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mohamedkhamis24
Community Member

The Website is soo Slow.

Upwork has been loading tremendously slowly for years now in all versions (Desktop and mobile; Chrome, firefox, edge and brave; mobile app and mobile browsers). Messages take ages to load. I always see the preloader, and it takes like 5 - 10 second each time. Who use preloaders in 2019? I think it's a business website, and business websites should load in milliseconds. If I was a new client, I wouldn't wait for all this time while the website loads. I think you lose a lot of customers this way. 

ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Hi Mohamed,

 

Unfortunately at the moment, I can't confirm anything as we don't have all the details. I would like to confirm that we are not receiving reports for the issue you`re experiencing.

I will escalate your problem to our team so that we can investigate it further and resolve it as soon as possible. One of our team members will reach out to you via ticket as well and assist you further. Thank you.

~ Goran
Upwork

View solution in original post

35 REPLIES 35
ricardoreinholt
Community Member

I totally agree. As freelancers, we pay so much in every possible way - platform fee, connects, low/bad exchange rates - the least you could expect should be a platform which work without interruptions.

I do often have a lot of issues with Upwork-messenger. Often I receive my messages to low. Furthermore I also see a great delay in some jobs posted to my feed.


pudingstudio
Community Member


Mohamed K wrote:

Upwork has been loading tremendously slowly for years now in all versions (Desktop and mobile; Chrome, firefox, edge and brave; mobile app and mobile browsers). Messages take ages to load. I always see the preloader, and it takes like 5 - 10 second each time. Who use preloaders in 2019? I think it's a business website, and business websites should load in milliseconds. If I was a new client, I wouldn't wait for all this time while the website loads. I think you lose a lot of customers this way. 


I don't share same experience.

jodypm
Community Member


Mohamed K wrote:

Upwork has been loading tremendously slowly for years now in all versions (Desktop and mobile; Chrome, firefox, edge and brave; mobile app and mobile browsers). Messages take ages to load. I always see the preloader, and it takes like 5 - 10 second each time. Who use preloaders in 2019? I think it's a business website, and business websites should load in milliseconds. If I was a new client, I wouldn't wait for all this time while the website loads. I think you lose a lot of customers this way. 


I can see why you would say this, but I, like Antun, don't share the experiences you outline above. Could it be from your end? As for preloaders, why would you think that they should not be used? Just curious.

Could it be from your end? Maybe, but then why does Upwork in particular suffer from this issue and no other known website? I literally open dozens of websites everyday, but I only experience this issue with upwork. So, maybe the code isn't optimized for every device and ISP as it should be. 

 

As for preloaders, why would you think that they should not be used? Well, preloaders is basically indiction of slowness either because of code, server response or both, so you don't see them in desktop websites anymore (e.g. facebook, amazon, booking, quora, twitter). Upwork has only 12 million registered freelancers and 5 million registered clients in comparison with hundreds of million for other services. 

 

All of the sites that you've listed use preloading techniques and for slow page loads as a result of the client connection, use preloaders. Even the fastest internet connections are not always so.

Facebook's preloader .gifFacebook's preloader .gif

ETA: gif

AveryO
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hi Mohamed, and Andreas, 


I'm sorry to learn that you are experiencing issues when using the Upwork website. I can confirm that we do not have any issues on our end, but I would like to look into this further.


Mohamed, have you tried checking the issue with your ISP provider? And if so, does the issue only persist when you're using the Upwork website?

Andreas, could you please share more information about the issue you have noted regarding your messages? Are your messages not showing on your Messages page in real time? I also checked your job feed, and saved searches, and can see that the most recent jobs are showing up in the results. What specific keywords are you using for the jobs you are searching for so that I can try and replicate your issue.


~ Avery
Upwork

Mohamed, have you tried checking the issue with your ISP provider? And if so, does the issue only persist when you're using the Upwork website?

 

Yes, I only experience this issue with the upwork website. I know it might be from my end (device or ISP), but then why the upwork website in particular? My Internet speed is 6.0 Mbps.

 

 

Hi Mohamed,

 

Unfortunately at the moment, I can't confirm anything as we don't have all the details. I would like to confirm that we are not receiving reports for the issue you`re experiencing.

I will escalate your problem to our team so that we can investigate it further and resolve it as soon as possible. One of our team members will reach out to you via ticket as well and assist you further. Thank you.

~ Goran
Upwork

I am posting a job and it's painfully slow. Like minutes to get text into a field.

May 22, 2023 - Upwork has been incredibly slow for the past several days. Refreshing a page, loading jobs, everything is reeeeeeaaaaaaalllllly sloooooooow.

