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Creating Lightweight Elementor Sites: Best Practices for Developers

ByKristina Louise Treadwell

So, you decided to build a WordPress website with Elementor for a lightweight site, but now your website is sluggish while your visitors tap their fingers impatiently. Welcome! You’re in the right place. While Elementor offers flexibility and design creativity, it tends to create bloated sites if not used with care. 
In our fast-paced digital world, website speed is a necessity. Search engines like Google use Web Core Vitals and SEO signals to prioritize fast-loading websites. A slow site can potentially lead to a frustrated user experience and lower search engine rankings. Faster websites are more eco-friendly and can reduce your business’s carbon footprint.

Why Your Elementor Site Might Be Slow

Before we dive into solutions, let’s explore the usual culprits behind a slow Elementor website:

  • Unoptimized Images and Videos: This is the most notorious cause of slow pages. Media files that have not been properly compressed and scaled are a guaranteed performance killer. 
  • Too Many Widgets: Every page that has Elementor code or addons must load that code each time the page is accessed. Each of the widgets activated with Elementor addons also adds to the list. If you keep adding weight to a car, it eventually slows down. 
  • Too Many Plugins: While Elementor itself is a plugin, adding more plugins than you need, or for every task, will eventually slow down your site. Each plugin loads its own scripts and CSS stylesheets, which takes time and resources from your server.
  • Heavyweight Theme: Not all themes are the same when it comes to optimization and speed, even though you are still using Elementor. Some themes are heavier and less optimized, contributing to slower page loading speeds. 
  • Poor Hosting: Often, cheap and shared hosting, or a poor host, results in resource contention and a slow site. 

These are all things you might find slowing down your site when you conduct regular website maintenance. But, the good news is, they can all be remedied.

Let’s explore some of the best practices to help you solve most of these issues preventing you from having a lightweight Elementor site.

Foundational Server-Side Optimizations For a Lightweight Setup

While Elementor is focused on the client side, your server environment plays a big role in the general performance of the site. Here is a perfect checklist for developers when optimizing server-side: 

Choose a Quality Host For Your Site

We would all prefer the bullet train to take us where we are going as fast as possible and be back before the slower ones. This is the same case with choosing your hosting providers. Opt for a reputable hosting provider for your site. Managed WordPress hosting plans can also offer enhanced performance and preconfigured caching for your site. 

Implement Server-level Hosting (for non-managed hosting)

Implement tools for robust server-level caching, such as Varnish Cache or Nginx FastCGI Cache. These will reduce the load on your server to incredible levels. 

Utilize the Latest Stable PHP Versions

Always run your site on the latest stable release of PHP for significant improvements and security enhancements. This is a simple best practice to implement. 

Use Content Delivery Networks (CDN)

Using a CDN is vital to improving loading speeds. CDN service providers like Cloudflare, Sucuri, and StackPath distribute your website’s assets, like images and code, to servers all over the world. This makes it easier for your site visitors to access your website from the closest server near them, boosting page loading speeds. 

Foundational Front-end Performance Optimizations For a Lightweight Elementor Website

Once the server-side has been optimized, we can move to our website. In this section, we will cover eight practices that affect your functionality on the WordPress admin side and the front-end part of your website. 

Compress and Resize Your Images

Your images on your website will be affected heavily if they are not compressed to smaller sizes while keeping a high quality. This should happen before you upload them to the WordPress media library. 

Utilize Next-Gen Images

Use of modern image formats like WebP offers superior compression compared to traditional formats like .jpg and .png. WebP files offer smaller images with no noticeable quality loss.

Minify Your JavaScript and CSS

Remove unnecessary whitespace and comments from your files. This helps reduce the file size and speed up download times. Check in the plugin repository for some of the plugins you can use for this. 

Add Caching to Your Website

No matter how lightweight your Elementor site is, add a performance and caching plugin. These plugins employ various techniques like page and browser caching, GZIP compression, and lazy loading, among other features. Serving your visitors with a faster preloaded version of a page than loading each time from scratch saves the page delivery time. 

Choose a Lightweight Theme

Your theme sets the tone for site optimization and performance. Multipurpose themes tend to bloat most of the time. Yet minimal themes such as Hello Elementor can be an improvement. Astra and GeneratePress are also highly customizable and tend to be more performance-focused.

Minimize Widget and Plugin Usage

Each widget and plugin has its own JavaScript and CSS that are loaded alongside Elementor. For addons, disable the widgets you do not need for your development. For example, you do not need WooCommerce widgets if you do not plan to use WooCommerce to sell anything. This helps reduce the file loading and offers a lightweight site for your visitors. 

Leverage Elementor Performance Settings

Tune your Elementor settings to improve the loading speeds of different assets of your website. Under settings, you will be able to activate lazy loading, inline font icons, optimized DOM output, and improved asset loading, which are key towards promoting a lightweight site. 

Clean Up Unused Code

Place your global code in the child theme’s function.php file or a custom plugin rather than cluttering your Elementor pages with multiple HTML widgets and unnecessary custom code blocks. 

To Sum Up…

Creating lightweight Elementor sites is a continuous process that requires both server-side and client-side configurations, image compressions, thoughtful widget usage, and other robust enhancements apart from the ones mentioned above. 

By implementing these best practices, you can build not only beautiful Elementor sites, but also rank higher in search rankings and offer a top user experience to your site visitors.

Remember, with every kilobyte saved, a millisecond of the loading time is reduced. For comprehensive tools and resources for faster sites, consider exploring this resource for various services, such as hosting, vital for your site’s server performance. 

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