Hello. These are my test results http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120726_NX_WFJ/.
I built the website using i-web, and it’s hosted on 123-reg.co.uk.
Do I need to pay somebody to do this for me, or is it possible to start from scratch, and learn to do all this yourself?
Do I need to move hosts, as I have read that 123 are not great.
Thanks for any advice.
Depending on how willing you are, you can certainly learn it all yourself. It will take quite a bit of reading and searching but there’s a TON of information out there. If you haven’t already you should start by reading High Performance Websites - http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596529309?tag=stevsoud-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0596529309&adid=00GNM1ZWW77KSD0RERXN&
I’m not familiar with 123 but there are 2 absolutely critical issues with your site that are within their control. Enabling persistent connections and gzip. Some shared hosting providers disable both of these in order to try to get more capacity out of their systems but it has a disastrous impact on performance. Just enabling those two would cut your load times in half and it’s a simple server configuration change. If they can’t do it or aren’t willing to then you should switch hosting providers. If they can then the rest of the performance for things they are specifically responsible for looks good (back-end response times are great) and the rest of the optimizations would be on you.
One possible option to use if your host is not willing to fix the server config would be to use something like cloudflare in front of your site. Their free tier will basically fix all of the server configuration problems and will also give you the benefits of a CDN and you won’t have to switch hosting providers but you do need to be able to switch the DNS over to them and that may be difficult if 123 is also providing your DNS.