Hello,
Thank you for your feedback. Loading a site in 3 to 5 seconds is about the average for websites, anything within that range is acceptable. Anything below 3 seconds is quite fast. The template itself actually has very little to do with site speed, most of your site speed is based on four things:
1. The speed of your server. Most shared hosting plans tend to be slower. But even dedicated servers you have to consider the current load on the server.
2. The amount and size of your content. ie: large pictures, or more pictures will slow down a site. In the case of our homepage we have a lot of images, but they need to be there for aesthetics and the page speed still falls within an acceptable load speed. We can strip those things out but it really defeats the overall look of the site.
3. Turning off features you don't need. Any template, not just Shape5 templates, comes with a lot of extra features like Font Awesome, Multibox, Lazy Load, etc. If you don't need them turn them off. Keep in mind that we're one of the few frameworks that allows to turn every feature off and truly turn off because of the css structure we've setup for each feature.
4. The CMS itself outputs A LOT of its own css, javascript, and php functions. Those are all default functions that the template can't control and add to the page load.
To see what I mean. You can compare the homepage of our latest template:
http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.shape5.com/EBBZeQX0To an internal page that showcases just the template itself, which loads in 2.91S:
http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.shape5.com/zXJNldepIt's about a 1 second difference. So the difference is the images and and amount of content. Any site can maintain the images and amount of content on their own, this is just how we setup the demos to showcase its features.
One last example is our free template, which again is just showcasing the template itself and this comes in under 2s:
http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.shape5.com/QY7sU8kQI also just checked the latest template demo urls of some of our competitors and they are all loading in the 4 to 5 seconds range. I didn't get any that loaded in less than 4s.