Why do GrowSurf embedded elements take a long time to load on my website?

GrowSurf embeddable elements load based on the completion time of your browser's network requests made to GrowSurf's servers, which are located in the San Francisco, California, USA region.

This is different for new visitors and participants:

New Visitors

New visitors will not have a participant browser cookie present. This means that all GrowSurf elements will show up as soon as GrowSurf has loaded on your webpage and your campaign information has been retrieved. If you are using the  data-grsf-email data attribute or the grsf_email URL parameter to dynamically add a new participant*, the GrowSurf signup form will be shown until the network request to GrowSurf finishes adding the new participant. See more details about the signup form flash here.

If you want to fully hide all GrowSurf elements until there is a participant browser cookie present, view this tutorial.

*See How can I add new participants to my referral program? for more details on adding new participants.

Participants

Participants will have a browser cookie saved that identifies the participant anytime they revisit the webpage that GrowSurf is installed on. Because this browser cookie is present, GrowSurf will hide all elements until GrowSurf has fully loaded, and the campaign information as well as participant information have both been retrieved.

The participant will see their unique share links and social share buttons without seeing any flash of the signup form.

Load Time Not Sufficient?

If you are using the GrowSurf Universal Code to load GrowSurf elements, but the load times do not meet your standards, you can use the GrowSurf REST API and/or Webhooks to persist GrowSurf participant data to your own datastore. You would then retrieve data from your own servers for faster load times and render custom elements on your webpage.

You can check how long API requests take on our status page.