Taking a look at the waterfall diagram, it is easy to spot the problem. Scoutstuff.org’s static asset load times are 20-50 seconds. This is far longer than optimal and is mostly a result of a shared hosting situation.

A solution to this problem would be to utilize a CDN like Yottaa’s CDN to offload the assets from ScoutStuff.org’s infrastructure onto a global high performance cloud network.

ScoutStuff.org is an interesting performance case because some attention to performance has been applied with some well-known performance optimization techniques.  Further enhancements can be made, for example by utilizing a DataURI to optimize all of the small images.

Re-running the website’s performance test on www.websitetest.org you can see the same performance issues:
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/120309_7S_3HAGZ/

Also, you can see the performance of the data website using Yottaa Site Speed Optimizer and CDN:
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/120309_V7_3HAHT/

The difference is quite dramatic.  The original ScoutStuff.org loaded in 1-2 minutes, and the optimized version loads in 6 – 10 seconds. This performance improvement was achieved in less than a minute and required no configuration changes or software installs by the site owner. Further dramatic improvements to the site’s speed could be made by the site owner in the the Yottaa Site Speed Optimizer configuration panel.

Don?t forget to recommend a site for next week in the comments or on Twitter ? #ExpertEval

Bob (Buffone)