I've built my own theme step-by-step following tutorials from wordpress.com. [Wp is installed in a directory & isn't serving the entire site - essentially I'm using wp as a micro-site CMS].
A post example is: http://www.truevoyage.com/db/thailand/koh-tao/scuba-diving-tours.html
Load times for my wp pages are very slow and the back-end too is painfully slow.
Plus I frequently hit 503 and 500 server errors.
I'm worried I've done something silly in developing the theme?
If I use http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ my wp pages perform slowly and have long 'wait' and 'connect' times.
So far I've kept the wp installation very light on plugins. [Only Jetpack, Advanced Custom Themes & Preserved HTML Editor Markup are enabled].
Plus I've run the theme-check plug-in and eliminated most errors. The one's not eliminated are irrelevant to what I'm trying to achieve [as far as I know].
I've experimented by switching back to the default theme - 'twentyeleven' and load times appeared slightly better. So I suspect the problem is with my theme.
However, even using my own theme the load time seems intermittent. Sometimes ok, other times fails to load.
I'm out of ideas - can anyone help?
Am I overlooking something obvious?