Did a little reading and redid the test using IE7, much better but still don’t know what I am supposed to do
here are the second results
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120510_3R_4A75W/
There’s a lot going on in that page so I’m not sure about priorities and which will get you the biggest wins without some deeper investingation but in looking at it quickly a few things jump out:
1 - Switch to the async snippet for the Google +1 button. Right now you are loading it using a blocking script tag (multiple times - you only need the code once on the page)
2 - Either use an async snippet for the pinterest code or move it to the bottom of the html. It is alos being included 3 times as blocking script tags.
3 - It looks like there are 8 Google Analytics beacons firing at the beginning of the page load - is that expected?
4 - Put an empty IE conditional comment before your first css file. The comments after the 2 css files are causing a break in downloads for newer IE versions: Conditional comments block downloads / Stoyan's phpied.com
5 - There are a lot of small below-the-fold images on the page (product thumbnails and profile pictures). You should see if you can defer those until after the top of the page loads. One way to do that would be to use a placeholder blank image for all of them and then in code at the bottom of the page swap the src for the real image src (or after onload). For browsers that support Data URI’s it may be worthwhile to inline those small images directly.
6 - You have a LOT of application code happening at the top of the document (JQuery, Scriptaculous, setting up the lazy module loader, etc). If you can, move all of that as far down in the page as you can to get out of the way of the html being displayed or use a loader like labjs or control.js to load/run asynchronously.
7 - It looks like you are using an automated resize script that is defaulting to a very high image quality (90+). You should swith it to 85 (or even 75 if the images look good).
Thanks,
-Pat