From reading your question, I assume your website runs smoothly before you activated your own child theme and you can confirm that it’s your child theme that’s slowing down your website.
For your child theme’s CSS, it should include the parent theme’s style.css like the following:
/*
Theme Name: TESSERACT Child
Theme URI: http://tesseracttheme.com/
Description: Tesseract Child Theme
Author: Giovanni Yarabek
Author URI: http://sanmiguelmagazine.com
Template: TESSERACT
Version: 1.0.0
Text Domain: tesseract-child
*/
/* Imports style from the parent theme
-------------------------------------------------------------- */
@import url('../TESSERACT/style.css');
/* Styling customization starts here
-------------------------------------------------------------- */
Otherwise the website’s styling won’t work properly.
After running a few test tools, it’s more than just your child theme that is slowing down your website. There are a few factors that are slowing down your website. You can get more details on these reports below:
There are web-optimization techniques & plugins which help keep your WordPress site running smoothly:
- Autoptimize – aggregates and minimizes JS, CSS and HTML
- TinyPNG – compress JPEG and PNG images
- Imsanity – automatically resizes huge image uploads
As you can see, images and bulky scripts are huge factors to slowing down a site.