Why is my site so slow?

Hey guys,

Having become acquainted with WordPress about a year ago i set about learning the ins and outs of this amazing bit of software. I wanted to develop my own theme and having just completed it i am about to apply it to a small site that will be used for a bit of affiliate marketing. The site is https://www.ladiesgolftrousers.co.uk.

So far i’ve just added some dummy content and applied to some merchants so they can see how the site will look and feel before i start adding some unique content in the form of product descriptions. My main problem however is that the home page takes too long to load. The internal pages are usually much faster, so after doing a bit of research and a few tests i made some changes;

1. I cleaned up the header and footer code by removing all the unnecessary php such as the calls for the stylesheet, bloginfo description etc and replacing it with html.

2. I installed the w3 total cache plugin and minified the css and javascript, enabled page cache, enabled browser cache and generally followed some excellent advice i found at https://zemalf.com/1443/w3-total-cache/

3. I optimised the database and cleared the post revisions.

4. I removed the <?php get(‘header/sidebar/footer’); ?> for the home page and instead copied and pasted the output html code.

All my images are in either gif, jpeg or png format so i didn’t touch them as i presume this is ok? I only have 11 plug-ins running. After doing all this i ran a report from webpagetest.org and got the following results:

https://www.webpagetest.org/result/110208_F7_6501fcf597d1fa18b3045d428befa4d6/

You can see that the site received a speed test score of 80/100 which i presume is pretty good. The waterfall graph shows a very long wait for the ‘time to first byte’. Nearly 4 seconds! Im not a computer expert so im not entirely sure what this means but from doing a bit of research it appears to be the response time from the database. Could it therefore be a case of poor hosting? I use a linux shared server from Fasthosts and pay about ￡6 per month. I also noticed that the ‘keep-alive’ grade that my site received was an ‘F’. Could this also be linked to a poor server?

Since applying the above changes the site has improved slightly, but is still no where near as fast as i would hope for. I ran further tests from the firefox page speed plugin and again received a healthy 83/100 score. What i cant understand is why these test sites are giving my home page a decent score yet this is not reflected in the user experience. The home page only uses a small amount of javascript for the central banner slideshow so that shouldn’t be a massive hindrance. The main problem seems to be the time it takes for the browser to access the initial database and begin the process of displaying the page.

If anyone could offer some advice as to why this might be happening or ways to improve the page speed i would be extremely grateful. Thanks for your time,

Patrick