The best way to expedite the loading of this website

Question

The website is http://www.kikbo.com

Is it slow enough to be costing me conversions (Maybe people in Europe)?

Here's the pingdom load time test result: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/t71Fj5LGf/http://kikbo.com

The biggest "offenders" seem to be the fading javascript, the pre-loaded images, and the like button.

Suggestions?

What I did to make it go faster

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120103_H6_2QFXT/1/details/

Thanks. Was able to shave off some seconds here and there.

In order of page load speed increases:

1. Moving most of the js to the back and the css to the front
2. Not pre-loading the images in the roll-over image gallery
3. loading prototype.js from google's servers
4. making the gallery of rollovers a css sprite
5. Minifying

Gzipping is basically impossible on GoDaddy and putting my files on google's CDN would be a good improvement.

Answer 1

Right then...

For starters here's a page load waterfall generated using the Amsterdam instance of webpagetest.org http://www.webpagetest.org/result/111230_1A_2PFQ6/1/details/

Your server looks like it's pretty slow at generating/serving out the base page and static assets but there are also other issues.

You want to load the CSS as soon as possible but delay the JS as long as possible.

I would try to simplify the CSS files then merge and minify them.

For the JS, work out what you really need to render the page and delay everything else until later either by including it at he end of the body or loading it asynchronously see Stoyan's article for how you should load the social media buttons http://www.phpied.com/social-button-bffs/

You also need to turn on gzip for the text based content e.g. HTML, CSS, JS etc. Suspect your images can be compressed further too.

Based on what I saw in the waterfall the way you're using JS is a big part of the slowness.