Since some point in mid to late August, some users of Firefox have been reporting a significant lag in the loading of Brand New pages. For some reason, this issue is limited to Firefox as the same users have confirmed that the site loads perfectly fine on Chrome and Safari. This isn’t the case for ALL Firefox users, though, including myself as all the various computers in our headquarters load the site fine so it’s been really hard to troubleshoot this. The issue also appears to be server-wide, affecting other non-Brand New pages, so it’s not a WordPress issue. Our server administrators are also baffled and have reported hearing similar issues from other customers. So, unfortunately, I do not have a solution at the moment but we are looking into it and wanted to let anyone here using Firefox know that, while not ideal for your browsing preferences, you will have a better experience on Brand New using another browser. To be continued…

UPDATE: Thanks to Phil DeJarnett in the comments for pointing this out! An interim solution on your end, as a Firefox user, is to disable the “DNS-over-HTTPS” setting. Instructions here.

With this breakthrough knowledge I will now work with our server admins to see what we can do on our end so that it works properly as a default.