General Plugin question. What do they do to my site?

https://www.webpagetest.org/result/120725_7M_M44/1/details/
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/120725_XB_M6F/

1. You have a couple of 404 errors which will cause a delay while the browser tries to load them
2. You could stand to enable keep-alive, if you can. See: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html There are advantages and disadvantages though: https://abdussamad.com/archives/169-Apache-optimization:-KeepAlive-On-or-Off.html
3. Likewise with caching, which means setting max-age or expires headers.See: https://www.askapache.com/htaccess/speed-up-sites-with-htaccess-caching.html
4. You are loading a lot of Javascript and CSS, which usually has a big impact, and reducing those requests would help. If you can combine those or remove some of those resources it would help.
5. In your case, by far your biggest problem seems to be your server, or with the netowrk connection to your server. See all that orange? That is the time spent waiting on the web server, not transmitting. Just waiting. It looks like your server just bogs down and the browser has to wait several seconds for a response, and that happens several times per page load. It works out to about half your load time. This isn’t even backend (PHP/MySQL) processing. You are just waiting to connect to the server. See: https://www.webpagetest.org/forums/printthread.php?tid=10331 It is going to be hard to fix. Unless you have system level access to the server you will probably need to contact your host.

From some locations the connection issues isn’t as bad:
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/120725_HY_MSX/1/details/
That may just be browser related though: https://www.webpagetest.org/result/120725_G8_N17/

Then again: https://www.webpagetest.org/result/120725_E3_MWE/
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/120725_6D_MYH/

Where is your server and where is your audience?

Hi, Wow, what a lot to understand. The hosting company is in the US and my audience in the US and UK.

Does it matter how many Plugins I have listed that are not activated?
Regards

Drachsi

Most of the time a disabled plugin won’t cause any issue… most of the time. To be safe, if you aren’t using the plugins, get rid of them.

I asked about your audience and your server because the first time I checked via a server in London you got much better performance than from US servers. I think had more to do with the browser though.

You have a real issue with that server connection though. Your host needs to look into that.