One of the most used SEO practices is the optimization of the pages to be fast and user friendly. I've done many attempts to make my pages to load faster, but always I get from Webmaster tools information, that my page is slower than 60-70% of other sites... Installed Memcache, APC (optcode cache), replaced Apache with Nginx and PHP Mod with PHP-FPM and the decrease is little... Compressed JS, CSS and again, no change. Used external CDN to parralelize the download of the images and scripts - again, no big change... I feel, that 10% slower than other sites will be if I have only one static .txt page Or I use hosting in USA... Do you have similar results and how you make your pages faster?
Do you use a lot of images, and if so, have you done anything about them? And your hosting situation can indeed affect things badly, especially since you must be on a shared server. Hosting in the US for $5/mo might not be a bad solution, considering how much trouble you have already gone through.
Yes, this graphic is from my site http://uhaaa.net - you can see it. I disabled CDN for now, because SimpleCDN had many interruptions of the service and I will switch to Amazon S3 soon. I tried many webspeed tests and they show me 1-2 secs for load. Webmaster tools show me different times. The number of images are big on pages, but all of them are small. I get similar graphics from all of my websites on this VPS. It's interesting, but Google says that my faster page is apc.php - 1 sec. Maybe this slow load is because my web server is based in Bulgaria (my country)? This hosting provider is the best in my country and load times are very good, but I am not sure about international speeds. But AOL Page test show me good time, Load Impact too. So maybe this is not the reason...
5$ for month is good, but my site is very dynamic and I am not sure. Now I pay for my VPS with 780 MB RAM about 50 USD/Month, but it hosts many Drupal sites with one installation. And I managed to make the load very light with all these optimizations. I am not Linux user, but it was very interesting to "overclock" my VPS The above mentioned site is for my country and I don't need US based hosting for it, but few of my other English sites had similar load times and maybe it's good reason to switch them to US server. But the prices of VPSes that I saw are very high, and cheap shared hosting will not help. About the images - tried to optimize them following the guides of YSlow and Google PageSpeed Tool. But not everything in Drupal is under my control. For example - profile pictures.
I am not an expert expert on these things but I was surprised you don't have progressive rendering -- the browser just shows a blank page for some long seconds before your whole page loads. Progressive rendering would be much better for user experience. And perhaps you can use this tool http://tools.pingdom.com/ to diagnose which specific objects are loading slowly.
This is interesting! Never heard about progressive rendering, but I will check out about this. Thank you!
Why not try Google and Yahoo's firefox plugins Yslow and PageSpeed (yes that's the name) to analyze more. If you are already using memcached and other caching solutions it's great. You don't have a lot of images on the site but you can still consider css sprites.
There are a lot of reasons why your website is loading slow, you can check the website speed through different tools try google page speed checker". Anything under 3Secs is ok. If it is still loading slow try to consider other things on your website images, advertisements etc