How To Fix A Slow Elementor Website (18 Speed Optimizations)

Have a slow Elementor website?

A slow Elementor site can usually be fixed by using faster plugins, hosting, upgrading to PHP 7.4, increasing memory limit, configuring WP Rocket with a CDN, and optimizing your images, database, third party scripts, and plugins. These should make a significant speed improvement.

This was already asked in the Elementor Facebook Group so I included all the solutions (plus others) in this tutorial. Elementor says the most common reasons for a slow Elementor website are your servers, media, third party scripts, plugins, no CDN, and using a mediocre cache plugin.

I use Elementor and am still able to get great results in GTmetrix.

1. Disable Unused Elementor Addons

Many Elementor plugins have widgets, add-ons, and scripts which are turned on by default, but you may not be using (Elementor Ultimate Addons, Premium Addons For Elementor, etc). Go through each plugin’s settings and deactivate the addons not currently being used on the site.

To go a step further, install Asset CleanUp or Perfmatters and use the script manager to deactivate Elementor scripts not being used on your site. For example, if you’re only using some Elementor functionality on pages (but not posts), you can deactivate the scripts on your posts. Again, test each one carefully since this can also break things if you are indeed using the script.

2. Move Away From Poor Hosting

Skip the shared crap and go with Cloudways.

Elementor says “shared hosting services are often the cause of a slow site.” So if you’re using GoDaddy, Bluehost, HostGator, or an EIG hosting company, this is what they mean by poor hosting. It simply doesn’t have enough server resources to support Elementor (let alone other heavy elements like WooCommerce or AdSense). Even SiteGround’s CPU limits are just as bad.

I moved from SiteGround to DigitalOcean on Cloudways and the results speak for themselves. I’m also paying 1/2 of what I was. Cloudways also does free migrations which made it very easy.

They’re who most people recommend in the WordPress Hosting Facebook Group and #1 in most recent Facebook polls, especially since SiteGround increased prices and went downhill.

I signed up for 15+ hosting accounts to test their speed. All domains in this video are live, which means you can visit them in real-time and click through their pages, use GTmetrix, etc. Same Astra Starter Site, same 6 plugins, SSL, no caching, no CDN, pretty much “out of the box.”

3. Upgrade To PHP 7.4

Check your current PHP Version under Elementor > System Info.

Upgrading PHP versions is one of the easiest ways to speed up your Elementor site. Kinsta’s PHP benchmarks shows how higher PHP versions can run 2-3x faster. Elementor also recommends higher PHP versions and to increase memory limit to 256MB (see next step).

You can do this in your hosting account:

4. Enable Varnish + Memcached

Login to your hosting account and make sure varnish and memcached are enabled.

Below are settings for Cloudways, but other providers also have these options. If using SG Optimizer, activate memcached in SiteGround’s dashboard then activate it in SG Optimizer.

5. Increase Memory Limit To 256MB

Again, check your memory limit in under Elementor > System Info.

Both Elementor, WordPress, and WooCommerce recommend a 256MB memory limit.

You can usually change memory limits in your hosting account:

Otherwise, add this code to functions.php.

define( ‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘256M’ );

6. Configure Optimal WP Rocket Settings

If you’re not using WP Rocket, you should (also for obvious reasons).

But most people don’t have the optimal WP Rocket settings configured. There are a few additional tweaks that can significantly improve your load times: testing and enabling everything in the file optimization tab, lazy loading, and prefetching DNS requests (basically just copying/pasting all URLs you find in the “reduce DNS lookups” section your GTmetrix YSlow report). Also preload font files shown in your Waterfall tab, and activate heartbeat control, database cleanup, and RocketCDN. After these, you should see a huge improvement.

7. Optimize Google Fonts

If you get font errors in GTmetrix, there are a few ways to optimize them.

Elementor Pro lets you use custom fonts.

Use Transfonter to convert fonts to web font files and upload them to CSS, or use OMGF.

Optimize Google Fonts in WP Rocket.

Preload font files in WP Rocket (copy/paste font files from GTmetrix waterfall).

8. Avoid Slow Loading Plugins

Some plugins you should just stay away from.

High CPU plugins that slow down Elementor sites usually have to do with statistics, backups, social sharing, portfolios, live chat, contact forms, sliders, JetPack, and any plugin that is constantly required to run on your website (such as Query Monitor or Broken Link Checker).

