We all love WordPress for its diverse set of plugins. But like all third-party add-ons, they come with certain drawbacks.
Elementor, one of the most popular plugins, has a reputation for making certain websites laggy. Is it true? Does Elementor slow down your site?
Unfortunately, it’s a fact — but there’s a catch. Although Elementor is uniquely heavy-duty, it’s quite efficient. Most Elementor websites slow down due to other external factors like unoptimized third-party code and bloat plugins.
But you don’t need to get rid of Elementor, nor do you need to have a laggy website. Read along as we’ll recommend the best ways to optimize your WordPress website today.
Elementor in itself doesn’t slow down a website. As one of the most popular and widely used plugins, the developers have optimized every nook and cranny of their code to optimize it to the fullest.
An Elementor website mostly slows down due to some common issues. Knowing the reasons beforehand will give you an idea of the parts you need to improve.
1. Cheap Shared Hosting
Firstly, most slow Elementor websites use cheap shared hosting. This is a type of slow hosting that uses a single server where different kinds of websites run. It isn’t efficient to share resources when it comes to websites, so it’s no wonder some websites are slow.
2. Bloat Modules & Plugins
When developing a website, most people end up using a ton of plugins without active acknowledgement. Every developer goes through trial and error to find the right plugin. But this process leaves behind several unneeded plugins and modules, which eat up resources and make a website slow.
3. Unoptimized Backend
The backend includes things like adding custom HTML or third-party code, custom images and fonts, etc. Although the backend is crucial for any website, most developers forget to optimize it after they make it functional. Unoptimized fonts, images, and of them all, third-party code creates poor backend performance which in turn makes a website super slow.
So there you have it, these are the main culprits for your Elementor website being slow. If possible, go to your WordPress dashboard right now and try to fix the things you already know. And to know how to optimize other aspects, keep reading.
How to Speed Up a Slow Elementor Website?
With certain tweaks, your Elementor page speed should drastically improve in no time. But first, let’s go through the most popular, tech-savvy way of doing it.
What is Lazy Load Elementor?
Lazy loading is a process where resources of a website like images or fonts are shown only when they’re needed as opposed to bulk loading, where the entire website loads first; lazy loading is efficient and saves resources. A popular example of lazy loading is infinite scrolling that we see on YouTube, Twitter, or any social media.
Sounds great, right? You can incorporate lazy loading into Elementor with the Optimole WordPress plugin.
Lazy loading improves backend performance even if backend elements are inherently unoptimized. Let’s go and optimize them.
1. Optimizing Backend Media
If your domain fails a website speed test, you have unoptimized backend elements like images, gifs, video files, and other media to blame for. As you’ve now enabled lazy loading, the problem should be somewhat mitigated. Further tweaks will now drastically increase performance.
- Reset Image Dimensions
Start by first resizing your media files to as low as possible while maintaining clarity and resolution. Several online websites allow you to do so. This kind of image processing will decrease image size and eat up fewer resources. And fewer the needed resources, the faster your website will be.
- Handle Video Files
Next up, fix video media. Keep the frame rate relatively low. 30 or 23 fps works fine. As for resolution, keep it as low as possible if you’re using it on the main page.
But if you want to display a larger-sized video, we recommend putting it on a separate webpage to display it in max resolution. This way, you can efficiently distribute the available resources.
2. Get Better Hosting
It’s time to leave cheap shared hosting plans if you’re planning to get serious with your WordPress websites. Although they’re affordable, free hosting servers are only well suited for personal endeavors like occasional blog posts.
You need to get premium hosting to offer the best user experience for more serious websites.
You should opt for hosting services that natively work well with Elementor. For great premium hosting plans, we recommend going for Nestify, Bluehost, and WP-Engine.
3. Inspect & Modify Third-Party Code
For custom raw HTML or JS code, research thoroughly whether the author kept WordPress optimization in mind. If not, you’re better off not using it. Try removing the code altogether if possible.
