How to Speed Up Slow Elementor Website? (15+ Easy Ways)

A slow website is a curse. No matter how good design or content you have on your site, your game is over if the page load speed is less than 2 seconds. As Elementor is a robust WordPress website builder with a huge template gallery, it can really slow down your website speed. So let’s learn how to speed up slow Elementor website using simple & easiest methods.

Having a well-optimized Elementor, good hosting, theme, and limited plugins can never let your site slow down. So, you have to properly configure Elementor to improve your WordPress site’s load time. First, let’s see how to do it.

How to Speed Up Slow Elementor Website?

A slow website can impact SEO ranking, user experience, and conversion rate. In short, you have no online existence without a fast-loading site. Thus, users should follow these solutions to speed up slow Elementor website:

Sort Website Technicalities

Let’s start by covering the primary grounds that impact the WordPress site speed. That includes:

  • Website Hosting: Select the hosting web service that uses up-to-date hardware and software. Ensure the host supports software like PHP 7+, 128MB+ WordPress memory, and MySQL 5.6+. Look for a host that uses SSD servers, Linux servers, and powerful firewalls for the hardware section. Some of the best web hosts are Bluehost, Siteground, Hostgator, etc. Check out the best wordpress hosting providers to select your desired hosting partner.
  • Use Lightweight Theme: A powerful host and lightweight WordPress theme can speed up your site. A few lightweight theme suggestions are MarketPress, GeneratePress, and Vinkmag. Some important features that you need in your theme are modular installation support, fewer server requests, and small file size. Additionally, make sure that you copy and paste the text correctly to avoid mishaps happening to your theme which will inturn increase the website loading speed. Check out our guide on how to copy and paste without formatting issues.
  • Compress Images: Web images make up most of the total page weight. Thus, you should compress and resize the photos to maintain the Elementor page speed. Some tools to compress images are TinyPNG, Imagify, and Smush.

Besides these tools, you can use these strategies to optimize your images:

  • Use progressive JPEG and next-gen file formats
  • Leverage a caching technique to load your content quickly by storing your images on a proxy server
  • Compress your photos before loading them online
  • If you can’t compress images, you can try to balance size and resolution
  • Lazy load your images

Check Your Plugins Speed

Plugins are useful to enhance the functionality of your WordPress site. But using lots of plugins can harm your Elementor page speed. It makes the site bulky. If possible, remove all the unwanted plugins right now. You can use tools like GTmetrix or Pingdom Tools to find slower plugins. Here you can check out the must-have best free WordPress plugins for businesses. Plugins’ speed really helps speed up slow elementor websites.

Use Elementor Experiments

After covering basic web speed optimization tips, let’s move to some Elementor-specific options. Elementor Experiments is a way for Elementor users to test new features before they are even released.

Under Elementor Pro 3.1 version, you can activate many performance features, such as:

  • Optimized DOM Output to avoid an excessive DOM size item in PSI.
  • Improved Asset Loading to remove unused JavaScript.
  • Improved CSS Loading to remove unused CSS and eliminate rendering-block resources.
  • Font-Awesome Inline helps to load font icons as SVGs without loading the entire library and reduces requests from extra CSS.

You can check out the Elementor review for more information.

Host Fonts Locally & Preload Them

Locally fonts can also help to reduce CSS requests on Elementor. To activate the feature, go to the Theme Customizer > Performance. This will load Google Fonts locally and preload them, or prefetch them when served from fonts.gstatic.com.

Remove Extra CSS & JavaScript

Elementor plugins add extra CSS and JavaScript to support some design elements on your site. And that can make your site heavy.

Using Elementor’s Experiments, you can remove some unwanted CSS and JavaScript. But there are still some scripts that you can remove via disabling other plugins, like:

  • Disable contact form from everywhere except the contact page
  • Keep the social sharing plugin active on only posts
  • Disable rich snippet plugin excluding content
  • Disable multiple fonts

Limit Elementor Widgets/Columns Usage

Keep your Elementor web page light for faster loading. Use a limited number of widgets and columns to speed up slow Elementor website. That’s because fewer widgets/columns mean fewer codes and faster loading.

Disable Unused Plugin Modules

Many WordPress plugins have a modular design that lets you disable features you are not using. Some Elementor plugins also have a modular design, like Premium Addons and Ultimate Addons.

Go to the plugin settings and deactivate modules that you are not using. This applies to all plugins, not just Elementor.

Light & Responsive Mobile Version

You can use Elementor’s responsive mode to remove all bulky components from mobile. In addition, remove third-party codes and JavaScript to make your mobile site faster.

Transform + Translate in Animations

If you are using animations on your site, use them with transform + translate. Otherwise, it might result in layout shifts.

