poor site speed with elementor and old templates

hi there,
I am writing about a site I built (not from scratch) that went live recently. It is taking more than 8 seconds to load the home page on Pingdom and similar to GMetrix.

The site originally had some templates that were built in PHP and in order to build the new site I used Elementor, cutting bits from the PHP and inserting them into the page using a PHP shortcode inserter. Most of the pages, still refer to the parts of the original templates.

I know that is a bit of a hack, but I don’t know how to write PHP code and Elementor seemed like the easiest way to present the design that I was asked to build.

I am wondering if that might be the reason why the site is so slow?

I have optimised images and installed Auto-optimize. I have also added Expires Headers to .htaccess, although this doesn’t seem to be reflected, I think it might be Google expires headers that are the problem there.

Could anyone make any suggestions about how I can reduce page loading speed, especially for the home page? It loads lightning fast on a second view, but the first view is really lagging.

Thanks in advance for your help!
Sarah

The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]