Reduce the waiting time on my Wordpress site

I have been configuring a wordpress theme for a month now, but know I want to increase the speed. I have read different tips on increasing speed, which have dramatically helped, but it seems that the initial load to my domain is taking the longest. Using the "net" tab in fireb开发者_JS百科ug tool, it shows me the different processes being ran. I have changed some static php requests in the header, footer, and other parts of my theme. I have removed any plugins, Im not using; and optimized some images. I optimized my database by permanently removing post/page revisions. I have removed garbage database entries.

I should mention that I did use W3 Total Cache, which did increase the speed of the site, but some of the caching options were confusing as some recent changes to the site were not being picked up. My site is based on my members creating/updating coupon and offer enteries, so its imperative that they are able to see any changes made to the site and their personal listings. So for the time being I deactivated it.

Why does it take so long (avg. 8 secs) to load the first request, which is my domain? How to I increase this waiting time?

This is the site: savingsulove dot com

It's probably because you're hosting the site at a budget host (traceroute says GoDaddy, right?) and their shared host database server is super duper slow (very likely). Move it to a faster, probably more spendy host and it will likely solve your speed issues.

Wordpress has a configuration option for logging SQL queries, which will help you identify bottlenecks occurring in the back-end. It can be enabled by adding this line to your configuration file:

/* wp-config.php */
define('SAVEQUERIES', true);

Next, add these two lines to the end of footer.php in your Wordpress theme:

/* footer.php */
global $wpdb;
print_r($wpdb->queries);

This will give you detailed information about the SQL queries executed in the course of generating each page you load. If you'd like this information presented in a human-readable format, consider integrating Wordpress with FirePHP. There's a good tutorial here.