initial page load speed

[cscompton]

I downloaded the source and am running on an ec2 T2.small instance. 'npm dev run' is the command I'm using to get the site up and running, however, there is a 6-7 delay from the time the page loads (black screen) until the rest of the site shows up (header/code block).

Obviously running the code local was pretty fast, anything I can do to improve the performance of it running on my EC2 VM?