Cookies good and cookies bad

[pmeenan]

I wouldn't worry about the cookies - your Friend's doesn't apear to have any and yours looks to only have one. Try testing your site with the www in front of the address, that will get rid of the first redirect and help a bit.

Beyond that it looks like both of your sites are based on wordpress. If you can, I recommend installing W3 Total Cache.

You should be able to configure it to do page and query caching which should help the first byte time (and that should be an easy configuration). A little more difficult but well worth it would be to configure it to combine your css and javascript files as well.

Thanks,

-Pat