Hope this tip might help someone in the future.
Long story short, my host must have made some server changes to their railgun settings which resulted in Error 524 a timeout occurred errors. The home page was partially loading but any subsequent activity returned a 524.
Normally a server load/hosting issue, I was confused because Cpanel was showing very low usage and other domains under the same hosting account were working fine and fast. I even went so far as to delete the website and upload a backup, but the new install script was also timing out.
Resolved instantly by going to Cloudflare panel > speed > railgun and testing/selecting a working connection from the list of options.
Cheers!