Loading Issues-Initial Page?

[machinerye]

I've been researching the slow loading issue I am having with my store and unfortunately have not been able to come up with much researching old threads. So here we go!

The problem is when you go to my website, the initial home page takes sometimes up to 13 seconds to load!

My website-

www.ewkarms.com

The funny thing is computer sits there for the 13 seconds and nothing is happening...then BAM! Pages loads right away. After the initial long wait, all the other pages load right away.

Everything on the admin side works super fast, even the first page load.

Looking through the old threads, came up with with a cool little tool at siteloadtest.com Its saying 549ms for page load time. 435K total page size.

I am hosting with Webmasters, Have Zencart 1.3.9h, my SQL 5.1.54.

I don't think I would have a problem with image or page side, I am kind of leaning to some sort of problems with the database, but not sure what to checking into there.

Parse time is running around 13 seconds according to the log file.

Thanks a bunch for any ideas!!!

[Kim]

Looking through the old threads, came up with with a cool little tool at siteloadtest.com Its saying 549ms for page load time. 435K total page size.

Start by optimizing your images - an "ideal" page is under 100k.

[machinerye]

Okay, thanks, I wasn't aware of that! Thanks again!

[machinerye]

Okay, I finally got around to playing with it some more. I eliminated all the product images on the home page, and got the page size down to 40K. If anything, it seems to be taking longer now! About 17 seconds this morning.

Same deal as before, initial page load is very slow-no matter what the page is. After the first page loads no problem at all on my website site with the rest of the pages. The problem is only after you open a new web browser and directly type in the address for my website or click on a link from a search engine. Again, after you initially "connect" to my website, it works great. For testing, I keep closing the web browser, and clearing the history.

Really appreciate any ideas of what it could be!!!

[joejoejoe]

Could it be your local connection - what happens when you try to visit other ZC stores in a different tab at the same time?

Could it be your host - what hapens when you try visiting other sites from your hosting company?

Are you calling up any external scripts? (Do you have Google Analytics or +1 installed?)

[stevesh]

Main page loaded in a couple of seconds here.

Recommendation - set the font-size in the stylesheet body rule back to 62.5% and size the various fonts you want to change individually.