How come the search engine & website is so much slower compared to other, small(er) and niche ones?

This is on my mac, my android, my iPhone, and even windows. No VPNs, with VPNs, cached DNS results, or without. Any reason whatsoever points back to DDG being painfully slow. Why? I jave abandoned using it for the most part but I don't trust startpage all that much and have sadly chosen to return to google.

edit: typo