 

I face this problem too. It makes me tired. I don't know what's the problem but this is very frustrated.

up2.jpg

Hi Malik,

 

I checked but couldn't replicate the issue and the Messages should open normally. Have you tried clearing your cache and cookies or a different browser? Let me know if you are still having issues with this after trying that.

 

Thank you.

~ Aleksandar
Upwork
erin_b
Community Member

These responses are ridiculous and I find them offensive in their blaming nature. I came on here because i'm SICK AND TIRED of the messages being so slow and now losing whole very long messages in the middle of me typing, losing a lot of time... and I see this: you all telling people it's their ISP or otherwise their side of things. NOOOOOOOO! it's the upwork site being built VERY POORLY. There is NO REASON for the messages section to take literally over 3 minutes to load just one message I'm trying to see. It's coded POORLY. There's no need to query ALL convo threads to get latest messages from ONE thread. This has been going on for YEARS now and it's unprofessional and cruel to blame ISPs. GIVE ME A BREAK! And so what if slow ISPs are being used to do work, that's all a lot of us have. It really shows a lack of professionalism how HARD you all are trying to downplay and pass off a KNOWN LONG STANDING ISSUE. 

 

FIX IT!!!!!!! REDESIGN MESSAGES to be a working effing site/app already!!!!!!

g_vasilevski
Retired Team Member
Retired Team Member

Hi Erin,

 

I'm sorry for the inconvenience this has caused you. Our tea will reach out to you via ticket where you can share more details with us. Our team will investigate it further and will assist you further directly on your ticket. Thank you.

~ Goran
Upwork
6f73d044
Community Member

I'm actually the same. Messages, artist's profiles and *especially* the Work Diary take ages...

UPWORK YOU NEED TO FIX THIS. IT IS RIDICOLOUS. IT'S 2020.

AveryO
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hi Evan, 

I'm sorry to learn that you are experiencing this issue. We have not received reports about this, so I want to investigate it further. Could you please clarify which pages are loading slow for you? 


~ Avery
Upwork
jabez2317
Community Member

I really thought I am the only one who experiences this. But the major problem with me for the past few weeks is the messages page.

 

If I have an active conversation with a client, the cursor and the letters will reflect on the messaging bar immediately without no problem.

 

If I go to another site, say youtube.com and watch a video, a couple minutes later when I click the messages tab in upwork to respond with my client, the cursor stops blinking and as I was typing letters/words, there are no words reflected on the message bar. It will take 10seconds more before the cursor starts blinking again and will reflect the letters I typed seconds ago. There's a delay. My typing of letters are normal sometimes but most of the time when I hover or go to another tab and stay for a while before I go back to Messages page, it has a delay. Sometimes my browser hangs. The occurence happens a lot when I use chrome. In firefox, I can still experience delay in responding messages or the cursor blinking stops when I'm about to type but not that much with chrome.

 

I am using Windows 10. I checked my internet connection and I don't have disconnection issues as I am pinging to google with a CMD line in another task window. I still got ample amount of memory 800MB left as well as the disk usage is not high in ceiling. This happened I think since last year. Or on before last 2 updates of upwork.

 

I suspected that it has something to do with the scripts and encryption. When I am active in the Upwork Messages tab, maybe the script is reloading and checking for security measures and it takes a toll on the browser/my cpu resources/and or my laptop's memory.

 

My laptop specs are Win10 64bit. 4GB of RAM. Chrome browser.  SATA 500GB HDD. 6MBps Internet.

 

When I am browsing or loading to Upwork homepage or to any other Upwork page aside from Messages, it is loading fine or normally, bearable as we say.

 

It appears that the platform works normally in high end computers or laptops only.

I have the exact same issue with the website.

The apps are also really slow to connect to the server and bring-up the
messages window. I tried to upload a video but they don't support m4a so i
gave up.


AveryO
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hi Romel, 


We haven't received other similar reports for the same issue recently. I wanted to check if you were able to make a screen recording of the issue you have noted on your post? 


~ Avery
Upwork
e1f25998
Community Member

AveryO
Community Manager
Community Manager

I appreciate that you sent this in, Evan! I'll go ahead and share this with the team so that it can be investigated further.


~ Avery
Upwork
azhangali
Community Member

I'm facing the same issues. Additionally, my job feed shows new jobs with delay (about 5 mins). I hardly ever see jobs in 3-5 mins after posting, and never see jobs early than it. Usually it takes 5-10 mins for job to appear on my feed.

Problem is both for desktop chrome browser and android mobile app.

