One and a half cheers for Elementor (I don’t like saying this)

So I got a last-minute site-rescue request from someone who paid a potato-head marketer five figures for a website. I get the impression they thought "I can just pay someone from Fiverr $500 and pocket the rest." Where the Fiverr person didn't know much either. It's a total s**tshow.

It's built 100% with the free, plugin-directory version of Elementor and a $25 premium theme. They serve videos from the media library. Totally non-optimized images (e.g. 10mb non-transparency PNGs) 6-minute, 159mb video in the "hero" spot with an 18mb background video! Badly done "custom CSS" for overlapping elements that fail completely in responsive mode. 21mb on-load Just a total amateur hour.

PageSpeed Insights still gives the site a %!#!# 96 for desktop, and a (remarkable, all things considered) 61 for mobile!

GTMetrix gives it a B.

Admittedly it's running on a SiteGround "GrowBig" account (along with the client's multiple other sites.) But those figures are without any of SiteGround's optional caching turned on.

Note: I don't even like Elementor, and I really don't like how it's become the defacto Microsoft Windows (vs Gutenberg's developer-friendly / user-unfriendly Unix TclTk.) But compared to the kind of dog-lips performance it's coughed up in past years "that's growth."

I'm curious what scores I'll be able to wring out of it if I actually Do Things like server-side and WP caching, image optimization, pushing videos to a streaming service, cleaning up responsive issues. Even without rebuilding it, with luck I ought to be able to get it into the mid to high 90s.

Again, I wouldn't have built this way. But sort of by definition people don't come to site cleanup specialists if their site is built the way I'd have built it. So one and a half stars for Elementor, I guess.