Elementor is the industry-leading WordPress page builder. Many WordPress designers use Elementor to create the appearance and structure of their clients’ websites. However, since we know that the speed of a website affects the SEO ranking, many WordPress users like to know how fast or slow Elementor is. What is the impact of Elementor on a WordPress PageSpeed score? This post found that Elementor decreases the PageSpeed score by 25 to 35 over a native theme. However, using Elementor produces shorter development times as well as decreasing the cost of development.
Pros
- shorter development time.
- lower cost of development.
Cons
- lower PageSpeed score.
Research procedures
- The experiment is run through on a newly created WordPress site on LaunchPad 1 hosting plan.
- Three posts of identical contents were created to test the page’s speed using Google’s PageSpeed Insight.
- The content was the first three paragraphs of the first chapter of Alice in Wonderland, together with the chapter’s title and the image of White Rabbit checking watch.
- Post 1 was created in the WordPress’s native editor.
- Post 2 was created in the Elementor’s editor, with the heading, text and image all in a single text body.
- Post 3 was also created with Elementor’s editor, using the title, text and image widgets to hold the different parts of the content.
- The experiment was run using Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Cache was purged before the test in each category. Each post was run five times and the average was computed.
- The two posts created in Elementor were run with Elementor and Elementor Pro’s plugin.
Results of Elementor’s impact on PageSpeed
We observed that the native theme(Post 1) always produced the highest score compared to the other two posts (Post 2 and 3). The page scored an average of 99 using LaunchPad 1 hosting plan.
With the free Elementor plugin, both the second and third posts did not show any significant difference in their PageSpeed results, averaging 76 and 78 for Post 1 and Post 2 respectively.
The PageSpeed results for Post 2 and Post 3 decreased by more than 10% when the Elementor Pro’s plugin is activated, scoring the same average of 68 for both posts.
The impact of Elementor on PageSpeed score
From the results, we observed that native theme always produces the fastest PageSpeed result, compared to the posts that were created with Elementor. We expected this because page builders require numerous javascript and CSS files to handle the layouts of the web page, creating an overhead that is otherwise absent on the native theme. Hence, Elementor, and other page builders, have a slight negative impact on the PageSpeed score of the WordPress pages.
That is not to say that native theme is the best option. The reason page builders were created was because many designers are not coding experts. That is to say, if a web designer wanted to create a native WordPress theme, the designer would need to pick up the knowledge of WordPress theme creation, including the structure of a WordPress theme, CSS and javascript.
Using Elementor allows designers to avoid learning web coding in-depth. This free them up to design aesthetically pleasing WordPress sites while at the same time, shorten the delivery times. As a result of shorter time to develop WordPress sites, site owners could also pay less as a result.
Finally, page speed is not the only SEO criteria. Other factors such as aesthetically pleasing themes and useful contents also play important roles is determining the overall page rank.
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