"Your website is slower than 97% of the other tested websites"

So I tested my website on pingdom, and got that message.

Ouch.

Here's the website: www.101baseballnews.com

Is it because of all the HTML code I put? What can I do to get a quicker loading time, etc.. you know, make the page load faster.

All help is greatly appreciated.

 

the message I get

 

What I can see in the image is that it is saying that the page size is 1.8MB, it will certainly reduce the speed since it is not a single file, instead it(Webpage) consists of multiple contents...
There can be more problems like the no of visitors you receive...

You can try few things such as:-

Using gzip feature so that the contents could be delivered in compressed format but it will eat a lot of CPU and in shared hosting it's not going to work since the provider may block you..
Reduce the quality/size of your images in the website..
You can use CDN's (Depends upon the fact that you really need it or not, else don't care about this)

Many other reasons can be there for a slow website.

 

http://sports.cbsimg.net/images/visual/whatshot/yadier-molina-82812.jpg - 11 seconds - change this image to your own server location

put social widgets like facebook etc in footer.

optimize image sizes, they are huge, taking 4-5 second each on a 1mbps connection.

if you dont' have photoshop , use pixlr.com/editor

 

Your page is massive -- and for little good reason. At 2 megabytes total size it is easily 12 times the upper limit I'd normally set for a page, but that's just a small part of the problem. A much larger issue is that it is built from 197 separate files. Each file request has a overhead to it called a "handshake" -- the browser says "do you have the file", the server says "yes", the browser says "good send it to me" -- and all this occurs BEFORE transfer even starts and can take anywhere from 30ms to a full on second EACH DIRECTION before transfer even starts. The 'rule of thumb' for ballparking the average page load time is 200ms for each file past the first eight, meaning that the average handshaking time for your page is around 38 Seconds -- long enough nobody is likely to wait for it to even load. Worst case scenario could be over THREE MINUTES just from the sheer number of files used!

Much of the endless pointless 'files for nothing' comes from the endless pointless "gee ain't it neat" javascript for nothing. The page reeks of a bunch of off the shelf solutions slapped together any old way, and while that may have 'sped up' developement and allowed someone with little web development experience to put together a website, the end result is akin to walking through a pile and smearing it all over the site's carpet. Bloated, slow, and in general doomed to failure. Much of the scripting and crap that's being loaded for nothing is done via scripting itself -- so I can't even get an accurate count of the script and image files used... but the 11 separate scripts totalling half a megabyte is a poster child for everything wrong with such site development approaches... The javascripts ALONE are six to eight times the filesize I'd allow for an entire page template not counting content -- that's HTML+CSS+SCRIPTS+IMAGES.

Much of the scripting bloat can be blamed on the social networking garbage in the sidebar. I'm not saying you can't have that, but there are more efficient ways of doing it... Even so, more of the bloat is crap like that bandwidth wasting idiotic 'slider' garbage mated to idiotic bandwidth wasting idiocy like jQuery. It's another poster child for everything wrong with using jQuery to slap crap on a website that to be frank, has no malfing business on a website in the first place!

The code used to build the site is the typical "blogger" train-wreck... static style inlined in the markup, static scripting in the markup, gibberish heading orders, nothing remotely resembling semantic markup or a logical document structure, absolute URL's for no reason, endless pointless DIV and classes due to the lack of semantics and/or failure to grasp how inheritance works, double-breaks doing paragraph's job, bold and italic around elements that would not be so gramattically/professional writing... end result is hardly a shock; 145k of markup for a dozen content images and 5.4k of plaintext -- anywhere from TEN TO TWELVE TIMES as much crap as should be in the document.

... and that's without talking about the accessibiltiy trifecta of /FAIL/ the design has of fixed width, fixed metric (px) fonts, and a few spots of illegible color contrasts.

Though that's ENTIRELY typical of slapping together off the shelf solutions to build a website. While the end result might work and get a handful of users -- if you care about accessibility, ranking, usability, functionality, hosting cost, and in general getting your site in the hands of as many people as possible, you need to throw that entire mess in the trash and start over with a custom solution using semantic markup, separation of presentation from content, accessibile design, and a whole host of other things that taking the cheap and easy shortcuts you have taken cannot deliver.

Just to give you an idea what I mean, if I was building that same page it is doubtful I'd use more than 15k of markup, 18k of CSS, 30k of javascript, 150k of images, and the total file count wouldn't be more than 24 files.

... so of course it's a fat bloated slow mess that's going to get a low ranking. it's HUGE and to be frank, huge for nothing.

BUT, if you want to use Blogger, with jquery stuff like the image rotator, with multiple social plugins -- that's what you are going to get! The choices you have made to this point led you to this result. That's WHY I'm so harsh on all these choices whenever people choose them. You CANNOT use any of these shortcuts and off the shelf parts without these types of problems in performance as the result!

 

the current one you have up loaded for me in under 3 seconds.

 

deathshadow makes very valid points, and I would take each and every one of them into careful consideration! I couldn't add anything else as he has said it all. His comments have prompted me to redesign my own site! Well put!!