s2Member slow because of ajax-loader.gif

When I check my site’s loading performance on tools.pingdom.com, one thing that sometimes slows my site from 1-2s to 3-4 seconds is ajax-loader.gif. Sometimes it spends 3 seconds just waiting before it starts receiving the gif data.

My site is relatively optimized, with CDN, minification, etc. I also replaced s2member’s CSS with my own to speed things up. But I can’t figure out how to get rid of this ajax-loader.gif. What is it used for and how do I stop s2member from loading it?

Thank you for reporting this important issue.

What is it used for and how do I stop s2member from loading it?

It’s interesting that you’re having this problem, the ajax-loader.gif file isn’t only about 2kilobytes, and should only take a split second to download. Also, your browser should be caching this file after the first time it’s used so it should take nearly no time to load it.

We use Pingdom here at s2Member and we do not have this problem ourselves, though we are running s2Member as well. I would recommend contacting your server provider. Maybe they can shed some light on this.

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This file is used in almost all of s2Member’s Pro Forms and Buttons. It’s not something I would consider “important”, as it is a UI element that Users should see for less than a second at a time. You could delete this file if it became a big problem and I believe that it would not cause any big issue. However, I would still recommend that you find the root cause of the problem.

Thanks!