The length of time that a Rapidweaver project takes to load up depends on various factors:

  1. The speed of your Mac. I use a MacBook Pro M1 2021 machine and a large project loads quite easily.
  2. The number of stacks that you have. I have nearly 2500 and one of my larger projects still loads in 15 seconds. I could improve on this by making inactive certain stacks so that they don't load anymore. I did do this exercise a while back but it's quite tedious and you can't be certain whether you have ever used a particular stack in some project that you might one day need to revisit. It's not the end of the world if you do archive a stack and then you need to re-use it, as you can always bring it back so that it loads again. See below for how to stop stacks loading and how to bring them back again.
  3. The size of the project that you have. One way to decrease the size of the project is by warehousing resources such as images. Images should be optimised using the online squoosh.app or similar for best SEO purposes but even so it's very easy to end up with a huge project because you've used the drop zone for images, rather than adding them as resources and then linking to them. Using the drop zone is so easy to do so I understand that if you are in a hurry to build something to a deadline then it seems like the best way to go but it could cause issues later. I have had a couple of occasions when I did this and then my images went missing. So it's also a lot safer to warehouse your images. 
    1. One way to do this is to drop them into resources within Rapidweaver which then gives you the URL to the image. Obviously, if you use an image multiple times such as a banner on multiple pages, just loading the image once and linking to it from each page where it is required is a no-brainer. 
    2. Another way to warehouse images and videos is simply to load them to the hosting server using an FTP app and then grab the URL that you need for Rapidweaver. I will always do it this way for videos. FileZilla shows a strange URL but it's quite easy to work out what the correct path should be. I think Transmit does a better job of showing you a properly formatted URL to the resource that you can copy/paste into your project.