I have an app I created for my company that uses arrays and a lot of JS to load in the content. This obviously comes back with some huge load times (up to 8s), where the majority of it is when the arrays are appended to my html.
What are some ways I can alleviate this loadtime, I have my JS optimized bringing close to 100 lines down to about 20-30, and that seemed to help. Is using a fake loader, or something that could symbolize that the page is not 100% there yet, bad ux?
For example, if I displayed a little rotating animation for 5 seconds on the side that is being appeneded, is this considered poor ux? More so than just leaving it blank? Is lying to a user to 'fake a load time' worse than just having a slow load time?