I’d have to ask why you need that many media files on one page? The best idea is to restructure the site to allow your thoughts of one file per page. Not only will that help with loading times, you’ll also be able ot optimise each page for what it’s meant to be instead of one big generic mess.
The reason for many files, is that this site is a media library. There essentially is no “thoughts”, but rather lists of files: audios, videos, PDFs. By having many media files on one page, we can – using a plugin called “Tablepress” – sort through, and search the files, by many different parameters. The site was originally as you have said, only a few files per page. By using the previous approach, such things as sorting and searching needed either to be manually made on new pages (that’s a lot of pages, considering how many parameters that we have), or was just not possible, and so it was abandoned. We were also looking for a result that was to be reminiscent of a media library. Hence the current design. Have you taken a look at the site? Perhaps a peek at it would explain better than I could.
These forums are not supposed to be critical of people’s site content, but since in this case it relates to technical issues, I’m going ahead. I’m sorry, but loading your entire library on a single page is just insane. Nobody but the most extremely devoted visitor is going to make use of all of the media content, it’s a complete waste of my bandwidth to load all of it, and even more of a waste of yours.
I understand why you are doing it, but the fact is if your organizational tool requires all of the media to be loaded to work, you are using the wrong tool. I regret the need to be so blunt, but I feel it’s necessary. This approach already has not scaled well, there is no room for growth.
The meta data used for organization and searching must be separate from the actual media file so that media can be sorted and searched without need for the media itself. Only when the specific media file is selected should it be downloaded.
I can’t make specific recommendations, but you need software that can extract meta data from media files and place it in a searchable and sortable database.
I’m not going to take a look at the site… but that’s because I don’t want to be subjected to 100’s of downloads on a page when I really don’t want to see them.
As bcworkz says, you really are doing it wrong. As well as making it very hard for users to browser the files because they are all loading, you’re also riskign crashing their browser as not many can handle that maney media files at once. I’ve seen browser windows crash with 2 videos playing at the same time, and on mobile devices it’s a whole lot worse.
On top of that, you’re also wasting your bandwidth sending all of the files all of the time. That’s a whole hepa of MB that is never used by anyone, and you’re paying for it!
If it was my site, I’d change things substantially.
My suggestion is to still use tablepress, but use it to list links to the files, not the files themselves. The links can take users to a page for that file only, and there they can view, download or do whatever they need to with that single file.
You can also use categories and tags categorise the media files and allow users to search for what they are after.
Thank you both for your advice. I will consider your suggestions.