had the same problem.
What I did was to change the global gradle settings to offline work which can be done by going to Preferences => Gradle. This did make a difference.
Another method I have seen people use, but which I have not used yet is to create a gradle.properties in the gradle folder like so:
Just create a file named gradle.properties in the following directory:
/home/<username>/.gradle/ (Linux)
/Users/<username>/.gradle/ (Mac)
C:\Users\<username>\.gradle (Windows)
Add this line to the file:
org.gradle.daemon=true
Please check out this link for more options as well as a detailed explanation on speeding up gradle.
Hope this helps!.