title: Are long Drupal page loads normal?
body: <p>We just had a design company redo our site from the ground up in Drupal and the first thing I notice is that the pages now take 5-6 seconds to load while they make 100+ separate requests to the server. Our old site loaded in 1.9s and only needed 27 server requests to get all its data.  Just clicking a different tab now in the Drupal menu takes 5 seconds to bring up the new page, while this only took 1.3 seconds on the old site. If the new site did a lot more than the old site I might understand, but it doesn't. It's basically the same, but "easier to maintain."</p>
  
  <p>To my thinking, nothing tells you immediately that a site is professional like a landing page that just "snaps' in front of your eyes before you expect it. Ours is a site that sells products, so it's important to convey "professional" as soon as possible.  So this Drupal performance is a real disappointment. I recall reading that Amazon found that their revenues went up 1% for each 100ms they were able to shave off of their page load times. It's important, today, to get time down to the absolute minimum, to compete.</p>
  
  <p>So are long load times just the way things are with Drupal, or does it seem like something is very wrong?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks</p>