Yeah, it's not surprising that any change would make it faster. Plot twist: OP was previously typing the server response BY HAND.
Those cookies can be a real pain if you make a typo.
On my site I figured out abnormally high load time is caused by under powered mobile devices accessing the site.
This struck me as really weird too. I Was half expecting "and I removed FullHDLogo.BMP but it's probably Go!" toward the end.
16 seconds is crazy slow, a sure sign that previously Something Wasn't Right.
That's a graph from webmaster tools. It may be that the Google Bot is hitting some pathological case with the Django (e.g. server-side sessions) or Disqus. I don't think he ever tested the latency directly.