Speeding up WordPress on Homestead/VB????

Hi,

I'm a bit new to local dev. setups but have been using Laravel Homestead for a month now to develop a WordPress project. It works great and all but can get extremely slow especially if I have multiple tabs open or am trying to load some medium sized post loops.

On the live servers I use I've never had this issue and would expect local to be much faster than live. I'm thinking it could be my MacBook processor lol.

Setup: 2015 Macbook 12 (1.1ghz w/ boost 2.4ghz - 2c/4t - 8gb ram - latest osx sierra - etc.) VirtualBox (latest update, configured to use 2 cores instead of 1, & 2gb ram instead of 1gb.) Homestead (latest version, latest composer, latest guest add-ons, nfs folders, etc.) One WordPress site, one adminer db table "site". Ubuntu (latest), nginx.

Any advice on speeding up WordPress specifically? Whether through the VB or Homestead.. as mentioned I'm using the nfs option. I'm working in Europe for a couple months so my main desktop is out of reach and I'm stuck with the MacBook.

Even though this laptop is "slow" I can't understand how hard it can be to load up some basic WordPress stuff.

Thanks and I hope I'm posting in the right section. https://tweakbox.mobi/ https://getappvalley.com/ https://vlc.onl