I’m seeing a lot of questions about sites being slow. Anecdotally, it seems like many of those are Elementor sites. So a database performance fanatic like me smells an opportunity to make improvements. Some of the WordPress punditocracy says “don’t use Elementor”. But, they have over ten million downloads. So let’s help those sites if we can.
Of course, it’s possible some Elementor sites are slow because they’re tricked out with every whizzy effect the designer can imagine: Elementor makes that possible. Shades of Geocities! But maybe there are common factors.
The company’s marketing copy prominently features statements of performance improvement from version to version, so it’s obviously important to them. Their advice, and the common wisdom, for speeding up these sites is to use a CDN and/or page cache. That points to potential slowness in the code that delivers pages to the browser.
This post is an account of my examination of the situation.
- Without a persistent object cache, Elementor loads quite a few non-autoloaded option settings for each pageview. Installing an object cache mitigates that. Query Monitor is the go-to tool for this analysis
- Big Javascript load on even simple pages. Lighthouse identifies that.
This post feels a bit cut-off and unfinished 🙂
It would be really interesting to get some deeper insights of the possibility to speed up elementor sites. We newly discovered that a database update of mariadb made a huge difference, and also update of latest php affected speed enormously. Two simple actions that together cut loading times from four seconds to under one second.
I would highly appreciate a post from an expert like you with tips from top to bottom easy fixes and more complex ones!
Yes, you are right I didn’t finish this. Thanks for the encouragement!