Hi Tom,
I hope you are fine too! Thanks again for the details.
I’m afraid this issue is completely unrelated to our plugin unfortunately. To simply test this, I deactivated the plugin programmatically (don’t worry nobody saw it), and did a search query without the plugin. The response time was exactly the same: https://i.imgur.com/gHOJU1M.png
As you can see there is almost a 30 second delay when loading up that page. I choose a random query, so there are no results to display, so the built in search finishes quickly.
These types of issues are very hard to get by. It can be a background process somewhere, which hangs up the server for too long. The search process should not take this long, even with the built in search, it is not possible.
The best possible course of action to find the culprit is:
– If you have any custom codes (custom php snippets on the server side), disable them one-by-one to see if that changes anything
– Same with the plugins, disable them one by one to see if the speed increases at any given point.
– If still nothing, switch the theme temporarily to see if that fixes the problem
If you can’t do these on the live site, set up a staging site somewhere and copy everything exactly, and test there instead.
I suspect, that somewhere along the way you will find the cause. It is usually a plugin (like almost every time), but definitely check any custom codes you have implemented. It can be anything minor, literally just a single line of code, that is why it’s very very hard to find the exact point.
If none of these helps, then looking at the server might be a good idea too. I don’t think that is the problem, but if disabling everything does not help at all, then it is very likely something wrong on the server side. The database can be full, the memory can run out etc..
Unfortunately I am not available for custom sessions, this is all I can give you about tweaking the issue.