The one complaint I hear from our users, or at least the most frequent one, I get is that the google event calendar app is slow to load. We don’t get a lot of visits to that page on our site, maybe a dozen a week, but it generates 80% of the complaints I get. As the site developer I have pretty fast internet, so I don’t really notice the problem on my end.
I feel there must be some caching option that I’ve overlooked, some way to preload that calendar data, or some other fix?
Consider lazy loading the Google Calendar widget. This means that the widget will only load when it becomes visible in the user’s viewport. This can significantly improve initial page load times. Review the settings of the Google Calendar itself. mcd food for thoughts If you have a large number of events, consider limiting the number of events displayed at once. Remove any unnecessary events or calendars. Configure your web server to set caching headers for static assets like scripts and stylesheets. This will allow browsers to cache these assets and load them more quickly on subsequent visits.
Thanks, the Google Calendar widget only uses lazy loading. Also, it’s not the initial page load time that’s a problem, it’s the Google Calendar widget itself that is slow to load. There are only a small handful of events to display on the calendar, and there is only one calendar, so there is nothing extra to remove. Since WIX is hosting the site, I have no control over the web server settings for caching.
I’m going to try just using an iFrame for the google calendar, and see if people like that better. It will take just as long to load, but since it’s not telling people to please wait while it loads, the people I’ve tried it on think it’s actually faster even though it’s not. They also like the format of the trad google calendar compared to the google calendar event widget.
I got a huge positive response from our users when we switched to just embedding the google calendar in an iFrame. So we’ve decided to stick with that.