Website url help and faster loading

Hello,

I just worked on moving our outdated website to a wordpress site. It's been a very long process and I basically did it all myself--no web designing knowledge. Our old site had come from working with a web designer who also had antiquated ways of working..and some of the resulting issues I believe are a result of that.

We think it looks great but there are two main problems
1) it's incredibly slow in loading
2) we would like the site url to be www.palmsforlife.org (we own both palmsforlifefund.org and palmsforlife.org) versus what it is now--which is a massive redirect which our web designer did.

Our budget is really very, very small.

Thank you in advance for your time and help.

Best,

Maayan