I have looked at "5 easy ways to speed up Concrete5 Site". It is highly recommended. My problem is that jquery is necessary for my theme and drop-down menu. Taking away functionality for speed seems a bit strange. APC, XCache or Zend Optimizer is not explained in detail so what to do exactly is not clear.

I am using a shared host. It is not optimized for Concrete5 but otherwise they have been excellent. Changing the host doesn't address the actual problem. I might have the same problem with my next host. Of course, an expensive host solution might perform better but money matters too.

There are lots of forum posts on this subject and most of the solutions did not work for me! Switching to emergency cache made things worse. Adding a define('cache_frontend_options',....) to site.php did not work.

Believe it or not the suggestion to disable page caching in the dashboard (sitewide settings), did help a little. Why turning off cache helped in my particular host is a mystery to me?

Best suggestion I can make is to just try what some of the other forum posts suggest. If there is no change I would undo or back out that option or code immediately. You probably don't want a bunch of modified options and changes to site.php or php.ini (specially if they did not fix anything). Maybe later a miscellaneous option change might bite you with a future add-on or new block.

Hopefully, someone will offer you more specific advice. It would be helpful if there were more discussion about tools to test and/or isolate the cause of slow sites. Understanding the cause is the first step to finding the cure. I plan to ask my web host for help once I have tried the Concrete5 suggestions. Your web host, in most cases, has a help desk which is more than happy to provide you support with configuration issues.

Check out the Miser download ( link on http://www.concrete5.org/community/forums/customizing_c5/miser-web-... thread )
This is really easy to install. I've tried it on a couple of "problem sites" and was amazed at the page speed difference, both subjectively and by Google's page speed test.

About Miser. http://www.webpagetest.org now shows "fully loaded - first view" at just over 3 seconds. As advertised, Miser was easy to install too. Hopefully, you have similar success SpencerNash. BTW, a week ago I scored 18 seconds on "fully loaded - first view". I did replace slideshow with an image before Miser. 3 seconds, wow!!!

Remember, there are lots of forum posts with other solutions. If Miser does the job, you have success. As a newbie, I have found solutions in these forums but sometimes it wasn't the first or most discussed solution. Tweaking my website to my Web Host has taken a little work.