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Well, this will probably be tough to track down.  Could be a number of things I would think.  Anyway, for just a second or two, I see a black background (whats behind this, the white).  Especially MS Edge does this the worse.  It doesn't happen here at the forum, only on my site.  Any ideas?  My servers not keeping up maybe?  (I'm only paying $4/year for hosting, so I really cant complain to them).  My site is in my signature if you want to see if happens on your end.   I would be curious if its happening to anyone else.

BTW....I have ran all maintenance from Elks admin area.  No errors were found.

Update....trying it out again, FF is not showing the lag, but Edge and Chrome still is.  Interesting...

Another update....Edge is lagging now on the Elk forum.   So, whatever is causing this, it must not be just my forum.   Hmmm...

Thats due to the dark background the default theme uses, what you are seeing is called FOUC.  The default browser background is white, so when you use a non white background (as we do), you can get that flash as its replaced.  What and how much you see is really defined by how the browser want to "create" the page.

What can you do, honestly not much.  You could set the base as white and animate in a dark background, that will stop the "flash" but I'm not sure the animation effect is not more annoying.

I'd start by enabling the css and js minification in your Admin panel, I think its under general settings.  You should also use google CDN for delivery of the jQuery assets (that is also under your Admin General settings),  Combined these changes reduces the number of calls to your server and helps optimize some css things for the browser.  That may help somewhat.

You can also increase the width of your layout (thats under theme settings), basically the less white you see, the less the flash will be noticeable, try 95% or so.

Thanks much Mr. Spuds.  I really don't think that it has anything to do with Elk now,  because recently, this lag happened in bringing up the foreground with one of my Vanilla forums too.

It does seem Edge has the biggest problem rendering the page instantly, then Chrome, and FF doesn't lag at all.  I will try those adjustments you mention too.