Repair Magento 2.1.4 site. Get site ready for going live.

We have a Magento 2.1.4 site that needs repair. Right now a backup is being uploaded and will be restored within the next 24 hours. The current site has been developed and was very near going live. The optimization introduced many instabilities and many problems that were fixed have now re-apeared. The project is to take the site to a state where it can go live. The optimization of the site can be considered a second project. The Freelancer needs to be well versed in Magento 2. Magento 2 experience is very important. They also need to have a good working knowledge of git. 1. Categories is broken. Browsing the site causes an error. This was fixed by doing a compile and deploy. This may fix it now. 2. Images are showing up with black around them. This may be a simple definition on how to display images. See the products in the Featured Products slider on the home page. 3. Fix display of products in category structure. Product display at the level that they are in the category tree. If they are defined in the sub-category, they only appear in the sub-category. If they are defined in the category, They appear there. Sub-categories appear in the category as an image that takes you to the next level. There was code written to take that image from the products in the sub-category. I do not know if the code is still there. 4. Shopping Cart Rules – This was working and debugged and now is broken again. Free shipping is accomplished by a shopping cart rule There is a known bug that has supposedly been fixed that once the rule files, it is not re-evaluated again. To reproduce : Add 1 product to the cart with value above 250 but less than 500. Checkout. Note: no free shipping offered. Change qty to 2 so that cart value is above $500. Note Free shipping is now offered. Reduce qty so cart value is now less than 500. Free shipping is STILL offered, because the rule is not being re-evaluated. This discussion [login to view URL] says that the fix is here [login to view URL] Same bug affect shipping to AK and HI which do not get free shipping. 5. Please change the message “ Sorry no quotes are available for this order at this time” to “ Please enter or correct the shipping information. No quotes are available for this address”. Ideally the message should be different if the address was empty or incorrect. 6. The mobile site was working. It must still work after the fixes. 7. Add “Shop by Categories” and “Shop by Manufacturer” to the “three line menu” on the mobile site (button on mobile top left). 8. Clean up site. Delete all the not needed backup directories and files. 9. GoIvy is installed on the site. What is it ? It is needed? 10. The site is in github. When doing a git status there are a bunch of files that show up as untracked. They appeared after the compile/deploy. Please add what needs to be added and put in git ignore what needs to be ignored. When the git status is clean the git status should show this. 11. Updated git with all the changes 12. Optimization of site. Load time is very very slow. In order to make this site live, We need to have sub second load.