While using the top WordPress page builder Elementor causes the website’s PageSpeed performance to go down significantly, optimizing the Elementor Core Web Vitals is essential to speed up the website. 

According to the w3techs website, around 11.1% of website owners use Elementor to build a well-designed website. If you are also one of them, and struggling with a slow PageSpeed performance, it’s time to speed up your website to enhance the user experience and improve the conversion rate. 

Here, we will see how you can improve Core Web Vitals and PageSpeed performance even if you are using Elementor or another page builder. 

What Is Elementor?

Elementor is the leading WordPress page builder with more than 5 million active installers. In elementor, the drag-and-drop feature allows users to create websites and excellent landing pages without any knowledge of HTML and CSS. This widely used page builder provides you with 100+ widgets such as:

• Headline
• Images Widget
• Video Widget
• Form
• Button
• Image Box
• Image Gallery
• Icon list
• Toggle
• Alert
• Google Map

What Are The Core Web Vitals? 

Google introduced a set of performance metrics to measure the real-world user experience, mainly focusing on the website’s loading time, visual stability, and user interactivity. Let’s explore Google Core web vitals.

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): LCP calculates the time span to display the largest content of your WordPress website in the user’s browser. This largest content can be an image (hero image) or a text block.

Using Elementor or other page builders can slow down the initial page loading time by adding some features like image frames, buttons and many more. 

2. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): CLS is a user-centric performance metric that measures your web page’s stability. 

The impact of Elementor can be negligible on the Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) performance.  

3. First Input Delay (FID): FID is a user-centric performance metric that measures the responsiveness of your WordPress site.

While using Elementor can increase the total page file size, it can negatively affect the website’s First Input Delay (FID) performance.   

4. Interaction to Next Paint (INP): INP calculates the interval of time between a user’s interaction and the website’s visual feedback. This permanence metric is crucial for maintaining a seamless and uninterrupted user experience through clicks and scrolls.

Google developed INP as a replacement for FID. Elementor has its own CSS and JavaScript file which can slow down the Interaction to Next Paint (INP) performance. 

5. First Contentful Paint (FCP): FCP calculates how quickly the first elements display on the user’s browser.

While using Elementor can negatively affect the initial page loading time, it can also slow down the FCP performance. 

For more details, you can check our previous blog.

The Impact of Using Elementor on Core Web Vital

Let’s explore the negative impact of using a page builder like Elementor on core web vitals which includes:

• Using elementor can Increase the page size
• Elementor inserts additional CSS and JavaScript code in a website
• Elementor enlarges the website’s DOM size

Using Elementor Can Increase the Page Size

While the size of the WordPress core is only 16.5 MB (unzipped file), unzipped Elementor consumes 21.0 mb which is 5 mb heavier than the WordPress core weighs. Especially, when you are adding features of elementor, the overall page size will be increased, harming the performance of your core web vital metrics.

To better understand this, we measure the page size for two different web pages with the same content. The page size was 1.0 MB for the web page where we didn’t add Elementor. 

On the other hand, for the web page in which we are using Elementor, the total page size is increased. For this demo page, it increases by 100 kb. Hence, when you are using elementor on a large web page, it would typically increase the page size. 

Elementor Inserts Additional CSS and JavaScript Code in a Website

Like every page builder, Elementor also has its own CSS stylesheets and JavaScript files. If those CSS and JavaSCript files remain unoptimized, then it can be the cause of a high Time to First Byte (TTFB) and First Contentful Paint (FCP).

Elementor Enlarges the Website’s DOM Size

During web page loading, the browser creates a Document Object Model (DOM) of the page. When you use a Page builder like Elementor, the DOM size automatically increases due to the inbuilt HTML and JavaScipt files.

However, if the DOM size exceeds 1500 nodes, Google PageSpeed Insights shows you the warning: Avoid an Excessive DOM Size and the overall core web vital’s performance would be affected. 

7 Strategies To Optimize Your Elementor Website with RabbitLoader

Lacking coding skills would insist you use a WordPress page builder like Elementor. However, to provide a faster-loading website and improve the user experience, you must optimize your Elementor website. Here we explore how RabbitLoader improves the Core Web Vitals performance of your Elementor website. 

