Meanwhile, the whole site needs to essentially be "re-indexed" by Google etc. because all the forum links are different. (Which I knew would happen, but I didn't think it would affect site speed...)
So in a couple days if pages are still loading slowly, I'll get back with my host provider and see what else I can do to fix it. It's also likely that some of the plugins I'm using are slowing things down, so I might have to drop some functionality until I can figure out how to write a better plugin to take its place (which, well.... could take awhile).
For sure, the basic forum features like posting a topic, replying to a topic, etc., are not going away - but the Visual editor, the method for adding images, the lack of an attachment option - these features probably will change over time. What we have now is the best I can do - but once the dust settles, so to speak, I hope to actually learn some real PHP, JavaScript, etc. and then I can most definitely improve some features.
The other thing I'm looking into, and it might change or it might not: I'm currently using a plugin for the forum links, that shortens the URLs when you get to a forum topic (i.e. it takes it from forum/kemco-games/exe-create/alphadia/topicname down to forum/alphadia/topicname, except, that it puts the topic # in front of it too, so like: forum/alphadia/432-topicname).
I'm happy with how this is working, but I'm searching for a way to shorten all the forum URLs, so that whichever forum you go to would be forum/name. That might never happen, so the forum URLs might stay the way they are now, but if I can do it that way, I will. Of course, either way it doesn't really affect the user; it's just me being nit-picky. I guess it could hurt my SEO if forum/kemco-games/exe-create got indexed, and then later I changed it forum/exe-create, but whatevs. (That's kid-speak for "whatever")
Anyway, now through New Year's I'm pretty much gonna be focused on improving site speed, and seeing if there's some plugins that maybe I need to get rid of in order to accomplish that - and of course making sure that the essential forum features keep working.
There's some other stuff I wanna do, to improve other parts of the site and to allow members to create walkthrough pages again, but a lot of that might have to wait until next month. So I just want you all to know where I'm at, and hopefully what to look forward to.