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Elementor is one of the most flexible and user-friendly website builders on WordPress. As a result of its flexibility and ease-of-use along with other nuances within WordPress, some developers have a tough time getting their Elementor website to load quickly or prevent glitches.
However, if you’re using Elementor correctly and implementing all of the other best practices in WordPress, you’ll end up with a blazing fast website that functions reliably.
Below, we’ve listed the most essential factors to keep in mind. We implement all of these tactics when performing our Elementor web design services.
Your choice of web host plays a huge role in how fast your website loads and how many errors occur. For that reason, it’s important to do extensive research on which WordPress hosting companies produce the best results. You can find several research studies online or you can even do your own testing.
At Azuro Digital, we’ve tested numerous WordPress hosts and we’ve come to the conclusion that Cloudways offers the best loading speed along with great security and reliability. Another great option is WP Engine.
On Cloudways, you have multiple “server types” to choose from. We recommend using Digital Ocean Premium or Vultr High Frequency for optimal site speed. Please note that Vultr High Frequency is only available for existing Cloudways users, so if you’re new to Cloudways, we recommend Digital Ocean Premium.
Cloudflare allows your website to load quickly across the globe. CDN stands for “content delivery network”, meaning that Cloudflare has servers in various cities around the world to serve your website from the nearest server based on the visitor’s location.
If you don’t integrate a CDN, your website might load quickly in your local city or wherever your WordPress host has set as the primary location, but then it would load slower and slower based on how far the visitor is from that primary server. For that reason, it’s essential to use a CDN like Cloudflare so that your website loads quickly regardless of the visitor’s location.
In addition to site speed, Cloudflare also provides extra security benefits for your website!
Hello Elementor is Elementor’s default theme. A common mistake that developers make when working with Elementor is they’ll choose a different theme.
Other themes are usually much heavier than Hello Elementor (which is a super-lightweight theme). Also, since other themes are built by different developers, they sometimes conflict with Elementor and cause technical issues which may harm site speed, break the site's layout, prevent critical functionality from executing, etc.
To avoid any of those technical errors, we recommend using Hello Elementor because it’s built by the same team and works seamlessly with the Elementor website builder. On top of that, it happens to be the lightest theme on the market and is the best option for site speed.
In the past, one of the criticisms that Elementor received was the fact that their website builder produced a large DOM size - slightly impacting the site speed.
However, in April 2022, Elementor released the “flexbox containers” feature which solved the DOM size issue.
So, when you’re building a website with Elementor, be sure to activate the flexbox containers feature to create a lightning-fast website.
To learn more about flexbox containers, check out Elementor’s explainer page.
Using a site speed plugin that adds all of the extra bells-and-whistles is essential if you want to maximize your site speed on WordPress and Elementor.
We recommend WP Rocket - the most popular site speed plugin on WordPress. It contains the critical features for site speed - such as caching, JS/CSS minification, lazy loading, and more.
Imagify is another site speed plugin owned by WP Rocket. It compresses and resizes your images so that your images don’t harm your loading speed. Use this plugin in combination with WP Rocket for the best results.
It might be tempting to integrate other plugins with Elementor/WordPress in order to add extra features. However, in many cases, doing so will harm your website loading speed or cause glitches.
If you do some digging and get familiar with Elementor, you’ll find that you can achieve almost anything with Elementor’s native features instead of integrating extra plugins. Sticking to Elementor’s native features as much as possible is one of the most crucial ways to maximize site speed and enhance reliability.
If you need to integrate other plugins, it’s vital to research those plugins and ensure that they integrate smoothly with Elementor and won’t cause any site speed issues or technical errors. For advanced features, we find that Crocoblock is a safe bet that won’t harm your loading speed or functionality. They have tons of different plugins for various use-cases.
For a list of the plugins that we use on WordPress/Elementor, check out our recommended tech stack for WordPress websites.
Even if all of your media is compressed, resized and lazy-loaded, your website will still load slowly if you overload the page with too much media or too many sections.
If you’ve followed all of the prior steps in this article but your site is still loading slowly, try to reduce the amount of content on the page and see if that helps!
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