Is around a second delay normal for a wall panel or is something wrong with my setup?

I actually went and measured mine with a slow-mo phone recording, because it bugged me the same way. Propped the phone up at 60fps, tapped a light toggle over and over, counted frames. Tap to icon changing color came out around 0.6 to 0.8 seconds every time, pretty consistent. Swapping between dashboard views was worse, closer to a second or a bit over. So your feel of half to three quarters of a second is spot on, and no, you didn't botch anything.

The reason sliders feel fine while buttons feel laggy is that the slider moves under your finger locally, right away, before the panel hears anything back from Home Assistant. Buttons don't work that way. The tap goes out, HA processes it and flips the state, the new state gets pushed back to the panel, and only then does the screen redraw. The light itself fires almost instantly, like you noticed, because the command part of that loop is fast. It's the round trip and the redraw that eat the time.

And your Wi-Fi isn't the problem. Mine sits even farther from the AP with a mediocre signal and the numbers didn't really change. Strong signal, weak signal, the delay stays put, wich tells you it's not the radio doing the waiting.

The tradeoff is that these panels run your existing dashboard rather than a purpose-built interface, so every visual confirmation goes through that whole update cycle. Firmware makes a difference too. Mine renders slower than the chip shoud allow, and people running native display code on the same hardware report much snappier taps. If the delay ever stops being acceptable to you, that's the direction to look, but as shipped, what you're describing is just how it behaves.

I went through the same disappointment with mine and ended up timing it against diferent dashboards out of curiosity. The panel redraws noticeably faster on a stripped down page with a handful of toggles than on my main dashboard crammed with graphs and cards, which suggests part of that pause is the browser laying out and painting the view after the state arrives, not just the round trip itself. Worth testing your laggy button on a nearly empty test dashboard and seeing if the number drops, because if it does you have some room to tune things without touching the firmware at all.

Funny thing I noticed on mine, the lag isn't even constant. Most days it's the usual delay, but when my server's doing a backup or pulling in camera recordings, taps sit there for a good while longer before anything changes on screen. Almost like the panel's waiting in line behind everything else. So if yours ever feels way worse at certain times, check what the server's up to. Also tried a barebones test dashboard on a second tab and the gap did shrink a bit, though not enough that I'd bother maintaining two versions of everything.

Still figuring this whole forum out, so hope this fits here. I don't have one of these panels at all, my situation is a bit different, I mounted an old tablet in the kitchen running the same dashboard. It does that same sluggish tap thing and I always blamed the creaky old hardware. But now I'm wondering if part of mine is the tablet's own battery saver and screen sleep settings, like it hesitates before it even bothers to redraw. Do these panels have anything similar, some doze or refresh mode that could be stacking extra pause on top of the delay you measured? Never timed mine either, I'm purely judging by gut feel.

This is making me look at my own wall setup differently. I put one of these panels up last month and I always blamed my router settings for the pause after tapping. Never thought about the screen waiting for the server to confirm before it changes colors. One thing I noticed on mine is that if I tap the same light twice fast, the second tap seems to catch up quicker than the first. Not sure if that's the panel remembering something or just luck. Is there a way to make the icon change the moment you tap it, even before the server answers back?