Okay so I found a solution myself and thought I would share it.

I have used New Relic to diagnose response times on my application.

This highlighted that the wp-cron file was using about 600ms I googled this and found that wordpress runs a virtual cron job every time a page loads!

This can be be switched off in the wp-config.php which I did and then scheduled it separately at 15 minute intervals.

Secondly New Relic highlighted to me I was requesting a Trust Pilot feed on every homepage load which greatly varied the response time depending on Trust Pilot. I had forgot to create a cache of this file. I am now going to download the feed separate and call that from a cron job too.

My response time is now down to .8 seconds almost half!. Going to keep monitoring and improving as much as I can.

Hope this helps you all.

Are you using apache with your server? You could always run nginx as a proxy server to improve delivery speed. Also you might want to look into varnish for your cache.

Those 2 should give you and improvement.

Hi Plesk uses Nginx for static resources when serving webpages. I have no Idea how Nginx works and I found it a bugger just to configure the Gzip compression settings.

As for Varnish how does it help with caching?

Use LoadFocus.com for finding speed issues and get free website speed tests