wordpress very slow

I'm testing wordpress and it takes a long time (typically about 5-7 seconds) to display pages. This is true with both the site and the control panel. I can live with this, though it's annoying. However I doubt that many people will put up with it and so participation in my blog will not be that high. When a web site is sluggish, people tend to navigate away from it.

My static HTML pages that do not utilize Wordpress come up almost instantly. Is there a tuning trick that I should be using? I did install wp-cache but it seems not to make much difference. This is version 2.3 but was also true of the previous version.

wp-cache should help but I think that wordpress has gradually been implementing its own caching system that makes the benefits less.

You could remove any plugins that aren't necessary as these tend to slow things down. If it is just the main index that is particularly slow then you could also consider reducing the number of posts it shows.

Also try http://tools.pingdom.com or http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ which will give some indication of what exactly is the slowest part of the site loading process and give you a starting point for what to try to speed up.

I've also found firebug and yslow to the helpful.