I am currently working on a site that is displaying relatively long (~5sec) render times on the home page. It is a WordPress install, with quite a bit going on, but it seems excessively long to load. I have noticed through the web inspector several big gaps in the load timeline where nothing seems to be going on. Does anyone have any idea what might be going on? I have confirmed there are no errors in the code that are being signaled load. The site can be found at http://ewokdown.com. For comparison, you can see that http://ewokdown.com/reviews loads quite snappily by comparison.
Thanks!
Elliott
Checked out your website, and the delay was not caused by anything on the client-side. Rather the delay occurred while waiting for the server to respond to my browser's request. Once the resources were loaded, rendering took a standard (relatively short) amount of time.
What does this mean? It means there's likely nothing specifically wrong with the way your site renders, it whatever server-side code you have for your site that ends up hanging.
Word to the wise: I wouldn't sweat the initial page load times all that much. User's expect there to be some delay, and once the resources are cached browsers typically do a good job of reducing future load times.