I’ll start by saying I’m not a developer. I don’t code either, I’d be about a 5/100 skill level there, so not a zero but still quite paltry.
I’ve made a site in WordPress as a means to test a project and I’m finding it’s just loading slowly. It’s simple in that it’s two pages (front page and a second page that has the main bits on it) and both aren’t doing too well speed wise.
It’s not an intensive site with lots of features, page one is more like a splash page and page two has a map plugin where you can search for services using Google Maps. No logins, no accounts, no subscribers etc etc.
I use WP Rest Cache which has a regeneration interval set as twice daily (default setting).
I’ve just implemented Cloudflare on their pro subscription though I’m unable to properly setup their APO plugin on WordPress so far due to an account verification issue. Without the APO plugin this has sped up the load time a bit but it’s still lacking.
I have my PHP memory limit sitting at 2048M with time limit and max input time both at 120.
I think the problem is with these two aspects on the front page though I’m speculating. The first being that I use a slider with a single slide – it’s just used as it’s the only thing I found that will let me put a particular animation on some text. The slider is Depicter and I get the feeling it has a slow initial load.
The second thing on the front page is that I’ve tried to put in a background video into the slider itself. I had a 15 second MP4 that was about 50mb but I couldn’t use it because I needed it to be a circular shape so the only way I could figure out to achieve that was to convert to a GIF which dropped the filesize to about 18mb which is better but still really big for a page yeah? The background image for the front page is 200kb.
So I’m hoping when I can get the cloudflare issue sorted and install their APO plugin it will help to speed things up even more but surely there would be things I should consider outside of that to be squeezing out the most performance I can get, I just don’t know what those things are.
I’ve noticed in the Site Health section I have two critical issues related to performance one being “An active PHP session was detected” and the second being “The REST API encountered an error”. Could these things be contributing to the page load speed issues? Sadly I don’t know what they relate to or how I would go about discovering that.
GTMetrix gives me a D grade with 59% Performance and 80% Structure. Largest Contentful Paint seems to fluctuate between 3.6 – 11 seconds depending on what time of day I check it.
Any suggestions for things I can do to improve this?

Without inspecting your site, we can’t know what exactly needs to be improved. Might be the server, might be the site. You don’t need cloudflare for speeding up a site. You just need to have it done properly, hosted on a good server.