To be honest, I feel the best course of action right now is to simply roll back to the previous design. Because there's only two ways this'll get resolved, and one to me, at least at on the surface, makes a lot more sense then the other.
First is taking the new design, and fixing it. But if only it were that simple. You'd have to re-implement many features completely missing now, like the sorting system, banners, creator ad's, just to name the some of the big omissions.
You'd have to fix things like the longer load times, the unresponsive search, glitched and unreadable novels...just to name a few issues.
Make many changes to the layout in general, making the website less confusing to navigate.
All this work and trouble...for essentially patched up WebToon. With features like the sidebar and autoscroll still missing, I still feel the community will still be very disappointed. And some may simply not bother waiting for change, and simply up and leave for WebToon or other webcomic sites. Websites they know at least will work reliably.
And that's kind of what's happening with Smackjeeves. The December update brought a Webtoon-like redesign that stripped it of many of it's unique features (namely custom sites) and made it significantly harder to find comics (having removed many search options). So many have simply left.
So I feel the best option is to simply revert to the previous design if possible. That way, we have a website that we know at least works, and is well regarded by the community. We won't have to fix the issues like the novels not loading properly. We won't have to hope the community learns to like the new layout.
Simply put: All of this just works!
Now, with a reliable platform in hand, all that's left to do is add new features the community wants or will probably like, such as dark mode. With prior testing and community input/warning, there really shouldn't be any issues from here on out.