What's our easiest, quickest "win" for page load speed?

[danatanseo]

This is a follow up question to an earlier thread located here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/we-just-fixed-a-meta-refresh-unified-our-link-profile-and-now-our-rankings-are-going-crazy

In that thread, Dr. Pete Meyers said "You'd really be better off getting all that script into external files."

Our IT Director is willing to spend time working on this, but he believes it is a complicated process because each script must be evaluated to determine which ones are needed "pre" page load and which ones can be loaded "post."

Our IT Director went on to say that he believes the quickest "win" we could get would be to move our SSL javascript for our SSL icon (in our site footer) to an internal page, and just link to that page from an image of the icon in the footer. He says this javascript, more than any other, slows our page down.

My question is two parts:

1. How can I verify that this javascript is indeed, a major culprit of our page load speed?

2. Is it possible that it is slow because so many styles have been applied to the surrounding area? In other words, if I stripped out the "Secured by" text and all the syles associated with that, could that effect the efficiency of the script?

3. Are there any negatives to moving that javascript to an interior landing page, leaving the icon as an image in the footer and linking to the new page?

Any thoughts, suggestions, comments, etc. are greatly appreciated!

Dana

[StreamlineMetrics]

1. Here's a tool to show what takes the longest to load on your page - http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

Let me know if JavaScript is in fact the culprit here and I can provide some additional help.

[danatanseo]

Thanks Stremline. Yes, it was clear from this report from Pingdom.com that our SSL validation icon was the biggest culprit bogging down our pagespeed. We are moving the JS to an interior page and then linking to that page via the .gif image icon to see if this helps.

After that, is seems our next biggest culprits could be images. Some of them are association images that could easily be combined into one optimized image.

The two "problem child" javscripts seem to be  "iaf.js" and "CCI-utils.js"  - Although I don't code javascript I believe these pertain to site functions like the popout navigation menus.

Awesome tool. Thank you. Do you have any developer tools that can help determine when javascripts load (pre versus post), etc. Thoughts?

Thanks again!

Dana