i disabled the new order email notification and this SIGNIFICANTLY improved the load time. The load time is still not ideal but this is the only thing that has seemed to work. Please note, I did not disable customer email notifications, just the email that gets sent to me when a user submits an order. Easy fix and very helpful.
Please note I tried all of the following, but the only thing that helped was email deactivation.
My server is digitalocean 2GB Ram 30GB SSD Disk.
I have tried:
1) deregistering the heartbeat api
2) increasing the memory limit (96M) and php memory limit (64M)
3) my WP URL and site URL match
4) switched to default wp theme (no change)
5) same issue on http and https
6) logged in and non logged in - issue persists
disabling the email seemed to be the thing that fixed this issue