Decreasing page load time

[freshstart]

I posted a similar question to this one last year but I am asking for some additional help or new input if it is available.

I have a website(www.teesacrossamerica) with a search box and 5 dropdowns which visitors use to filter down to the items that are of interest.

I wanted to be able to select the dropdowns in any order and as each dropdown is selected the remaining dropdowns offer only the options relative to the selected dropdown.

I contacted Caspio and was told they couldn’t help since cascading dropdowns only work in 1 direction, but that it might be possible using javascript.

I was able to design a way of accomplishing what I wanted but it took about 180 dropdowns and cascading dropdowns to make it work. I use javascript to hide and disable dropdowns that are not relevant during the filtering process.

Everything works perfectly and the process returns the information the user requests, however, due to the large number of dropdown elements the page loads very slowly as all of the dropdowns are populated on page load, even the ones that are not visible and/or disabled since these events don’t occur until after pageload.

View my website and use the dropdowns to see how it works. www.teesacrossamerica.com

I now have a couple of questions that I am hoping someone can help with:

• a.               Is it possible to load tables in filestor that can be accessed by my dropdowns and my results page, and would this significantly speed up my page load times? All information in my tables is public so I am not concerned about security
• b.             Is there any other way to reduce the number of dropdowns I have to use possibly by changing the parent element of my cascading dropdowns dynamically (this question I asked before), or by any other means, and how would I do that?

 

 

I appreciate any help!

Thanks

[rachana]

Speed of the page loading time can be increased by optimizing images and CSS and placing external Javascript files at the bottom of the page.