Here is my report. Is there any documentation, whitepaper, helpfiles, FAQ, to tell me what I need to do. The report shows what is going on, but is not very helpful for how to fix is. Any help is appreciated.
There are a lot of resources that will give you the background to understand how to improve but asking here is a great first step because you will get people who have a lot of experience looking at waterfalls give you some quick wins (I’m not a huge fan of automated recommendations because they could miss the biggest wins and have you focusing on all sorts of things).
There are 2 very quick things you can do that will have an amazing impact on the performance of your site:
1 - Enable HTTP keep-alives on your server. Every request is having to make a new connection to your server (doubling the round trips). If your hosting provider will not enable it and you are not looking to change providers you can use a service like cloudflare which will sit in front of your hosting provider and take care of it for you (though any hosting provider that doesn’t enable keep-alives doesn’t deserve your business).
2 - Merge all of those javascript files into a LOT fewer (if you need to keep it modular than a few files is fine but no more than 3-4 files). Javascript resources block the browser’s execution until it has downloaded and executed the javascript and each one of those is adding 2 round trips to your server - serially (IE should be downloading 6 at a time so something else is going on as well but we can figure that out after they are merged). It looks like you are using Dojo and you should be doing a build before releasing the page to merge the libraries - Creating Builds - Archived Tutorial - Dojo Toolkit
#2 will shave 12 seconds off of your load time (and start render time). #1 should just be a config change and is really easy to do if your host supports it and will show significant gains as well.
Once you take care of the items above there will still be a lot more opportunity to make things faster but you should not look at anything else until both of them are finished.
As far as resources go, Steve’s books are pretty much the bible for front-end web performance: http://stevesouders.com/ (under Books).
Patrick,
Thank you very much for your detailed response. We have two sites - collector-actionfigures and collector-modeltrains. Both are the same code with different databases.
We will start working on your suggestions. I’ll touch base back with you after we complete some of the work.
Thank you again,
Doug
“If your hosting provider will not enable it and you are not looking to change providers you can use a service like cloudflare which will sit in front of your hosting provider and take care of it for you (though any hosting provider that doesn’t enable keep-alives doesn’t deserve your business).”
More than happy to answer any questions about CloudFlare, if you decide to go down that road.