I run a small website agency for the last 3 years. I started with page builders (Elementor) as it was quick and easy to build large sites. However, I constantly feel like I’m trying to limit my plugins and other bloat, but it never seems enough.
Should I move away from Elementor? If so, how do I recreate similar designs? ACF and CPT? If so, where’s a good place (YT or Udemy) to learn this?
My goal is to create fast WordPress sites that I can scale. Generally my process is this:
* Build a site in Figma using various themes and styles from other sites
* Install Hello theme (from Elementor)
* Install Elementor Pro, All-in-one SEO (RankMath gives errors sometimes), WordFence, Header Injections (for Google Tag manager), some extra Elementor plugins for more items, Contact Form 7, and maybe one or 2 random plugins for the client (e.g. a store locator)
* Reduce my images as much as possible and convert to webp
* I try and use a CDN (like cloudfare) but my hosting provider doesn’t like it
That’s about it. Home page is generally around 1-2MB but always seems to take a few seconds to load. Is it worth me moving away from a pagebuilder? Has anyone been in a similar position? Or should I just stick with Elementor and learn to make the most of it?
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I’ll speak to my own experiences:
* Fastest Elementor-built page I’ve had loaded in <0.2s
* Heaviest website, ~2.5MiB page size with 54-ish plugins and tons of JS scripts (including multiple analytics) had a FCP <0.6s and full page load in <1s, including heavy plugins like WooCommerce, RankMath Pro, Elementor Pro, Wordfence, ACF Pro, …
This website started at ~7s for a full page load pre-optimizations. And almost none of the optimization work was related to Elementor.
I can code in PHP/HTML/CSS/JS as well. It’s just not worth it for my category of client. The time spent manually coding is so high that the cost is always higher than just optimizing an Elementor-built website, which they can then continue to manage themselves.
Unless you’re going for 30k+ clients (50k+ if you’re HCOL), I think you’re almost always better off with a page builder and growing your experience in debugging / performance optimization.
> If so, where’s a good place (YT or Udemy) to learn this?
That’s a tough question for me. I learned by digging through the depths. Attach a debugger and start learning about everything that runs behind WordPress from A to Z. I’d prefer to give you a link to easier info, but most performance-related guides are too generic to be useful and have no sense of importance/impact — so they recommend stuff that ultimately doesn’t help you or makes your page slower.
Aka get [xdebug]).
RE: with ACF.
Another option is taking your Figma designs, converting them to HTML/CSS (there are many affordable done-for-you services for this as well), integrate into WordPress, then replace any dynamic content with ACF’s shortcode or PHP function for fetching whatever field.