I'm going to go ahead and say it loud because I'm sure everyone is thinking about this : MSFS official website is absolute garbage. And they need to FIX that asap.

I'm sorry to say that because MSFS does look unbelievable, but the website : no, no, no MS you're doing it wrong. You're not doing justice to the software dev team.

This is not even about the layout which is "mkay", it could be more readable, THIS IS ABOUT THE LOADING SPEED.
C'mon, when I type "https://www.flightsimulator.com/" I can go grab a coffee outside and come back before I get a rendering response on the browser.

PageSpeed Insights score : 32, I think a score lower than 90 is unacceptable.

I ran another website speed test : THE HOME PAGE IS 79 MB. No gzip compression, no image compression, etc. ??!!!

I mean, 79 MB ! A WEBPAGE ! WHAT ARE YOU THINKING ?

Did you give the website management to a trainee ? I can do it for free if you want, I'll get you an instant webpage under 100k on Azure.

PS : By the way, please do NOT put a SLOW and bloated forum section, otherwise nobody will use it, do provide a lighting fast clean readable content-focused forum section and you'll get strong engagement. Easy, speed is everything.

Edited November 21, 20196 yr by tarere

I will not say you are wrong (you are not), but their homepage isn't a real priority right now. I would rather see them focusing on the actual sim than on their homepage.

So, I looked at it just with Firefox Developer Tools, and this is what I see:

 

 

There's a few things like the CSS and some of the JS isn't minimized, but the main issue is the 4k-ish screenshots.

This guy - https://cdn.microsoftstudios.com/fsi/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Clouds_Barcelone.png is  3820 x 2160 and 11MB by itself. There can definitely be some optimization, but I also think it's a bit unreasonable to expect the promo/marketing page for an upcoming video game to be super interested in loading speed over showing off the 4K graphics of their engine.

11 minutes ago, NotASenator said:

main issue is the 4k-ish screenshots

Those should be displayed on demand after a zoom request and not preloaded on a carousel right at homepage. Or loaded based on media queries screen size. Essentially, the website is unresponsive, this is a major pain and not a good selling argument when you are about to sell a game which rely heavily on streaming (so to speak : download speed) !

The number one reason for a visitor leaving a website is loading time. First and foremost. Studies says more than half visitor will quit after 3 seconds of loading. That's an average, I personnaly quit after 2 sec, if it was not for MSFS...

Please forgive me if you see me as being "that guy", but facts are facts.  Their website always loads quickly for me here near Atlanta, Georgia.  Always comes up quickly and the pictures and videos load quickly.  I have never noticed slow speeds with their site.. Maybe I'm just fortunate and everyone else is having an issue. 

Anyway, just one data point for what is is worth.

Still loads faster than Avsim does these days 😉

2 minutes ago, Sethos said:

Still loads faster than Avsim does these days 😉

This. Avsim works much worse than flightsim web for me.