Generating Critical CSS

Critical CSS is the most impactful optimization strategy for extracting the CSS style rules or CSS stylesheets applied to the above-the-fold elements to display the page quickly. 

RabbitLoader never removes any resource file from your website. It identifies the critical CSS for every page of your Elementor website and creates a separate file for them. 

Hence, by optimizing the CSS futile, RabbitLoader reduces the CSS file size by 98%, which helps to improve the core web vitals performance. Let’s understand with a real-time example.

As you can see in the above example, RabbitLoader reduces the CSS file size by 98%, from 2.3 MB to just 39.3 kb. It also increases the average page rendering time from 10944.4 ms to 287.6 ms. 

Deferring JavaScript

You often notice the “eliminate render-blocking resources” warning in the Google PageSpeed Insights during the pagespeed auditing time due to the large-sized JavaScript files.

During the page loading time, when the browser parses the entire JavaScript file, it blocks the main thread due to its large size. Therefore, JavaScript files are considered a render-blocking resource. 

By deferring the non-critical JavaScript functions, you instruct the browser to execute those JavaScript files later. This would reduce your website’s Total Blocking Time and improve the LCP and TTFB performance.

RabbitLoader will improve your Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Time to First Byte (TTFB) performance by deferring the non-critical JavaScript files and mitigating the render-blocking resources warning.

Reduce DOM Size 

Reducing DOM size can be one crucial optimization technique for improving the performance of your Elementor website’s core web vitals. By doing this, you can easily mitigate an excessive DOM size warning.

Manually reducing the DOM size can be time-consuming. RabbitLoader will reduce your DOM size by compressing the HTML files.

Let’s see how it works. Here, we have analyzed a website (RabbitLoader.com) before and after using RabbitLoader to better understand the improvement. 

Before optimizing this website with RabbitLoader, the DOM size had 729 nodes. It can harm this website’s pagespeed performance. When we installed RabbitLoader, the DOM size was reduced, improving the page rendering. 

After applying these 3 master techniques, your core web vitals would be improved. If you want to further increase the performance, you can try the following optimization techniques.

Using Lazy Loading

When you add too many images to the Elementor website, it would typically increase the website’s page size. 

If you are adding too many images to your Elementor website, lazy loading is the best optimization technique to improve your Core Web Vitals performance, especially  Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). It allows browsers to display the images present above the fold and defer the remaining images.

When you are using RabbitLoader, it automatically adds lazy load to your Elementor website and improves the rendering time of the largest Contentful elements such as text blocks or hero images. 

Convert Images into Next-Gen Formats

In order to make your Elementor more attractive, you often add high-resolution JPG images that increase the overall page size and decrease the performance of LCP, TTFB and FCP.

RabbitLoader optimizes all images by converting them into Next-gen formats such as AVIF and WebP. The inbuilt bulk image optimization feature reduces image sizes without compromising quality.

Implement a Browser Caching Mechanism 

By implementing the browser cache in your Elementor website, you can temporarily store your website’s static assets, such as media files, HTML, Stylesheets and JavaScript and improve the page loading time. 

When you are using RabbitLoader for another optimization technique, why do you put any extra extra effort into implementing the browser caching mechanism in your website? RabbitLoader will keep an eye on this.

Using Content Delivery Network

 A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a group of edge/ proxy servers distributed in different locations. A CDN can mitigate latency by storing static content in the edge servers.

RabbitLoader has a premium CDN with almost 300+ PoPs. Therefore, using RabbitLoader will improve the server response time by reducing the distance between the user and the origin server.

Why Do You Need To Use RabbitLoader On Elementor Website?  

In the journey to optimize the Elementor website for improving the core web vitals, we explore 7 strategies which include from generating critical CSS to using CDN.  you also can try other optimization techniques like using reliable managed WordPress hosting, using web-safe Google fonts and many more.

Hence, if you are also using elementor or other page builders for creating a well-designed land page, you need to also take care of its PageSpeed performance to enhance the user experience. 

While manually optimizing the Core Web Vitals performance needs expertise in coding, with the help of RabbitLoader, you can easily improve the Elementor Core Web Vitals and speed the the website’s PageSpeed performance.