optimization - Help speed up website performance, especially in IE8

Question

Where would you start if you were trying to make this webpage load faster?

Site: Game-On Glove

It is JavaScript heavy because the goal was a one-page layout with light-boxed checkout. The hosting platform creates some limitations in the server side code department.

If there's a Flash or JavaScript banner that anyone knows of that looks as nice, is XML-driven, and actually takes advantage of parallel downloads, please let me know. I chose to pre-load the bunch of 250px images that appear in our Flash gallery to take advantage of parallel downloads, which our Flash banner of choice doesn't take advantage of.

Apart from that though, in the Firefox Firebug NET tab I see:

1. Initial gameonglove.com request takes 6.75s. This seems high. I wonder if I could start reducing it by packaging up most of the JavaScript into external files.
2. To reduce our massive number of images I could replace the white background with grey borders with some kind of rounded border instead of dedicating an image for each background.
3. Facebook, addthis.com, and google-analytics.com downloads take about 7s, and put the rest of the page load on hold. Problem being, they wait for the onLoad event to fire I believe. I'm not sure what else to use as the event trigger, but I probably shouldn't have to resort to something else.
4. I'm not entirely sure which hostnames to keep, and which ones to host on our server to optimize our DNS to parallel download ratio.

Avoiding DNS lookups cuts response times, but reducing parallel downloads may increase response times. My guideline is to split these components across at least two but no more than four hostnames. http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

Help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You could try Pingdom, which purely measures time to download objects (no JavaScript processing time or anything like that).

I tested your site and it looks like it needs >1.7MiB of information, which could be partially where your slowdown is occurring.