[morog]

Thanks for the all the critiques that is very valuable feedback.

wrt choosing Wordpress - it certainly does have a lot of drawbacks like you mention, our reasons for going with it:

1. There are about 10 web designers in our town, they all use Wordpres...Wordpress runs just about every small -= medium site in South Africa, so if I fall under a bus theres someone to pick up the (website) pieces

2. We had a very broad set of requirements - event ticketing with seating plans, accommodation booking with calendars, payment processing, members directory with subscription and free options. Since this was very much an 'after-hours' project we needed fairly plug-and-play functionality.

3. Low budget for hosting - this site needed to run on a shared server that already had PHP / MySQL

But thanks again for the tips, I will review them with the team and I'm sure we can get most sorted! (the broken links were Wordpress permalinks misbehaving...oops)

Regarding speed - we have done a fair bit of optimizing Litespeed cache and reducing the unnecessary scripts that get loaded but yea its still slower than we would like. Also since we are not using a CDN, if you are far from South Africa latency will be a big issue.

All the best & greetings from Greyton!