Concerning the button, this is standard behavior with bbPress, I’m afraid.
Here I have to disagree with you, this is not a standard behavior of BBPress, I installed bbpress solo on an empty wordpress to test some settings and standard it looks like “Screen1”
Simply add the following code snippet to your website:
Thanks, but I didn’t want to “hide” it but just get the subforums displayed and no extra list to press.
You can find useful information about this at https://codex.bbpress.org/ including https://codex.bbpress.org/bbp_list_forums/.
Since the design or the template was created by you, I can assume that you have inserted this button and this is not “standard” from BBpress.
The rest of the design is ok, yes you have to put work into it, only the forum is the only thing that bothers me very much.
and as I said the instructions you have in the support forum are not correct, the menu items given do not exist.
The performance, yes, here I found the problem,
The server has no problems only the php configuration for the template had to be adjusted, because it needs more “resources” than the standard installation of WP and here the link to “Check the WordPress prerequisites here: WordPress requirements” does not help.
After the optimization I had when installing also Suddenly a menu on the page 😉
About the plugins…
Yes unnecessary plugins slow down the site, true.
Why do you use so many plugins then? if they should not be used then ?
With kind regards
Krashdeez