Performance optimization for an Elementor-based site can take many forms. From experience, issues tend to be related to sub-optimal web hosting services, an overload of activated plugins, or large, uncompressed images being used throughout the site. The key is identifying which aspects might be negatively impacting your site’s performance and taking action to address them.

One of the first things you can do is ensure that your web hosting service isn’t the culprit. A poor hosting service can easily cause slow server responses and prevent optimal site performance. For WordPress sites, including those built using Elementor, we generally recommend managed hosting options like WPEngine or Kinsta as good starting points. If upgrading your web host isn’t feasible for your team, you may find this list of the best budget WordPress hosts helpful.

Next, take a look at the number of plugins in use. An excess number of active plugins can affect your site’s performance considerably due to excessive server requests and database queries occurring each time someone loads a page on your site. With this in mind, it’s recommended that you remove any unused or redundant plugins.

A vital step in optimizing any site built with Elementor is optimizing images for web usage before uploading them to your media library. Large image files will take longer to load on visitors’ browsers leading to slower page loading times overall.

There are numerous ways to optimize images before uploading:

• Most graphic design tools will offer options when exporting or saving files that compress file sizes.
• Optimize them for display dimensions – images should not be larger than their display dimension size.
• Compressing photos with free online tools like TinyPNG to reduce their file size before uploading them to your WordPress website.

Another factor that might be affecting your loading speeds in Elementor is JavaScript and CSS files. WordPress generates these files every time someone visits your website, and they can pile up quite quickly. You can combine and minify these using the Autoptimize plugin, which in essence simplifies them and removes any unnecessary characters (like spaces and comments).

A Content Delivery Network (also called a CDN) like Cloudflare or Amazon Cloudfront helps distribute static resources of a site (like images, CSS, JS) across many servers globally. When a visitor requests your site from a location far from your server, they will get served the static resources from the nearest available server. CDNs not only help reduce latency but also reduce load on your server.

A bloated database can also contribute to slower speeds so regularly cleaning and optimizing your WordPress database can have significant performance gains. You can use plugins like WP-Optimize for this.

Remember that optimizing a site built with Elementor involves more than just speed optimization.

Conduct regular speed tests on your website using tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to see what effect these changes are making over time.

A WordPress developer with Elementor experience can help guide you through all these steps based on their best practices experience.