Do Elementor Negatively Affect Pagespeed or Google PageInsights score?

Elementor is an AWESOME WordPress page builder. They have a free version in WordPress.org with over 5 million installations, and overall 5 star ratings.

Why are they so popular? Because they provide a free version of the plugin which is not crap. Using the free version of Elementor alone, you can design beautiful pages or write well organized blog posts. Many people including myself love to use Elementor to write blogs instead of using the default WordPress editor called Gutenberg.

I usually prefer Elementor to write my blogs, because it is a front end editor. You know exactly what you are doing and how it is going to look. You know exactly where to add a new paragraph. You can resize the images, and know it will look exactly the same how you edited it.

But with Gutenberg its a completely different story. I believe Gutenberg is nothing but a Glorified Backend Editor. But gutenberg is definitely an upgrade from the classic editor. It has lots of options. You can even build a full-width page using it, if you are an expert at using it. My problem with Gutenberg is that the content does not look the same of how I edit it in the Gutenberg editor. In fact it looks absolutely different. That is why I use Elementor instead.

I was watching YouTube once, heard a blogger mention that page builders slows down the web page, he suggested to use Gutenberg instead to write blogs. I was a bit curious and tested out whether Elementor does affect the page speed or Google pageinsights score. Yes, indeed it does affects the score quite a bit.

How did I compare them?

I compared Elementor and Gutenberg in the simplest way possible. Firstly I created a post with Gutenberg with only dummy text, no images, embeds etc. Then I created a post with Elementor with the same dummy text. They look exactly the same from the front end.

Then I simply measured their scores in Google PageInsights and Pingdom Speedtest.

Page Speed Scores with Gutenberg

The blog post made with Gutenberg got excellent scores on both mobile and desktop in the Google PageInsights score, 93 on mobile and 98 on desktop. It  also a great load time of only 660 ms on Pingdom Speed test.

Page Speed Scores with Elementor

Compared to Gutenberg, the blog post made with Elementor got a much lower score on mobile devices, only 71, 22 lest than that of Gutenberg score on mobile. On desktop devices Elementor blog post got a decent score of 90 on Google PageInsights. But the desktop score is also 8 less than that of Gutenberg.

On pingdom speed test, the load time of the blog post is only 678 ms, 18 ms more than Gutenberg. But this difference is negligible.

My Thoughts

The main things which everything boils down to is the performance in mobile. Elementor got a decent 90 score on desktop, but it’s mobile performance is very poor compared of Gutenberg on Google PageInsights.

So a blog post made with Gutenberg might get more visitors from phone than a blog post made with Elementor. Getting mobile traffic is a good signal for SEO, so a Gutenberg blog post might end up having a higher rank on Google than an Elementor blog post.

My suggestion would be, if you are able to use Gutenberg and comfortable with it, then keep writing blogs with Gutenberg. This will be very good for SEO of your blogs.

But if you would like to keep using Elementor for your website contents. Then you can use the WP Rocket plugin to speed up your WordPress pages and posts.

Will I keep using Elementor?

Yes, I will keep on writing my blog posts using Elementor. Because Gutenberg is still a backend editor, no matter how you present it. It takes a lot of time to reload the pages again and again to see how the page looks.

If you are looking forward to speed up your WordPress website, then you will find this book “Speed-Up WordPress: Step By Step Guide To Speed Optimize Your Blog” from Amazon very useful.

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