Series Carousel Creating Hundreds of HTTP Requests / Image Loads

[EnterTalk]

Hi,
I spent a lot of time benchmarking our site – https://entertalkmedia.com/ ,
and trying to figure out why the page size was so large (13MB with 230 http resquests).

I eventually figured out that the series carousel on the homepage loads ALL the thumbnails from all the episodes in the series and creates a ton of http requests associated with these episodes. Even though the thumbnails aren’t visible until you click the expanded view and navigate to the “Episodes” tab, all these elements are included in the page load.

Is there any way to implement some kind of a lazy loading, where these elements aren’t called on unless a particular Series is actually expanded and viewed?

This carousel was one of the central features of the theme that appealed to us, and was a major factor in choosing Vlogger. But I didn’t realize that is how it functions, loading ALL these elements by default. This has quite a detrimental impact on page size and load times as we currently have 10 Series, some with up to 40 episodes.
Is there any kind of workaround you can suggest?

Thanks,
Paul

[themes2go]

Hello EnterTalk and thanks for reaching us.
The series carousel plugin is not meant to be used with such a large amount of items because, as you figured out, the interactive cards contains thumbnails of each contained video.

This shortcode works fine with 8-10 series, but it always depends on how many videos a single serie contains.

To increase the performance you should keep the number of cards within those numbers.

We leave an arbitrary amount of cards in the carousel because the performance limitations are dependent on the number of videos in each series, so if series have fewer videos you can use more cards in the carousel. But is not meant to contain all of the series, only a limited amount that you want to highlight.

If there is anything else I can do for you just reply below.
Best,

Andrea

[EnterTalk]

Thanks Andrea. I understand. Is there a way that you recommend of linking the series carousel to the actual Post Category containing ALL the episodes in the series?
For example, our series “Hudson Music” had 21 cards in the series. I pared it down to 7 but how is the user supposed to know there are more episodes and where to find them?
I suppose I can add something like an “All Episodes” hyperlink to the entire post category in the “Details” tab but is there a way to do this in the “Episodes” tab? Like a “more episodes” button?
Or conversely, is it possible to change the text of the “Start Now” button to something else like “Latest Epsiodes”. That way, at least I could differentiate a point of entry to just the latest handful of episodes vs the entirety of the series.

What is the best way to go about this?
Thanks.

[themes2go]

hello! I’m Igor here, developer from Themes2Go.
About your request, there are several options:

1) We have a custom plugin, developed a couple of days ago for a customer, that can import all of the posts within a category within a serie. So basically you feed it a category and a serie and choose the order, and all of the videos goes in that serie. It also has a, “undo” feature.

This is a test performed on hundreds of vides to test the performance an dstability
https://www.dropbox.com/s/078mc7cibe8zhx4/vlogger%20converter%20test2.mov?dl=0

In this case, we can also help you by also with a customization on the cards to limit the amount of preview videos, so that you can use more cards in the same page.

2) Another laternative is that in the serie main page, you use the custom description to manually link to your category, this is the cheap/fast solution.

Other ways I can’t actually think of… Please let me know your thoughts
thanks!