I have been told by a couple of web designers that my site http://thaihealingmassage.com is loading slowly because the template is using tables instead of div's.
You have to excuse my ignorance. I don't know the meaning of any of this.
My question is: It is possible to use div's instead of tables within ATA, or is it possible to convert tables into div's?

excuse my language, but they are full of it. There are so many variables when talking about page load time that to state "this is the thing...' is malarkey. While a tabe takes more time to render that div's, the effect of this on a modern computer should be negligable.

A quick look at your site shows that 51% of the load time involves images. You have a slideshow in the left sidebar displaying images that are roughly 500 x 380 but displaying in a 185px sidebar, so they all have to be resized. If eanc image is 100k and you have ten of them, that means you are downloading 1meg of images. cutting the images by a fifth would save 800k of downloads and teh time involved.

Do this is you want to see the speed effects.

Run the site thru a page load tester like pingdom. Record the reslts. Now disable all plugins and run it again and compare the results.

load time can even be effected by the number of other sites on the same server as you are and how busy they are at teh same time.

Thanks for the explanation. I built this site all by myself. I am clearly not a web designer and I know nothing about coding. Whenever I ask someone for help with improving my site layout, structure and performance, they always try to sell me a brand new custom site which locks me out of most control except adding posts.

My site is a real business and it makes real money. I do think that someone who knows more about webdesign could make it much better functionally. Here is my question: Are you aware of anyone in the ATA community whom I could hire to finetune and improve my site? In this way I stay within the theme and get around the issue of outside designers trying to sell me on a brand new site.

Send a PM to lmilesw