I have been concerned at slowly degrading performance on my web sites, coming to a head with migration to WordPress (this blog) about six months ago.
To improve performance, I have migrated all content to a new hosting service on Godaddy’s latest cPanel hosts.
It is a substantial amount of work, and I think everything is working properly. It is certainly much quicker and consistently quicker (at the moment) on the WordPress application.
Though I have taken care in specification of character sets, it appears that special symbols have been trashed in the migration. I have done some global search and replaces and think I have found and fixed all (or most) problems. Credit to the Search Regex add-in.