Joomla vs. Non-Joomla site <yikes>

[pmeenan]

It is a combination of host and application problem (the two depend on each other a lot). The exact same application running on SSD's and dedicated hardware could be made to run significantly faster or a different application on the same host could also run a lot faster (like your old site). Joomla is not known for being particularly fast and does a lot of database interactions.

The thing you should be really scared about is the first run of the new site: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120327...1/details/ which looks like it returned an error: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120327...reen_shot/

It looks like it took so long to serve that the full content didn't serve and an error was passed back to the user. Subsequent loads were faster (but still painful 1-5 seconds for the back end) probably because the first load caused a bunch of things to get cached in the database.

You can enable server-side page caching in Joomla (control panel->global configuration->system->cache settings) but that won't help with the first visit problem, it will just hide the issue for a lot of users.

Don't focus too much on the grades or images yet, you need to fix the back-end (first byte performance) before you even look at doing anything on the front-end.