Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links. Purchasing a product through one of these links generates a commission for us at no additional expense to you.
Here’s the hard truth: All the work you put into creating a stunning, well-designed WordPress website can go to waste if your site loads slow or performs poorly.
After all, slow page load speeds and lousy site performance can turn off your visitors, causing them to click away and lowering your conversion and sales opportunities.
The good news is, Elementor offers several features and functionalities to help you improve performance and build a traffic-generating WordPress site.
Continue reading to learn how Elementor’s site performance optimization functions and features can improve your WordPress website.
Elementor: What is it?
Elementor is a WordPress website builder platform that allows you to create stunning websites quickly through an easy-to-use drag and drop editor. The platform is open-source and offers free and premium versions.
Elementor’s front-end page builder helps you apply high-level site designs to build dynamic websites with ease.
With its all-in-one solution, you’ll have complete control over your WordPress website’s design in one platform.
The platform’s features and functionalities help you customize your website how you want. For example, you can use multiple fonts, apply enhanced background images, use motion effects (among others) to ensure your site fits with your brand, including your sales and marketing initiatives.
If you’ve never used Elementor before, check out this tutorial on how to use Elementor now.
4 ways Elementor can boost website performance
Elementor provides more than robust site-building features. It also offers functionalities and several methods you can apply to improve your WordPress website’s performance.
1. Improved asset loading
Elementor’s latest releases (versions 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3.) include new techniques on loading JavaScript (JS), Font, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) files.
The techniques are designed to improve your page load speed and help your website run faster. This includes reducing duplicate codes, removing unused CSS, and applying dynamic assets loading (among others).
For instance, before Elementor 3.1, all widget functionality was loaded whether the widgets were used on your web page or not.
The latest versions of Elementor now load JS files responsible only for each widget functionality and splits the platform’s front-end JS into small pieces. This gives every widget its JS file containing its own logic, making the general front-end JS file smaller.
In the past, loading multiple files like this would slow websites down, but now that most sites are loaded with HTTP 2.0, this is no longer the case.
The optimized loading process significantly improves page speed since Elementor checks the widgets used on the page and only loads the JS files each page loads.
Elementor applies conditional asset loading to improve the way widgets consume external libraries, such as the Swiper.js library.
The past Elementor versions loaded this JS file on all the pages even when not required. Recent versions detect which components use the swiper library and only load it if at least one page element utilizes the library.
Elementor also implements this conditional asset loading to other JS file libraries such as the Dialog library, Share links library, and Lightbox and Screenful libraries. All these lead to serious page size reduction and faster load speeds.
2. Native browser support
Elementor leverages native browser support for more efficient implementation and even reduces JS execution time (in some cases).
For example, Elementor replaced the Waypoints library with the native Intersection Observer API (when applicable) to further reduce the number of libraries it loads.
The Intersection Observer API offers a way to asynchronously observe the changes in the intersection of a target element with a top-level document’s viewport (the part of the document you’re viewing that’s currently visible in its window or screen) or an ancestor element.
Let’s say your web page uses infinite scrolling. This means the page utilizes your vendor-provided library to manage ads positioned periodically across the page, including animated graphics and other elements.
Each of these includes its own intersection detection routines and runs on the main thread.
As visitors scroll the page, these intersection detection routines constantly fire throughout the scroll handling code. Unfortunately, this results in sluggish site performance that ends up frustrating your site users.
However, the Intersection Observer API allows code to register a callback function that executes when an element exits or enters the viewport (or another element).
With this, your website won’t need to do anything on the main thread to spot this kind of element intersection. This frees the browser to optimize managing intersections accordingly, improving the site performance.
3. Optimized DOM
One of the ways Elementor improves your website’s speed and performance is by ensuring slimmer and better code output. It removed wrapper elements from the Document Object Model (DOM) to reduce the volume of HTML on the page.
The previous versions of Elementor website builder included many wrapper elements in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) output that increased the web page sizes and slowed site performance.
Elementor remedied this in the 3.0 version by no longer including the .elementor-inner HTML wrapper, for instance.
The standard markup looked like this in Elementor v2.9:
In Elementor 3+, that same markup has been reduced to the following code:
However, keep in mind that the removal of some HTML wrappers from Elementor’s code can potentially affect your existing site’s functionality and appearance if you’ve written CSS selectors using these elements. This can happen when you update your Elementor 2.x version to 3.x.
Make sure to test Elementor 3 on a staging site or local copy of your website before updating your production site.
Essentially, Elementor removed bulky and unnecessary wrapper elements from the DOM to provide a simplified code output. This leads to less complexity, better readability, and increased website performance and speed.
4. Enhanced CSS rendering performance
Some dynamic content has its own CSS, such as images (used as background-image values), colors, and custom fields.
With the previous versions of Elementor, the platform’s Dynamic Tags module scanned the whole web page to find elements with dynamic content whenever the page loaded.
The detected dynamic content would prompt the module to fetch the element’s dynamic values, write the relevant CSS into a <style> tag, and inject it into the DOM. However, this whole process is costly and takes up too much loading time.
Elementor 3.0 provides a more optimized rendering process for dynamic CSS.
The first time a page loads and its static CSS renders, Elementor creates a cache containing a list of its elements with dynamic CSS values. This way, when users visit the page, the platform fetches a list of dynamic elements from the cache to render them instantly.
The process eliminates the need to iterate all the page elements each time the page loads, saving tons of run time and increasing your load speed and, in turn, site performance.
Start leveraging Elementor to optimize your WP site performance
Ensuring stellar website performance is critical to help raise your Google rankings, improve the user experience, and, in turn, boost your conversions and revenue.
While achieving this isn’t always a walk in the park, Elementor provides the functionalities, features, and methods to help boost your WordPress website’s performance.
The more optimal your website performs, the lower your chances of losing quality traffic, high-converting visitors, and ultimately, revenue.
If you haven’t tried Elementor yet, you can download it for free on their site. And if you want to learn how it works first, make sure to check out this video tutorial.
Thanks for reading!
