Safari pauses before loading pages

This thread came up top for my search in Google.

I have had this issue for ages - normally I would have to stop and restart a page load in safari and recently they wouldn't load at all.

I eliminated DNS as the cause.

The solution for me was to disable DNS prefetching in Safari. This has made every page load first time and instantly.

To do this I put the following command into terminal

defaults write com.apple.safari WebKitDNSPrefetchingEnabled -boolean false

My Safari loads pages slowly as well, and In Preferences | Network, I have only my router IP. So it seems to me the problem is elsewhere. On more than one case, while Safari "paused" loading a page, I had time to take my iPhone out of its holster, turn it on, and load the very same page while Safari was hung all the time. iPhone took less than 1 second to load it, Safari was hung on it for about 30 seconds.

You might want to consider starting a new discussion. Since this one is marked solved, less people are likely to look at it. A new post would be much more visible. You can link to this one.

Safari - Unsupported third-party add-ons may cause Safari to unexpectedly quit or have performance issues

Safari Can't Open the Page

Safari doesn't load a page or webpage items are missing

Web Content not responding

I have the same problem and it is not DNS. Chrome and Firefox are fine, and changing DNS servers (Google, OpenDNS) makes no difference. I'm on Safari 10.0.3, macOS 10.12.3.

[EDIT] I also tried disabling DNS prefetching, with no luck...

I was surprised this was the problem for me, as Chrome and Firefox seemed to be loading pages just fine. I have my router set up with OpenDNS, but in network properties I had 8.8.8.8, then my router IP. I removed Google's DNS, leaving just my router, and now Safari is loading pages right away. Thanks for the tip!

Non-responsive DNS server or invalid DNS configuration can cause long delay before webpages load - Apple Support