Problems with site shifting

Hello,

We are hoping someone can help out with a little problem we are having. Our site was recently rebuilt, and after the new site went live, we started noticing some shifting. When the page loads, there is some rapid shifting…it quickly moves to the right and then to the left. It is happening in the admin as well. It seems to be occurring on every page. It’s most noticeable when browsing categories or looking at product description pages.

Here is the site: http://dollargraphicsdepot.com

We have had this website for over three years, and have done several upgrades, but this issue has never occurred before…neither in the actual store, or in the admin. The server runs on a VPS so it’s not related to server performance.

If anyone has suggestions for how we can fix this, we will pass them on to our programmer who is trying to troubleshoot the problem. We really appreciate any help you can give!

Thanks,
Bryan

It only happened once for me, when I first clicked on a category.

A much bigger problem, in my opinion, is that fact that your header and product images are way too big (file size, not dimensions), causing your pages to load very slowly. They badly need to be optimized.

Thanks for the reply. If you go to some of the other "ez-pages" you should see it as well. I understand your comment on file size, I believe we have image handler 4 installed but it might not have the gzip unabled yet. Thanks for the feedback!

Neither gzip nor image handler or designed to handle header images.

IMH4 WILL drastically improve load speed of product images.

Oh yeah, that's right. Ok, thanks for the reminder.

Any idea on the shifting?

You may also want to investigate the proper naming/usage of an image. Spaces in names will haunt you with strange effects. Starting images with a Cap or using caps in the file extension (.JPG vs .jpg)can cause interesting phenomenon as well.

The shift you are seeing is often caused by a difference in fonts for link tags. Remember that there are tags for the link, the link while active, and the link after visited.

Ok great thanks! I will pass the info on. Appreciate your feedback!

After further review....

I would also look at your stylesheets. When I saw wishlist in one, it sent up a flag.

Nine (without counting the print stylesheet) can often cause one stylesheet to tell the site to be 925px wide followed by one that tells it to be 1028px wide. Magins, paddings, etc. can be the cause as well.

Awesome thanks! I will passed that along as well. We're very thankful for your feedback! :D

The Nine refers to the number of stylesheets. When you get that many, the probability of having problems increases dramatically.

Re your site shifting problem.

I too had this issue which drove me crazy for a bit, what I eventually realised was that it was fundamentally due to the speed at which the users browser rendered the page, the shift occurs when the browser's vertical slider bar appears. If you save the page (complete) and view it locally you should see no shift.

Because it was also evident in Admin it can't be design/image/css issue of your site, I would think that it was something so simple as server and/or internet performance.

As you can tell I'm no expert, just giving my two cents worth