FYI.
I upgraded the MonoGame.net server hardware tonight. Took about 30 minutes and I can all ready tell the response times on the website and here on the community forums is significantly improved.
MonoGame.net runs on DigitalOcean. If you’re looking for host highly recommend them (if you use this link it donates a little cash to our hosting bills).
What size Droplet are you using?
Also, I can recommend Vultr. They are slightly cheaper than DigitalOcean, and performance is good (running Discourse on mine too).
We were on the $10 a month droplet to keep hosting costs down… 1 core 1GB of memory. I was seeing between 900 and 2500ms response times on the server.
I updated to the $20 a month droplet which is 2 cores and 2GB of memory. We now see a very consistent 380ms response times.
So a huge improvement.
I would love to get the response times under 200ms. Running a profiler on the Wordpress side of the site shows that 95% of my time is tied up in the Jetpack plugin. So I need to investigate that further.
So did a little more tweaking.
The WordPress profiler was reporting over 320ms tied up in plugins. I went and disabled a bunch of features we were not using in Jetpack… site stats being the big one. We’re now down to just 48ms dedicated to WordPress plugins which is pretty fantastic.
While the WordPress stats are nice… they are not worth over 200ms of loading time on pages. I’ll just depend on our Google Analytics stats instead.
Next i’ll look at improving the Discourse performance a bit.
Ahh, nice! If you find any performance tweaks, please share 
Why don’t you try Ghost, or maybe even a static site generator instead of WordPress? Should run a lot faster.
WordPress has the flexibility we need and is every reliable and easy to maintain. If we need a feature it is almost guaranteed there is a plugin for it in WordPress.
Also we’ve used alternatives in the past… they are never as good as WordPress.