therestore

Thanks for writing back. I have some larger images, but they aren’t over 150kb. I’ll still be going in to shrink those. The theme is sterling, not highly customized. Yes, I have administrator permissions.

I somehow MacGyvered the edits to publish by updating to the most recent version of WordPress. The previous website admin suggested that I not update, but I haven’t seen any ill effects yet, only positive.

I checked the speed in webpagetest.org per your suggestion. The load time for the first view is 4.621s, down from almost 6 yesterday before the WordPress updates. For both requests and bytes, Javascript is the main reason for the slowdown. Any ideas how I can rectify this?

I don’t yet know which pieces of the website need which plugins, but if I can somehow get javascript to run a bit faster I’d be really thrilled. I haven’t disabled plugins one by one to see if they are the performance draw because it takes at least 20 seconds from the time of click to fruition. Checking each plugin would take forever.

The list of plugins is as follows:
Acunetix WP Security
Akismet
Attention Grabber
Broken Link Checker
CMS Tree Page View
Dave’s WordPress Live Search
Display Widgets
DreamObjects Backups
Duplicate Post
Formstack Plugin
Formstack Widget
Google Analytics by Monsterinsightsram
HTML Javascript Adder
Insert Headers and Footers
Layerslider WP
P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)
Photonic Gallery for Flickr, Picasa, Smugmug, 500px, Zenfolio and Instagram
Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin
Rotating Tweets (Twitter widget & shortcut)
SiteTree
Slick Social Share Buttons
W3 Total Cache
Widgets on Pages
WP Edit
WP Statistics
wpcu3er
Yoast SEO
YouTube

Thanks for your help and advice!