A big thank you to everyone who responded to the survey to try and work out why some people find the FSA website to be running slower than it should. Unfortunately, the results are not conclusive but may offer some clues. I strongly suspect that there are multiple causes, not necessarily related to the website. Although I asked people to respond even if they were not experiencing any difficulties with the FSA website I think that it is reasonable to assume that people are more likely to respond if they are having difficulties. There were some lovely messages of support in there as well for which I am very grateful.
59 people completed the survey over about a 2 week period. In answer to the question:
Does the FSA website load (render) at a good speed? In other words, at least as good as the average website that you would visit.
No – 10
Yes – 49
At one level I am encouraged that only 10 people are reporting that they are having problems although that is still 10 more than I would like.
There is not one single clear variable from the survey that connects the people having problems. However, 8 of the 10 people having problems are using Explorer to browse the web while only 16 out of 40 people not having problems use Explorer. Clearly using Explorer is not ‘the cause’ but it may be an indicator of some kind (granted that with these low numbers it may not be statistically significant).
The home page of the FSA website does say that the website does not support Internet Explorer. In truth this should not make any difference to the speed with which it loads but does affect the quality of the ‘look’ of the website. The FSA website is built using open source software (free and accessible for anyone) and internet explorer (owned by Microsoft) seems to not be able to render colours in such websites as well as websites built using Microsoft software (I have no comment on why this may be). Anyhow, in theory it should not affect loading speeds.
Interestingly no one using Safari is having problems (Apple’s browser). This may not be statistically significant because of the low numbers in the sample.
A couple of people who are having problems are clearly trying to access the website from their place of work (I did not specifically ask this question and so it may apply to others). It could be that the problem is resulting from an interaction between the workplace servers and the FSA webhost or perhaps the workplace computers are applying some settings that don’t like our website. This is very hard to pinpoint but now I think about it 2 of the people who contacted me directly about this problem were trying to access from work.
There was no obvious correlation between having a problem and the browser version or type of computer devise used. No one said that clearing the browser cache and history had helped them although doing this did help 2 out of the 3 people who contacted me directly about this problem.
So, where does this leave us? Not necessarily any closer to helping the people who are struggling with the speed of the website at the moment. I can make the following recommendations so see if anything helps. If you do find that it suddenly gets better after making some change please do let me know.
1. Go into your browser history and delete history, cache and cookies. You can leave passwords alone.
2. Try a different browser. I recommend Chrome as being very user friendly.
3. If you have not done so already try using a different computer – both from the same wifi location and a different one.
4. Try using the same computer (obviously a portable one is easier for this) from a different wifi location.
IF ANYTHING WORKS PLEASE LET ME KNOW – gareth@forestschoolassociation.org
I’m really sorry that anyone is having difficulties but at the same time I am moderately pleased that this does not look like it is a wide spread problem. With over 700 members, 967 FB followers, and hundreds of visitors from all over the world to our website every day I think that I would have heard from more people if it was. I understand that this will not make you feel better if you are one of the ones having problems. I will keep looking into it.
