21 seconds for first view and 6 seconds for repeat view…
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120806_ZK_MN1/
I know this is very slow but my other site has first view time of 106 sec.
Can the experts look at the results and recommend 2-3 things I can do to get this down to 3-4 seconds for first view?
The site is on wordpress.
3-4 seconds is going to be difficult if you are on a shared hosting plan.
1 - Switch to a fast hosting provider (WPEngine is good for wordpress). 10 seconds of your first-view time is just to generate and send the base page back and that’s a combination of slow hosting and WordPress. You can tune/optimize your app to make it faster but to get REALLY fast you need to switch hosting.
2 - Merge your css and js files. You have close to 50 separate files and the browser needs to request each of them separately. Something like W3 Total Cache can help automate the combining for you
3 - Use a CDN. That will help speed up the requests for the remaining content (Something like CloudFlare is a free/low-cost option)
You probably still won’t be at 3-4 seconds but you’ll be in a LOT better shape than you are now and then you can re-evaluate how things look. My guess is that that would get you down to 5-6 seconds.
Make sure you don’t have too many plugins running (these can seriously impact the performance of your site, notably if you have multiple social media buttons on your site). You should also remove any inactive plugins or themes.