I'm using cloudflare, rokbooster, css compression, etc on shared hosting (hostmonster). It's mainly just text, script and web-optimized photos and YouTube video embeds but it just loads awfully slow still... even when I've noticed other sites run so fast with even more on it. Performance improved a bit on pingtools when I turned off smart load. The templates just seem SO HEAVY. What else can I turn off to improve speed performance even if it means sacrificing cosmetics, bells and whistles.
Are there other things could I do to the template settings to make my site load faster?
But mostly I'm guessing the main solution is "GET ON A VPS OR DEDICATED SERVER OPTIMIZED FOR SPEED"!! Am I right?
Reason I'm asking is because I'm talking to a web dev guru who said site speed is a HUGE thing for users, and frankly, my site load speed is crap. I mentioned how I loved the ease of gantry and the look of rocketthemes. He then made a point, "What's more important to you? Ease of use on your end? Or ease of use on your users' end?" He's also the one who mentioned that it's imperative to get off shared hosting.
He also called me a noob for being such a WYSIWYG web dev'er, which I agreed to lol.
Either way... I think gantry and rockettheme are great products and I'm trying to improve site speed greatly (because I know there is potential for that) and I don't want to leave rockettheme and gantry even though he's saying I should. Reason I like it so much *is* for the ease of use and it saves me time from learning to code and such - I'd rather spend that time to work on my actual products. Before and *if* I consider leaving rockettheme, I want to make sure that I can't make it just as easy for both sides, web developer and visitor. Is it truly because I need to change hosts as well as many other things- or do I truly have to sacrifice site speed to use these products for how heavy they are in scripting? What should I do?
First of all it takes 5+ seconds before the server is responding and that is just too slow for many users and there's nothing you can do to optimize that besides changing to a faster account or webhost.
One more thing, you have a lot of scripts running and many things that gets its content from other servers and that will slow down your site.
I have several Rockettheme sites and they're not slow at all. But of course the more stuff you add the slower the site will get.