We’ve heard it, and it’s fair: some days this app feels slow to load, slow to post, slow to answer.
Here’s the honest reason. Home Renovation Reviews isn’t run by a software company. It’s run by a renovation company. Most days the people who build this site are out in the field — framing basements, hanging gutters, tearing out a 1970s kitchen, standing in somebody’s backyard in the rain figuring out why the deck is sinking. The site gets built in the evenings, in the truck between jobs, and on the odd rainy day. We’re doing the work first and writing about it second.
That’s also why this place is worth your time. The answers here come from people who were on a ladder this morning, not from a content farm.
What we’re doing about the speed
- The site moved to new infrastructure this summer. The parts that used to break under load (images not loading, “too many requests” errors, the app needing a hard refresh) have been fixed in the last few days.
- Pages that don’t need you signed in are now served from a cache close to you, which is why browsing got quicker even when the server is busy.
- The server itself is getting a bigger engine, and it now grows on its own when real members are actually waiting on it — not when a bot storm rolls through.
- The Shorts library (2,000 job-site videos, 60 seconds each) has been rebuilt so it loads fast and works from a shared link on your phone.
What you can do
- If a page hangs, give it a few seconds before refreshing — it’s usually the server waking up, not your connection.
- If something is broken, say so in Site Feedback with what you clicked and what you saw. We read it, and it gets fixed faster than you’d think for a crew that’s also pouring concrete.
- Ask your question anyway. Slow app or not, the median first reply here is under an hour, from a trade who does that work.
Thanks for the patience. We’d rather be a little slow and real than fast and fake.
— The LF Builders crew
