I experienced the same thing. Fairly decent laptop and high speed broadband.
After getting sick of just waiting, I entered “my . zwift . com” into the same browser that was trying to load, and low and behold, it logged in. Almost like enteting the URL, forced it to wake up and log in?
i thin you have the only real response to the issue. you obviously know what you are saying.
What amazed me is that most seem to think it is ok to throw money at a problem at should not exist in the first place. Compared to 99.9% of the games these days zwift graphics and complexity is like like comparing a bicycle with a F1 car. You should not need top shelve hardware to run it, you should not require to upgrade to SSD just to have a single app working properly, you should not have to use 32Gb ram to get a decent load time. FFS I can run Metro Exodus with half my spec yet I need to wait ages for Castle Wolvenstein to load? Even if 10 out of every 1000 user experience performance issues it points to an issue but zwift is not prepared to go beyond the usual ‘it’s your crap pc and internet’ connection
I’m with you. After 6 months of trying to get used to Zwift I’ve spent enough. Support is poor and slow. All they do is point me at the forums in the first instance (“thanks for your e-mail. While you wait check the forums!”) or run me through a set of inane steps (“Try updating the firmware of your trainer”, um, it’s a dumb trainer, how would I do that?)
As far as fitness “apps” go it’s almost as expensive as a cheap gym membership, the training plans are uninspiring, I can’t get it to load quickly so often am too late to join activities, and it constantly crashes.
Today after waiting for the update to install and the application to load (I’d be happy with 4 minutes, takes me much longer) I gave up. In a few minutes I had signed up to rouvy, downloaded, installed, connected my sensors loaded and started riding. 7 minutes into that ride Zwift finally finished updating and loaded and popped up the log in screen. Just not good enough for the money they charge!
I know this is an old thread but here’s a solution that’s worked for me on Win10:
Close Zwift… make sure it’s closed on your Taskbar as well. Then simply go to your “Documents” folder. You’ll notice a folder named “Zwift”… delete that folder. Zwift should load quickly after that. Zwift will automatically recreate that folder and I just delete it again next time. Sure it’s annoying but it’s easy.
Zwift was taking me 20-30 minutes to load recently (November and December 2020), after deleting that folder it loads almost instantly. I’m not sure what’s in that folder… nor do I really care, I just want to ride my bike and I haven’t really noticed any difference in my Zwifting experience.
Hope this helps someone who is as annoyed as I was.
I would not suggest this to resolve the loading issue.
Users would lose their Custom Workouts and Personal Bests.
Zwift on any reasonable hardware should take no more than 1-2mins to load, and on good hardware it’s more like 20-40secs.
It should never take 20-30mins, that’s ludicrous and means there’s a massive issue at your end.
First, Custom Workouts and Personal Bests don’t matter one bit to me when I’m sitting there pedaling my smart trainer like a dumb trainer and waiting for Zwift to load. It took two restarts and 40 minutes the other day (my wife was 40 minutes into her ride before Zwift finally loaded on my computer, and I started the process 5 minutes before she even turned on her computer). It just hangs on the splash screen for 20 minutes straight. I just want to ride and I don’t really care about those other bells and whistles. To some they may matter to me I prefer to actually just ride and have the program work. To me deleting that folder works and it’s the only solution/work-around I’ve found. I’d rather have it work correclty but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
As for the problem being on my end… maybe, but I don’t write that folder to my “Documents” folder. That’s a folder that Zwift writes/creates and updates every session and if that folder is what’s causing Zwift to hangup that’s on them. My laptop has an Intel I7 processor, 16 GB or RAM, the latest version of Win10 and has no other issues with regards to other programs. It runs resource intensive programs like AutoCAD and Photoshop with ease, yet it seems to struggle with Zwift.
Again, it may be on my end but Zwift is the only program I have issues with.
Do you have a cloud sync program like one drive or drop box that might be causing the issue with the long load times?
SSD hard drive?
Nope, no cloud sync of any type.
Nope, no SSD hard drive. I know it would make a small difference but I’m not changing or adding a hard drive just for Zwift. AutoCAD is a resource hog and it doesn’t seem to struggle. Photoshop and Lightroom are resouce hogs too and they don’t seem load slow either. It’s only an issue with loading Zwift.
AutoCad and Photoshop use different resources. Did you mention what Graphics card GPU you have in the laptop.
It would make a HUGE difference.
I have always suggested that if you are going to run Win10 then you need to use an SSD.
That would depend on the version and what configurations you use.
An SSD does help, but not as much as you’d think in a straight comparison with a 7200rpm HDD on a nice clean build. CPU is still a bottleneck, and ‘i7’ doesn’t mean much on its own. Depends which one. RAM capacity is irrelevant too.
First, If Zwift is that hardware dependent then it’s a huge, Huge, HUGE fail by the software developers.
Second, an SSD is not going to solve a 40 minute load time. Yes, they are faster, but if they are that important it’s also a huge fail by the Zwift developers.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s not a hardware issue. Why am I going to assume that? Because Zwift works flawlessly and loads almost instantly after I delete that “Zwift” folder. I’m not kidding it’s almost instantaneous once that folder is gone. No load time lag, no bugs, no glitches what-so-ever. It’s a hack of a work-around but it’s one that I’m willing to live with (but one I shouldn’t have to). The hardware functions fine.
It’s either writing or reading too much from that folder or else something in that folder is getting corrupted.
I am not just suggesting an SSD for Zwift, I am suggesting it for ALL Windows 10 installs.
If deleting that folder works for you, fine, but I would not suggest this for anyone else unless they are willing to lose Custom Workouts and Personal Best.
Should be basically illegal to run anything from mechanical storage at this point. 
My wife uses Zwift on a 6 year old laptop that we bought second hand a couple of years ago. 2GB of RAM, 250 (ish) GB magnetic HD, onboard graphics and while she gets frustrated by how long it takes to load up (but not frustrated enough to just use my laptop instead) it never takes more than 5-10 minutes.
My newer, but still relatively low-spec, laptop (but with SSD) loads up and pairs in the time it takes me to nip to the kitchen and fill my bidons.
It really does sound like the problem is with your machine not with Zwift.
Ive been using Zwift for years and the glacial loading is just a fact of life. Routinely well over 5 minutes,
I have a Microsoft Surface series 6
SDD
Laptop has been on and booted up for over an hour before trying to start Zwift
have tried many different things suggested on this and other threads. No material improvement.
just one of those things that you have to tolerate. Plainly the Zwift engineers just don’t give this issue any priority. And if they are prepared to release sub-standard software then so be it. Not the first software company to make that decision, won’t be the last.
Hi @Peter_Croft_NWSCC and welcome to the forums. Sorry you are having long load times, but it is not the fault of the Zwift devs. Unfortunately your system is not ideal for running a 3D game.
Ahh, of course. The user is the problem. Silly me.
Funny how often that is the case. It isn’t that we produce software that isn’t fit for the general experience of users, the users just aren’t fit for our software.
Peter Croft