The load time for the site seems incredibly long.

It's just a thing, that I increasingly observe. I don't know, if it has been that way forever, but LoA seems to take ages to load, compared to other sites, and I even regularly end up with "Time Out, Gateway somethingsomething" errors and can load the site only on the second or consecutive tries.

I haven't thought about it for a long time and just accepted it, but maybe you can check whether there is a way to optimize the loading algorithms for the site.

It definitely has times when it is just hammered and struggling. Load tiime optimization is definitely something I've put time into every few months, but I'm constantly working to keep up. I hope that more can be done with the rebuild over the summer.