Elementor & page speed
Understand how Elementor affects your site's loading speed, what causes slowness, and what you can do to keep your site fast.
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- Intermediate
Elementor is a powerful tool, but it does add code to your pages that can affect how quickly they load. A slow website can lose visitors, and Google takes page experience into account when ranking pages. This guide explains how Elementor affects speed and what you can do about it.
Quick summary
Elementor pages can get slower because of large images, too many plugins, heavy external scripts, or slow hosting. The main ways to keep things fast are: use optimized images, keep pages focused, use a caching plugin, and choose good hosting. Chykalophia handles most of this for you.
Why page speed matters
A slow website can cost you visitors and customers. It can also affect how your pages do in Google:
- Google's ranking systems use Core Web Vitals, a set of measurements that includes how quickly a page's main content loads
- Google says a good page experience can help in Search, but it still puts the most relevant content first
- Google's PageSpeed Insights reports on both mobile and desktop, so check both
See Why website speed matters for more background.
How Elementor affects speed
When Elementor builds a page, it adds its own CSS (styling) and JavaScript (interactivity) files. Visitors' browsers download these files to display the page. Elementor only loads the files a page actually uses, so widgets you haven't placed on a page don't slow it down.
On well-built sites with proper optimization, Elementor's impact on speed is minimal. On poorly built or over-complicated sites, it can be significant.
Common causes of Elementor-related slowness:
| Cause | What to do |
|---|---|
| Large, uncompressed images | Compress and resize images before upload |
| Complex pages with many containers and widgets | Keep pages focused, and build layouts with as few containers as possible |
| External fonts and scripts (such as Google Fonts or embedded maps) | Use only the fonts and embeds your design needs |
| Unused plugins, including Elementor add-on packs | Delete plugins you don't use |
| No caching | Use a caching plugin or managed hosting with caching built in |
| Slow hosting | Use quality managed WordPress hosting (free or shared hosting is often slow) |
What you can control as an editor
As a content editor, the biggest thing you can do for page speed is optimize images:
- Compress images before uploading (use a free tool like TinyPNG). Elementor recommends keeping images under 1 MB.
- Upload images at the correct size — a full-page hero image needs to be wide, but an icon does not
- Prefer WebP format where possible (it is smaller than JPG with similar quality)
- Avoid using PNG for photos (use JPG or WebP instead — PNG doesn't compress photos as much, so the files are larger)
See Images & page speed for practical guidance.
What Chykalophia handles
Performance optimization at the technical level is part of what we do when building and maintaining your site. This includes:
- Turning on Elementor's built-in performance settings
- Setting up a caching plugin or server-level caching
- Configuring a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to serve files faster globally
- Enabling lazy loading for images (they only load when scrolled into view)
- Removing widgets a page doesn't need, and cleaning up Elementor's output
If you are concerned about your site's speed, contact us and we will run a performance audit.
Checking your site's speed
You can run a free speed test anytime using these tools:
- Google PageSpeed Insights — pagespeed.web.dev — shows your score and specific suggestions
- GTmetrix — gtmetrix.com — includes a waterfall chart showing what loads, and in what order
Test both mobile and desktop. In PageSpeed Insights, Google counts a score of 90 or above as good, 50 to 89 as needing improvement, and below 50 as poor.
A score below 90 does not mean disaster
The score comes from a simulated test, and Google notes that a good lab score doesn't guarantee a good experience for real visitors. Focus on the practical user experience alongside the technical score.
Elementor's built-in performance features
Elementor (including the free version) has several performance-oriented features. Some are built in, and others are settings your developer may have turned on:
- Improved Asset Loading — loads only the code each page needs rather than everything at once. This is now built into Elementor.
- Inline Font Icons — shows icons as inline SVG, so the page doesn't have to load the full Font Awesome icon library
- Optimized Image Loading and Lazy Load Background Images — settings on Elementor's Performance tab that help the main image load first and hold back other images until they're needed
- Container-based layouts — lighter output than the legacy Section/Column structure
Common questions
My site scored poorly on PageSpeed — what should I do?
Share the test URL with us. The PageSpeed report lists specific recommendations. Some are things you can fix (image sizes), and others require technical work (we can handle those).
Can I speed up my site by removing Elementor?
Only as part of rebuilding the site with a different tool. We don't recommend removing Elementor from a site that was built with it. The better approach is to optimize the Elementor setup.
Does using more widgets make my site slower?
Widgets you don't use don't slow your site down: Elementor only loads a widget's files on pages where it's used. The widgets you do add each bring their own code, so avoid adding widgets you do not need, and keep pages focused.
Related guides
- Why website speed matters
- Images & page speed
- Common Elementor mistakes to avoid
- Troubleshooting Elementor problems
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