Hi!
Thank you for the details, it helps a lot.
The “white space” issue is caused by a timing related problem. The auto populate of the search finishes faster than the Elementor module has time to load. So whenever the plugin tries to trigger the “refresh” on the elementor module, it does not exist yet. It does not happen to me on each page load, sometimes the browser is faster, and Elementor is loaded first.
I believe the simplest solution would be to turn off the auto-populate feature, I dont see much difference in the initial output, so it should not cause any issues.
The performance hit is something from the server side. Whenever you try to query a page on the staging server via a dynamically changing query arguments, it takes a lot of time to process. Try for example: https://scbbstaging.wpengine.com/rides/?yx=123456
For the first time, it will take around 5 seconds, until it is cached.
The same thing does not happen on the development server: https://devscbb.wpengine.com/rides/?yx=123456
The initial query takes only around 1 second.
The plugin is not initiated when you visit these URLs, so there is something else causing the delay. Maybe the staging environment only has more limited resources and simply takes a lot more time to respond. Other causes can be firewall (especially WAF or a plugin), or something with the .htaccess file etc..