Are you running these as pass-through queries?

The Internet speed is what causes the delay.  Even if you have 300 Mbps fiber optic Internet speed like I do (you can check your Internet speed here:   https://www.speedtest.net ), accessing a database across the Internet is still too slow compared to accessing it locally.  To speed things up, you need to minimize data retrievals (both outgoing and incoming) and the amount of data involved in each retrieval -- and that will likely involve re-designing the queries.  Sometimes delays are unavoidable even if you've done your best to optimize the design.  That's why sometimes you see websites just hang and take a long time to load.

Yeah, like my website before I moved it to the new server. LOL.

Morning apologies for late response I have been away.  I am sure the internet speed is part of the problem Kevin.  @Richard - I am not using pass-through queries -  would this minimize data retrievals as suggested by Kevin?

Yes absolutely.
Depending on factors like your table sizes, and the number of records the queries needs to return, the pass-throgh can make a massive difference.

For example, if your table has 10,000 records and your query needs to return 10 records, a front-end query will send all 10,000 records over the network. On the other hand, a pass-through query will only return 10 records over the network.

Pass-through queries will help because they are "server-side" execution.  But pass-through queries need to be written in the native SQL syntax of the server.  For instance, SQL Server does not use "#" to indicate dates, but single quotes: '4/3/2024'.  It doesn't use Now() to return the current date and time, but GETDATE().  Wild cards don't use "*", but "%".  And so on.  In other words, native Access queries often have to be (totally) rewritten using native SQL Server syntax (called T-SQL).  I hope you are running a test system right now, because there could be substantial modifications (and learning, if you haven't learned all this) needed before you use SQL Server for real.

Morning thank you all for that very helpful input.  I am completing an full SQL course as we speak.  the system is still in test mode (on the SQL server).   I wil rewrite the queries and see how it goes.