from AskMyDaddy

Working Faster on LinkedIn

You asked

LinkedIn pages take a long time to display. How can I get around that?

MyLinkDaddy writes

For the first four years LinkedIn web performance was fine with rare outages But it's definitely degraded over the past few months, and frankly on an increasing basis, with pages slow, not displaying, or erroneously saying a member is not in my network.

While this may be new to you, it isn't to me. I have so many connections it almost always takes 15 seconds to a minute to display a page. LinkedIn has always been slow for me (and yes, I have broadband). It simply takes too much time to sequentially go from page to page if you're viewing and working on a lot of pages.

Here is what I do to get around these problems and minimize clicks that are either slow or can time out.

Learn to love your browser tabs.

Tabs make it easy to manage multiple browser pages as you'll see below.

Keep regularly-viewed LinkedIn pages open in multiple tabs on your browser

Use browser settings or add-ins so those pages are always displayed and refreshed on startup. I always have three LinkedIn pages open - my Inbox (so I know what's new), my latest LinkedIn search (so I know who to send Intros to when they open up), and the InviteMany page (so I know when I'm awarded additional invitations that I can use). If I have an active question on LinkedIn Answers I'll keep that open too.

Work in parallel, not sequentially (open LinkedIn pages in multiple tabs)

Don't let slow LinkedIn web display hold you up. Display multiple web pages in tabs (right click the link and select Open link in new tab). For example, if you're responding to LinkedIn Inbox messages, first open up all the new messages in tabs. While you're looking at the first message in a tab, the rest are loading. When you're done with a message, just close the tab and go to the next message in the next tab. You don't have to wait for LinkedIn to load the page because it's already been read.

Use browser keyboard shortcuts

For example, in Mozilla CTL-W will close the current tab and display the next one, and CTL-T creates a new blank tab.

Use bookmarks

Don't go through the LinkedIn front door. If you have lots of connections try to avoid clicking My Contacts as that displays your connections, which can take a few minutes to load. For example, if want to manually add contacts it can take several clicks and minutes for me to go from the LinkedIn home page through My Contacts to Other Contacts to Add More Contacts to Enter Contacts Manually. Yikes! Instead I have folder of LinkedIn bookmarks that can take me exactly where I need to go.

Edit LinkedIn URLs to get around artificial (and asinine) limitations

The following example drives me nuts. An Introduction stalls. I withdraw it. LinkedIn displays the withdrawn message and Introduction path. I click on the intended recipient to resend it. But LinkedIn doesn't give you the option to send another Introduction to the recipient! The URL is of the following form - http://www.LinkedIn.com/profile?viewProfile=¬Contactable=&key=1234567 . The text "¬Contactable=" is a simple browser variable that tells LinkedIn not to display the Introduction option. Just take it out and the page will display and work fine. In this case I do the following to minimize the time waiting for LinkedIn pages to display.

1. Right click the URL and select copy the URL
2. Paste the URL into the browser location box.
3. Manually delete "¬Contactable=". If you double click in the text Mozilla selects most of the text, making it easier to delete.
4. Click Go on the browser.

Use Clip Management software

Clip management software stores multiple boilerplate clips, as well as successively pastes them. See Software. This doesn't avoid LinkedIn page displays, but it does minimize cutting, pasting, and having to work with other documents where you typically stored standard text.