to normal. Obviously I’m going to have to find an entirely new WP theme soon and I really don’t look forward to all the work. You folks with Blogger and at WordPress.com can be thankful that all the upgrades are done for you.

So here is a lesson to be learned at my expense:

It is a good idea to check out how your blog or website reacts and loads on different browsers!

I have known this in the past and have noticed that by blogs look somewhat different using different browsers. My daughter alerted me one time a couple of years ago that my site looked somewhat distorted on her Mac–she was using Safari as many Mac folk do. After that I had her checking it out once in awhile. Also another time by accident I discovered that some of my blogs looked different on IE 6 than they looked on IE 7. So it is important to even check out different versions of the same browser at times.

Right now I have the current versions of Firefox, IE 8, Safari, and Chrome installed on my computer just for a quick check. However, it takes up a lot of memory. Here is a great site where you can check out how your blog or website resolves on all of the different browsers and versions currently in use:

<<<Browser Shots>>>             *Top

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