We had a client reach out to us because their site was loading incredibly slow. We ran a few page speed tests and received scores of 36/100 and the site was using Elementor as a page builder.
Page builders for WordPress make it simple for those without coding backgrounds to create and edit layouts of their website but they add a substantial amount of code to the front end of your site causing low performance scores.
Once we had completed the work we were getting Google Pagespeed scores of 91/100 so let’s learn how to speed up Elementor.
Let’s Discuss Your Elementor Goals
Compress Images
Compressing images reduces the file size but keeps the image quality the same. This site had a compression plugin installed but was not using it for every upload to the media folder.
We deleted the plugin, installed Smush and configured the settings to automatically compress every image during upload.
Optimizing for Speed and Cache
The site was using a pagespeed and caching plugin and had one that was not active so we removed both plugins and installed Hummingbird.
We configured the settings for cache, enabled GZIP options and compressed some additional file assets that had not been automatically compressed by the plugin.
Minify the HTML
Typically we do not add this next plugin but we were now receiving scores that were somewhat average so we installed Autoptimize and only minified the HTML output.
The additional plugin worked and is what helped push our score over 90.