CSS transform will help you change the animations’ width/height. And CSS translate allows you to move elements around without causing shifts.

Switch to PHP 8.0

If your WordPress is still running on older PHP versions, it can slow down your Elementor site. Thus, go to System Info to ensure you are using the latest PHP 8.0. If not, log in to your hosting account and upgrade to the latest PHP version.

To do so, go to your Host account > Select your website > Click on the Tools tab. Under the PHP engine click on the Modify button and select your preferred PHP version in the drop-down menu.

Expand Memory Limit

Elementor requires minimal 256MB memory to work efficiently. But if your host account doesn’t offer sufficient memory to use Elementor, upgrade your hosting plan today.

To upgrade your hosting plan, you can visit your host’s website and check out all the plans available there. Then, go to Services > Hosting and upgrade to a new plan so it can speed up slow elementor website.

Optimize Heavy Third-Party Codes

Heavy third-party codes can also slow down your Elementor site. They are often found in PSI, GTmetrix, Chrome Dev Tools, or Waterfall.

Here are a few tips to reduce third-party codes:

  • Host fonts locally.
  • Lazy load images and your YouTube videos
  • Delay JavaScript
  • Delay third-party comment plugins and Gravatars
  • Use Cloudflare Zaraz to offload Ads and Analytics
  • Host avatars locally
  • Use a self-hosted YouTube placeholder

Three Ps of Speed

Preload, prefetch, and pre-connect are three Ps to boost up slow Elementor websites. Here is how they are used:

Preload

Preload is often used for fonts and links. You can find font files under preload key requests in PSI. Preloading links make the page appear instantly when a user hovers over it. This will reduce page loading for the end-users.

Prefetch

It allows browsers to anticipate requests from third-party sites. Check for third-party code loading on your site in PSI and then prefetch the URLs.

Preconnect

It establishes a quick connection with third-party origins to load a website faster.

Regular Database Cleanups

You should use cache plugins like WP Rocket to regularly clean up your website database. The database is the place where your website data is stored. So, it does contain some unnecessary data, like remnants of uninstalled plugins, spam comments, etc.

Many cache plugins won’t delete tables or configured settings left behind by old plugins. This, in return, can impact the speed of your plugins. So, if you don’t plan to use the plugin ever again, fully delete it from your site. For this, you can use plugins like WP-Optimize to speed up slow elementor website.

Use Perfmatters Plugin

Perfmatters is a robust performance booster plugin for WordPress sites. It is not just valuable for removing unwanted CSS and JavaScript. But it can also help with asset uploading, web vitals, removing bloatware, and more. Read Perfmatters review in detail to get more information on the plugin.

It can help you beyond any regular cache plugin. You can get this plugin for $24.95 per year.

Optimize Core Web Vitals

We already have a comprehensive guide on core web vitals that you can check. So, I will not repeat myself and share some instant tips to improve your Elementor website’s speed:

Look for your Largest Contentful Paint in PSI, usually an image or background image. You should optimize it as best, especially if it loads across your site.
Use Google’s Layout Shift to identify components that are causing your website elements to shift.
Avoid using plugins and themes with heavy JavaScript files.

Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)

It is a vital website speed improvement tip that works for all websites. Getting CDN (Content Delivery Network) will help to load web content faster for your global audience.

That is because when someone visits your website, they download data from your host’s server. Suppose your host’s data center is based in San Francisco. In that case, your website will load faster for users living in California or the US. But will not offer the same speed to visitors based in India or Iceland.

So, CDN here has a simple job to load data for your user from the nearest located data center. That means when someone from India visits your San Francisco-centered site, CDN will look for local data centers to load your website faster.

Many great CDN service providers are available, like Cloudflare or Bunny CDN help you speed up slow elementor website.

Use High-Performing DNS Server

Have you ever wondered how a web browser takes you to a specific URL? That happens with the help of DNS, aka Domain Name Server.

The DNS is like a directory that contains all website addresses and paths available on the Internet. The web browser uses the DNS to look for the server IP address of your website and loads data. Thus, if you use a slower nameserver, it can take longer to find the IP address of your website, leading to a slower Elementor website.

So, get the high-performing DNS servers to help web browsers load your site faster like Cisco OpenDNS, Cloudflare, Google Public DNS, Quad9, etc.

Let’s Speed Up Slow Elementor Website!

Elementor is an intuitive WordPress site builder with a drag-drop interface. Some Elementor might slow down your site, but you have nothing to worry about when you configure the plugin correctly.

I have already shared some common tips to speed up slow Elementor website. In addition, I have also shared tools and services that can fix your slow Elementor website. If you are planning to buy the pro version, here are elementor pro discount codes for you.

Check more details about Elementor here.

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