Board Thread:Support Requests - Designing Your Wikia/@comment-24661007-20140518014307/@comment-452-20140518124540

If the question is "As a user, what you can do to improve load times for yourself", then the answer is "adblock" and/or other content-blocking browser extensions, or other programs, to strip out the content that you do not want to load.

You could also try using alternative browsers for a day or two - different browsers can have remarkably different loading times.

If the question is "As an admin, what you can do to improve load times for other users":

Apart from avoiding expensive parser functions and excessively long pages, I don't know of anything end-users can do about Wikia's load times.

One thing that I have noticed is that the header often loads first, with an apparent pause before the rest of the article loads, so reducing the number of items in the top nav menu, or populating the menus after the page has loaded might help.

Unfortunately, the page source itself is rather bloated.
 * Total size of this page: 65258 characters.
 * 10% could immediately be removed by getting rid of 6613 tabs and double newlines. That doesn't include unnecessary newlines.
 * It takes 639 lines and 32435 characters before you get to the "Cutting page load times" heading.

15 years ago, people cared about, and actively reduced, the volume of HTML they were serving. I expect that Wikia, like most websites, probably just doesn't care.