Hi Zhangali,

 

I'd like to confirm that the experience you described is expected, due to the automatic review process we have in place that some jobs are subjected to. As an example, I see just now a job that was posted two minutes ago appeared in your job feed, please check the screenshot below and take a look at your feed.

Job Feed.png

 

~ Vladimir
Upwork

I see this sort of error using Chrome pretty often as well.

 

What is the best browser to use with Upwork? Chrome seems to have issues.

AveryO
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hi Evan, 

It looks like you are referring to a different issue. A member of the Customer Support Team will reach out to you to assist you further.


~ Avery
Upwork
54573f94
Community Member

I have had the same problem for years. I have access to high-speed internet, and live between London and other countries - it is the same problem in every location. 

 

I don't have loading issues with other websites, only Upwork. It is the same for the rest of my office. Just to post this reply took ages, using Upwork is painful! 

Hi Danielle,

 

I'm sorry for the inconvenience this has caused you. I shared your concern with the rest of our team and one of our agents already reached out to you directly via a support ticket to assist you further.

 

Thank you.

~ Aleksandar
Upwork

Yes!
Same issue here.
I have super internet speed
But I've been trying to understand the logic behind upwork slowing down their site especially the message and inbox that will load for average of 30 to 40 seconds in all my devices and ISP

I only had to bear it because of business, but it pained me to the point I started searching for threads like this.

I'll be so glad If this bug is fixed

Hi Henry et al.,

 

I've came across this thread a few times, so I finally decided to add my three cents. Why not just two cents? Well, because it's almost 2021, and I figured it was time to give a little more. Now, whether my opinion is worth three cents - or even two cents - is for you to decide.

 

I did a few tests around the globe from different geolocations (USA, Spain, France, Jordan, Canada, and Australia): Upwork.com does not really have any notable internal issues, other than a couple (which I will list below, and are not serious), to be classified as a 'slow site.' These tests conclude that Upwork is pretty stable and reasonably quick.

 

The only two (2) issues that may affect some page loads are:

 

  1. Compression (like gzip) could be better, but to the defense of the developers at Upwork, I'm not reviewing the source code, and God only knows how much complexity the devs are immersed in: Sometimes devs can't have their cake and eat it too.
  2. Headers would benefit from better caching, so that when a page loads the first time, it can cache many components (like images, but also stylesheets, etc.) so that future requests to the page will be faster. However, that being said, many of the people who are experiencing slow page loads may be starting fresh with the page before caching.

 

What I would suggest to all the folks who experience issues with speed is to allow the page(s) ample time to load initially, and then on revisits to that page, you will hopefully see a speedier result.

 

If the above does not work for you, I would lay money on the idea that it may very well be your ISP.

 

In closing, I would like to add that Matthew D's comment about changing your DNS resolver to 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare) may help. I can confirm this from my own experience as a web developer.

 

So that's my three cents. I hope that I've been helpful.

 

Best regards,

 

Jody

 

Glossary of terms used:

 

Geolocation

In computing, Internet geolocation is software capable of deducing the geographic position of a device connected to the Internet. For example, the device's IP address can be used to determine the country, city, or post/ZIP code, determining an object's geographical location.

Source: Wikipedia Contributors, “Internet Geolocation,” Wikipedia (Wikimedia Foundation, October 17, 2020)

 

Caching

Caching is software component that stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster.

Source: Wikipedia Contributors, “Cache (Computing),” Wikipedia (Wikimedia Foundation, October 11, 2020)

 

gzip

gzip is a file format and a software application used for file compression and decompression.

Source: Wikipedia Contributors, “Gzip,” Wikipedia (Wikimedia Foundation, September 13, 2020)

 

ISP

An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet.

Source: Wikipedia Contributors, “Internet Service Provider,” Wikipedia (Wikimedia Foundation, November 8, 2020)

 

VladimirG
Community Manager
Community Manager

Thanks for sharing your three cents, Jody! I'll share the feedback and suggestions you provided, appreciate the insight!

~ Vladimir
Upwork
jodypm
Community Member

Always ready to help if able. Thank you.

kairos93511
Community Member

If you're in a Computer maybe the DNS Server is the main problem. Try the IP Server of Google like. : 8.8.8.8 second is 8.8.4.4.
It looks like this:
8.8.8.8
8.8.4.4
Or change it to 1.1.1.1 for fastest connection on internet.
mendellucero
Community Member

It is really slow esp. the Messages. Maybe it is your hosting's security settings or something because certain ip's are largely affected by the slow loading process; could be redundancy inside the website markup. Could be anything on your end.

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