Why Are Images Loading Slowly on My Ghost Site?

Last updated: 04 November 2024

If you're experiencing slow image loading times on your Ghost site hosted on Magic Pages, there are several potential causes. Let's look at the most common scenarios and their solutions.

Are you logged in as an admin?

The most common reason for experiencing slower image loading times is checking your site while logged in as an admin, while also being far away from Magic Pages' servers (located in Germany). Here's why this happens:

When you're logged in as an admin on a Magic Pages hosted Ghost site, caching is completely disabled. This is a security feature to prevent sensitive admin data from being cached and potentially exposed to regular visitors.

For example, an admin request for a 260kB image from South America to our servers must travel:

From South America through submarine cables to North America
Across the Atlantic to Europe
Finally to our servers

This journey can be up to 36,000 km long and must happen three times:

Once for establishing the connection (TCP handshake)
Once for securing it (TLS handshake)
Once for the actual image transfer

This can result in loading times of above a second for uncached requests, even for relatively small images.

What your visitors actually experience

Your regular visitors won't face these delays because they benefit from our CDN's regional caching system, if you're on the Pro plan. Once an image has been requested in a particular region, it's cached on local servers. Subsequent visitors from the same region receive the image from these nearby servers instead of Magic Pages' main servers.

Other common causes of slow image loading

1. Image Size

Large, unoptimized images can slow down loading times. Aim for a balance between quality and file size.

2. Network Conditions

Your local internet connection speed, especially in more remote locations and peak usage times (usually in the evening). This can impact your internet service provider's routing efficiency, and therefore the "last mile" of a request, even when it is cached.

3. Browser Cache

Clearing your browser cache can sometimes help. To test this, try using an incognito/private window.

Still experiencing issues?

If you've verified that:

You're testing while logged out
Images are properly optimized
The issue persists across different devices and networks

...it might be time to reach out to help@magicpages.co. Ideally, send as many details as possible about your connection. Where are you accessing your site from? What does the network tab in your browser developer tools (right click --> inspect) look like?