Hi Ian,

It does indeed load slow!

There is an image file on that site which is 2.7mb in size - This is probably the reason. File in question is http://www.peterichardsonastro.com/style/content.jpg

Edit, Actually there are two problem images, the other is http://www.peterichardsonastro.com/style/bg.jpg, Which again, looks like the background image AGAIN, which is another 2.7mb - BOTH of these files are being loaded - Adds up to a whopping 5.4 Megabytes. I've no idea how the site was coded - I haven't time to look at the source, but these are the culprits for sure.

If these files were reduced (and they could probably be reduced to about 20k) the page load issue would disappear. I'd question why the same image is used twice but with different file name as well.

I've gone ahead and optomised the images for you, which I've attached here. If your friend uploads these to http://www.peterichardsonastro.com/style/ that should help. I've resized them to a width of 1920px which should cover the majority of monitors. They now come in at about 25k each.

Andy.

Yeah, there are like 30+ images loading.

The main culpret is this bad boy: http://www.peterichardsonastro.com/style/content.jpg

While 2.7mb isn't a large file by any means, the fact of the matter is it is just a background gradient. This can be done with CSS. Also the image loads incredibly slow (6 seconds here), so likely a hosting problem. Moving to a better host should solve the loading time by having a better transfer rate, however tell him to learn about CSS gradients.

Use optimize Images in jpeg formates

On occasion we have had success, after compressing images, with hosting images on Picasa

Could also improve using a CDN like Cloudflare.

WebPagetest Test Result - Dulles : peterichardsonastro.com - 11/10/13 14:26:46

There's also the fact that the server he hosts his website on has at least 3,116 other websites hosted on it (or at least pointed to it). Check 94.136.40.37 IP Address Whois | DomainTools.com for details. Even if all of them may not be live at the same time and serving traffic, they do contribute to server resources in one way or another.

Point being, besides the slow load due to a lot of images, which later get cached, I see at least a 7-ish second delay between the request for the site being initiated and first bit of content being delivered. That is not due to an image being big, it's just the server in question that's lousy.

Most shared servers I've looked at are just plain lousy delivering the first bit of content. Some worse but I suspect it's the nature of shared hosting on Apache.

My first suggestion would be to analyse your website speed problems with GTMetrix - Latest Performance Report for: http://www.peterichardsonastro.com/ | GTmetrix

This is how I speed up all my websites. Just go down the list of recommendations fixing one by one.

in our country websites which are on foreign hosts have this problem,when they replace the site on a national one everything seem much more better!

Simplest way to check a site load time is to check using google page speed test or tools.pingdom.com Both of them show page speed issues and highlight ways to make them better