But if you think it’s crucial to your website, you can try two techniques:
- Minify Raw Code: In minification, your goal is to decrease the overall size of your script file. You can achieve this by removing external spaces and changing spaces to tabs.
- Concentrate Code Files: This involves merging multiple similar category files into one. It’s a good practice in programming to have separate files for each task. But to ace page speed analyzers for WordPress, you should merge all similar code scripts into one. This will decrease overall file size too, which is crucial for performance.
You should first do these tweaks manually. Then you can take the help of plugins like WP Rocket. Autoptimize, which we’ll talk about later, is a great one too.
4. Discard Modules Like Google Fonts
External modules like custom Google fonts are often unoptimized for WordPress, which creates problems. For linkups like YouTube, Facebook, Google Maps, and Google Fonts, we recommend discarding them altogether.
It’s hard to optimize them yourself, and even if you do, they have few trade-offs. We’d recommend finding a good WordPress-optimized plugin for those tasks instead.
5. Clean Out Unnecessary Plugins
If you take a closer look at your dashboard, you’ll see there are more plugins than you need. Still, they’re running in the background, eating up resources. It’s now time to go through them and remove whichever you don’t need.
6. Database Optimization
Most people set up an automated database and forget about it later on. But more often or not, databases store a lot of unnecessary and invalid data. If you let it get out of hand, they’ll just eat up valuable space.
Query speeds depend on the size of the database. So it’s crucial you only keep data that’s needed and discard others. You should remove inactive users and their data, spam comments, cache files, and other unnecessary files on your database. There are several spam-checking and cache clearing plugins on WordPress to use.
7. Consider Changing Your WordPress Theme
Your WordPress theme might also be responsible for slowing down your website. Some themes just don’t go well with Elementor and, in turn, cause unnecessary lags and loading issues.
Check your WordPress theme’s website to see if it’s well integrated with Elementor. If not, consider changing it. We recommend going for Elementor Default Themes. As they’re made by Elementor, they’ll have the maximum integration.
8. Enable Helpful Plugins
After removing the excess plugins which you don’t need, you should now install the ones that’ll truly come in handy. We recommend Autoptimize for the job.
After you’re done with manual tweaks, Autoptimize is a great way to automate tweakings for later media insertions. It clears out cache and unnecessary scripts, adds lazy-loading automatically to images, and more. Autoptimize tweaks and optimizes Google Fonts and other modules too, but we won’t recommend relying on that too much.
Other than that, CSS codes are added, which make the website much faster and smoother than before.
Pro Tips & Mistakes To Avoid
The topics we’ve discussed till now should be enough to improve the Elementor performance on your website drastically. In the end, let’s go over the do-s and don’t-s of managing an efficient and bug-free website.
1. Regularly Clear Cache
Once a week should be enough for most websites. Check the WordPress dashboard for cache clearing options. Create a Hotkey if possible to do it quickly each time.
2. Use File Compression
Gzip compressions with extensions .gz, .tar, or .tgz are some of the most efficient. Linux, the fastest operating system, also incorporates these compression types. To do this manually, add a .htaccess file t WordPress. Or you can simply look for WordPress Gzip compression plugins for the job.
3. Keep Default Colors
Every theme comes with default colors, and you should try to use them. A theme is best optimized surrounding that color family, so sometimes it gets laggy if you change it.
4. Periodically Monitor Website Speed
Log how well your website speed is doing from time to time. Services like PageSpeed Insights by Google or other external services are a great way to do so. Create a spreadsheet and make necessary changes so that your website speed is under your control!
Conclusion
If you’ve followed us till now regarding, “does Elementor slow down your site?”, your WordPress website should now be running faster than ever before. Elementor doesn’t have to be laggy, and we hope you understand that now.
As a final tip, we recommend keeping an eye on Elementor’s Blog. They create regular blog posts related to Elementor and how to best use it. By adopting the tips and tricks they share, you can further optimize Elementor in the most efficient way possible.
Good luck, and see you on top of the Google ranks!