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There are other little things that all help as well. For example - never leave old plugins hanging around if you are not using them (WordPress plugins I mean). As a rule - if you don't use it - get rid of it completely.

Keep your database optimised - I would say at least once a week.

Watch out when pages are loading for that little tell-tale url in the browser status bar that sometimes takes forever to load. Connections to and loading stuff in from Facebook or Google or Twitter can cause massive drag on load times sometimes. Fine if you really want it but if not - cut it out.

As to Simple:Press then again - I would say consider if you need all the plugins you may have activated. Choose with care. The template driven nature of SP means that it is easy to cut out whole display sections if you don't want them thus cutting out some priocessing. Turn on the combined CSS and JS cache (global options). If this screws up the display of the forum then turn it off again - it means you host will not allow it but hopefully they will and that can be a good time saver.

But hey - you said right at the top 3 seconds? Seriously? Unless you are on fibre with a dedicated fast server then 3 seconds ain't that bad at all!

mmm. At the moment your site is not actually loading for me at all so I will try and come back later to make a visit.

Inactive plugins CAN have a small effect on WordPress as it does scan the folders every now and then - at least it used to. Not sure I remember why now and they may have removed that so i can not swear to it. But it has always been my policy that the less clutter the more efficient things will be.

DB optimisation is one of those things that most people never do and most probably do not know about but it CAN have an impact in performance over time. It is not a great analogy but think of a database table as a  bookcase. Books get loaded onto the shelf and sooner or later it gets pretty full and then a really big book comes along and there is no room so you lay it aside and then more and more books get laid aside when what you really need to do is add more shelves. In other words the data can get fragmented and the more fragmented it gets (1) the slower data retrieval becomes and (2) the more likely you are to start getting db errors reading data.

It night not be much of a noticeable slow down at first but it can build up. Wp plugins like db-manager allow you to schedule an optimise to run in the background. Or tools like phpMyAdmin which you almost certainly have, allow you to do it and see the results - usually from a drop down menu at the bottom I seem to recall.

And finally. You do have to bear in mind that SP is built on top of  WordPress. There has to be a certain amount of WP code and processing first before the forum starts to load. This is inevitable as SP IS a WP plugin. Only a completely stand alone forum application - with no connection to WP - will be able to avoid this. And forums are - by their very nature - data 'heavy' and dynamic as the data is changing all of the time - unlike a blog where the data is pretty static.

OK - well I don't have a particularly fast broadband connection here but iut is supposed to be 8mps but we never get that of course!

Randon test just now: It took 30 seconds for your Home page to finish loading completely. 10 register. 10 blog and, at that tome, 9 for he forum! Then the next attempt at the forum I abandoned as it never loaded.

The problem was the call the site is making to wd-dge-share-this. And then on the next attempt it was ssl-gstartic. Your site on every page load is making a LOT of remote http requests to various services and on my tests there is hardly a page loaded where at least one of those services is responding very slowly.

In the general mix of things I actually thought the forum pages were loading up OK but too many page loads seem to get stuck...