There's several ways to speed things up:
1. For non-commercial use, check out the Concrete on Steroids thread. A very long read and the miser code may not work with some of your add-ons very well, but it does increase performance a lot.
2. Make sure your images are all optimized.
3. Check your cache settings
4. Search the forums. There are a ton of threads going already.

One of the easiest things I have done that provides pretty good bang for my buck is adding the following to my htaccess file:




gzip needs to be enabled on your server at the WHM level, but this gives a pretty nice boost in speed, with little work, and as far as my experience goes, little to no risk.

(I typed too slow...lol My-Tooq says it well)
There are a lot of ways to improve and several threads that have already discussed (Andrew's 5 speed tips, Miser, and a recent speed tip in the "How to" area of documentation).

I use the same template you're using with very good speed results, so I don't think its your template or Concrete.
1) Check your cache / speed settings in the dashboard under "Sitewide settings"
2) Add one or more of the speed tips discussed on this site
and/or

3) Check with your host provider! Shared hosting solutions (like GoDaddys) actually can have your site file structure on one server and the database on another (slowing down performance dramatically. If this is the case, customer service at your provider may be able to help


All just suggestions of course ;)

Trace route times out:

TraceRoute to 38.113.1.225 [riverwood.net]

Hop (ms) (ms) (ms) IP Address Host name
1 0 0 0 8.9.232.73 xe-5-3-0.edge3.dallas1.level3.net
2 0 0 1 8.9.232.73 xe-5-3-0.edge3.dallas1.level3.net
3 0 0 0 4.69.151.158 ae-83-83.ebr3.dallas1.level3.net
4 20 1 20 4.69.134.22 ae-7-7.ebr3.atlanta2.level3.net
5 20 20 20 4.69.134.22 ae-7-7.ebr3.atlanta2.level3.net
6 20 32 20 4.69.148.242 ae-63-63.ebr1.atlanta2.level3.net
7 32 32 32 4.69.143.214 ae-1-100.ebr2.washington12.level3.net
8 36 36 36 4.69.148.49 -
9 36 40 64 4.69.140.97 ae-1-8.bar2.boston1.level3.net
10 40 40 40 4.69.140.89 ae-0-11.bar1.boston1.level3.net
11 40 41 41 4.69.132.241 ae-7-7.car1.boston1.level3.net
12 41 41 41 4.53.60.26 north-atlan.car1.boston1.level3.net
13 41 42 42 216.75.151.9 -
14 Timed out 249 Timed out 216.75.151.9 -
15 Timed out Timed out Timed out -
16 Timed out Timed out Timed out -
17 Timed out Timed out Timed out -
18 Timed out Timed out Timed out -
Trace aborted.

PSINet looks like a slow server.

These problems are almost always related to having a crappy host. I've had good luck with hostpapa.com and a2hosting.com . There's always the Concrete5.org hosting. Any switch you go with here will speed things up ten fold.

Also check out 12345j's optimizer:

https://github.com/12345j/Tinifier-Concrete5-Optimiser...

Thank you all for your quick responses. I am going to try the suggestions. Is anyone familiar with IPower? That is who this site is hosted with...just wondering if it's that they have slow servers? Didn't have any problems with the site before I created the Concrete5 site. Other sites I've created in FrontPage (yes I'm arcaic)...have all loaded fine. The only one that is slow is the Concrete5 one.

I've had slowness issues before with iPower. A lot of hosts will provide a trial period where you can get your $ back if its not fast enough.

Dreamhost and Inmmotionhosting are two Im happy with.

steve

Hi Guys,

Same here. I started to work with concrete5 and just loved is. I first did some tryouts on on a local XAMP installation and it looked slow. Now I've put it online and the loading times are just terrible.

take a look and please give me some advice:http://www.just-c.be

I feel your pain. I did load it and it did take a bit. I had an interesting thing happen with our site. We were in the process of switching over from front page to the Concrete5 site. Once that was initiated, now the site loads fine. We didn't do anything but change the pointer.

One thing I received while asking for help was a link to a gentleman named Andrew who had developed a fix. My husband installed it and it made some other mess up but did help with the speed. In doing a review on it, others said it messed up some things too, others said it worked great. I guess you wouldn't know until you tried. Here is the link we found...

http://andrewembler.com/concrete5/5-easy-ways-to-speed-up-a-concret... This was taken from a posting. If you type in google slow load times for concrete5...the posting was in a string of threads under chit chat.

Hope this helps. Like I said it did speed it up but also messed up some files that we did recover once we took it off so it was not permanent. Could be worth a try.

I just converted your main page image into a jpg with the blue background, and ran it through ImageOptim (a free program that removes unnecessary meta data), and it reduced the file size from 135kb to 86kb with no visible loss of quality ("save for web" in photoshop at quality 80). Rule of thumb is PNGs for images like gradients and solid colors, while JPG is great at anything with texture ( for more in depth info look up how PNG is lossless and JPG is lossy ). Since you don't use a texture in your backgrounds, you can simply make the background of your image match the background on your site. I noticed you are using all PNG images. You will save many kb if you switch to JPGs for images.

Second thing, make sure you compress your production CSS, as you will save up to 40-50% in file sizes. You can't do much about the block file includes, but you got down and dirty, you could remove all the includes from your blocks and compress them into your main.css file. This will also reduce http requests, which will speed your times up.

Third, make sure you use sprites as much as possible, again because every http request takes time!

Fourth, only parse the CSS you need to parse. If you are parsing a huge main.css when you don't need to, you may be wasting valuable server time.

Something I intend to try out is maybe making a separate (shorter, smaller) CSS file with only the css I need parsed in it, and simply link directly to the other css without parsing them. Maybe do something like parse colors.css, and don't parse main css.
Hope I helped! :-D

Please check this

http://code.google.com/speed/tools.html...

http://www.webpagetest.org/compare...

and others