Need a consultation - Slow initial page display

I’ve been chasing down a performance problem on this site for a few weeks and need a quick consultation to see if there is something I’m missing.

Symptom is slow load time in the browser (1.5 - 3 seconds of wait time) then the content loads fairly quickly.

Is the slow initial load have to do with the order the resources are being called? or is just the size of the images and the speed with which they are being delivered?

Any insight is greatly appreciated!

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/141112_N4_1AN8/1/details/

Test from Europe, Windows 7, Chrome, first open almost instantly. After the home page, other pages are rendered after ~2 sec waiting. Looking at the graph, there are several js files, maybe they can be combined into one, fonts are taking relatively long time do download, there are many icons but they are loading fast. I’m not expert for WordPress but maybe several css files and the theme are the reason for waiting before rendering.

Looking at the site code it looks like you’re doing a lot of things right and part of what you are seeing is from bugs in Chrome that I’m actively working on. This one in particular: 317785 - chromium - An open-source project to help move the web forward. - Monorail which finds the js you have at the end of your document and loads it at the beginning.

Don’t fret too much about the timing of the JS. Hopefully changes should be landing soon that will make it much less of an issue and we’re working on fixing that on the browser side.

One thing that WILL help is if you can inline your css (or at least experiment with it). Preferably just the part that is needed for the above-the-fold but all of your css is small enough that it might make sense to inline all of it regardless.

Beyond those you start to become bandwidth constrained. You could choreograph the image loading so that only the above-the-fold images load initially and then load the other ones (maybe after onload) so they aren’t competing for bandwidth.