Using a WordPress page builder is an easy way to customize a WordPress theme. The drag and drop functionality of the builder allows you to create and customize the layout without touching the code. The only drawback is that page builders typically add a ton of extra code to the front end of your website causing your pagespeed score to suffer. Let’s learn how we can improve Google Pagespeed scores while using the WPBakery Page Builder for WordPress.
Website Background
We had the opportunity to improve the page speed of an eCommerce website that was using the WPBakery plugin. The site was very slow loading, on the front and admin side of the website and the Pagespeed scores were very low. This is how we optimized this eCommerce website.
Use Better Hosting
Switching website hosts is a big deal and requires a good amount of work but the results of making this move can be fantastic. We migrated this eCommerce website to a faster, more reliable website host who optimizes WordPress websites better than any host we’ve worked with. Now that our server was setup to run a WordPress website the best it could it was time to work on the actual site.
Compressing Images
The images for the products were not the issue even though they benefited from being compressed a touch during our process. The site’s major image issue were the hero images. The hero images were particularly large especially on the home page slider so we reduced the file size while keeping the photo quality.
Adding a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
We added and configured Cloudflare CDN for this website and the results were outstanding. After installing and configuring Cloudflare we gained over 20 points in Google Pagespeed scores almost instantly and the service is saving the site about 18% of the bandwidth daily.