If you’re running slow plugins, replace it with a lightweight plugin. For example, I use the Grow by Mediavine for social sharing buttons and it doesn’t affect my GTmetrix report whatsoever.

9. Optimize Third Party Requests

Just like Google Fonts are a third party request, so is AdSense, Analytics, Maps, Tag Manager, embedded videos, and even Gravatars or social sharing plugins can cause third party requests.

Find these in the “reduce DNS lookups” section of GTmetrix YSlow.

Optimizing Specific Third Party Scripts

WP Rocket has an Add-ons tab that can help host analytics locally and add browser caching to Facebook Pixel. WP Rocket’s Media settings let you lazy load videos while replacing the iframe with a preview image. If you embed posts from social media, try taking a screenshot and using an image instead. I also use the Flying Scripts plugin to delay loading of Gravatars and Discuz which is why I still get fast load times when showing Gravatars on posts with lots of comments.

10. Resize Images To Correct Dimensions

When using Elementor, it’s important to scale (resize) images to fit their correct dimensions.

Otherwise, you will see serve scaled images errors in GTmetrix. If you see any, grab the recommended dimensions provided by GTmetrix, resize the image to those dimensions, then replace the old image with the new one. I recommend creating an “image dimension cheat sheet” with the dimensions of different areas of your site (sliders, featured images, full width blog images, logo). That way, you can resize images to the correct dimensions before uploading.

11. Disable WooCommerce Scripts, Styles, Cart Fragments

Just like you selectively disabled scripts in the very first step, you can use Perfmatters and Asset CleanUp to do the same thing with WooCommerce scripts, styles, and cart fragments.

Perfmatters lets you do this with 1-click:

12. Clean Your Database

WP Rocket doesn’t let you go through individual plugin tables, while WP Optimize does.

This lets you delete old tables left behind by plugins you deleted which are shown as “not installed.” You probably installed the plugin, deleted it, but it left behind pre-configured settings in your database. So if you don’t plan on using that plugin again, delete the table. Otherwise, WP Rocket is fine for regular database cleanups, but install WP-Optimize and do this once in awhile.

13. Utilize CDNs

Most Elementor users are using Cloudflare or RocketCDN (with WP Rocket).

RocketCDN is extremely easy to set up (just buy the plan through WP Rocket which uses StackPath’s data centers), while Cloudflare requires changing nameservers. If you’re using Cloudflare, be sure to go through your actual Cloudflare dashboard and tweak your settings.

• Speed: enable Brotli and Rocket Loader
• Scrape Shield: enable hotlink protection
• Page Rules: set up page rules for WordPress
• Firewall: block bad bots from Wordfence’s live traffic report

14. Use A Lightweight Theme

There are the themes most people are using:

15. Find Bottlenecks In GTmetrix

Other than measuring scores + load times, you can uncover quite a few things in GTmetrix. Since every Elementor site is different, you want to find exactly what is slowing down yours.

Time To First Byte

Unoptimized Images

Slow Plugins

16. Explore Plugins By Gijo Varghese

Love this guys and his plugins; he even has his own Facebook Group.

Flying Scripts is my favorite because it let me show Gravatars without affecting GTmetrix. But he also has plugins for hosting analytics locally, image optimization, Flying Pages (preloads pages), and other very plugins. See my WordPress speed optimization plugins for a full list.

17. Switch Editor Loader Method In Elementor

Elementor says:

Find this under Elementor → Settings → Advanced → Editor Loader.

18. Finish The Last 10% Of Speed With Perfmatters

Perfmatters (by Kinsta) takes care of what I like to call “miscellaneous speed optimizations.”

Some of these are extremely useful; the script manager which lets you selectively disable plugins/scripts from certain pages, changing the autosave interval, limiting post revisions, preconnect, and disabling WooCommerce scripts, styles, and cart fragments. When it comes to these types of optimizations, I don’t know of any plugin that does a better job than Perfmatters.

What do you expect, it’s Kinsta.

Frequently Asked Questions

Still Have A Slow Elementor Site?

I’ll say this: Cloudways and WP Rocket should fix 80% of your problems.

Most every part of WordPress speed optimization relates to your infrastructure: hosting, theme, page builder, plugins, etc. You can still get an extremely fast site with Elementor (mine is just 1 example), however, after watching this video and looking at my own source code, I kind of wish I went with Oxygen. I love how my site looks, but next redesign will likely be with Oxygen.

Not cool!

Cheers,
Tom