Thinking about switching from Elementor.

[Joey_Broadway]

I only have one website. It's for my clinic and it's pretty bare-bones. Even still, the load times are atrocious. Perusing some of the posts here it seems that part of the problem may be because it's been built with Elementor. I was thinking of switching over to Bricks.

Price is not horrible for Bricks. Elementor was free, so paying anything stings a little, but it's not the end of the world.

I have no coding knowledge either. When I installed Elementor I just went step-by-step through a tutorial on Youtube. It was pretty easy, but tedious. Will Bricks be the same? I'm looking at a tutorial right know and it doesn't seem too bad. I'm afraid of running into a roadblock and not being able find any answers. I don't want to waste too much time and hiring someone is not in the picture right now.

I would also need to switch over everything from Elementor to Bricks. How much of a pain in the butt is that going to be? Thnkfully, my website is mostly informational. Some images, phone numbers, a contact form. That sort of thing. Nothing complex.

So do you think Bricks is a good idea for me?

 

[Ryuzaki]

Switching will be a pain in the butt regardless, but the real question is whether or not you've done things that can speed up your website even with Elementor. A big problem with all of that is going to be endless database queries and lots of extra CSS and probably JS being called. The database query problem shouldn't even exist if you're using a caching plugin.

WP Super Cache is free, made by Wordpress/Automattic, and has always been my go-to. What it does is runs all of those database queries that are being performed through PHP, and caches them. It takes all the other PHP functions that build out the webpage and caches them.

So the basic explanation is you're no longer saying "Hey, pull the header content from the database, then build out the main content, then sidebar, and footer, and do this every time a page is requested." Instead, it does all that once and saves it all as HTML files (pre-built without needing PHP and SQL queries). It'll also concatenate (combine) your JS and CSS files so instead of loading 5 of them (and waiting on the server to respond) it lets your users load one. It's faster to load one larger file than to wait on the server for 5 smaller ones.

Another thing you can do is make sure your server is using HTTP/2 which allows for multi-threading. So instead of saying "Okay, give me this one file. We'll download it and parse it, then we'll ask for the next file." It's more like "Okay, give me all 5 files at once."

My point is, you may not need to rebuild without Elementor with some other pagespeed optimization efforts. And nothing I just mentioned above is hard. You install the plugin and turn it on. It manages it in the background. And for HTTP/2 you'd just ask your server provider to turn it on. But you can test here and see if it's already on or not. If so, get some caching going if you don't already, and see how things improve.

 

[roydan]

Elementor really stepped up their speed game recently. Are you using an updated version?
Try compressing images and a CDN. It could be that there's an underlying reason that causing the slow loading which isn't Elementor.

 

[Joey_Broadway]

Thanks for the reply.

Switching will be a pain in the butt regardless, but the real question is whether or not you've done things that can speed up your website even with Elementor. A big problem with all of that is going to be endless database queries and lots of extra CSS and probably JS being called. The database query problem shouldn't even exist if you're using a caching plugin.

WP Super Cache is free, made by Wordpress/Automattic, and has always been my go-to. What it does is runs all of those database queries that are being performed through PHP, and caches them. It takes all the other PHP functions that build out the webpage and caches them.

So the basic explanation is you're no longer saying "Hey, pull the header content from the database, then build out the main content, then sidebar, and footer, and do this every time a page is requested." Instead, it does all that once and saves it all as HTML files (pre-built without needing PHP and SQL queries). It'll also concatenate (combine) your JS and CSS files so instead of loading 5 of them (and waiting on the server to respond) it lets your users load one. It's faster to load one larger file than to wait on the server for 5 smaller ones.

Another thing you can do is make sure your server is using HTTP/2 which allows for multi-threading. So instead of saying "Okay, give me this one file. We'll download it and parse it, then we'll ask for the next file." It's more like "Okay, give me all 5 files at once."

My point is, you may not need to rebuild without Elementor with some other pagespeed optimization efforts. And nothing I just mentioned above is hard. You install the plugin and turn it on. It manages it in the background. And for HTTP/2 you'd just ask your server provider to turn it on. But you can test here and see if it's already on or not. If so, get some caching going if you don't already, and see how things improve.

I will check all that out. Thanks for the tip. That sounds like way less hassle than having to rebuild everything with a new program I’m not familiar with.

Elementor really stepped up their speed game recently. Are you using an updated version?
Try compressing images and a CDN. It could be that there's an underlying reason that causing the slow loading which isn't Elementor.

I think I am. I will make sure that I am though.
I will look into your other recommendations too.
Thanks.

 

[thisishatred]

I would also need to switch over everything from Elementor to Bricks. How much of a pain in the butt is that going to be? Thnkfully, my website is mostly informational. Some images, phone numbers, a contact form. That sort of thing. Nothing complex.

So do you think Bricks is a good idea for me?

I am a regular Bricks user and like it far more than Elementor.

Basically any site you could show me, I can likely rebuild in a day or 2.

(a local lead-gen probably half a if you have all the assets ready to go like images, info, color palette - or even a base local site you want yours to look like)

I use the following:

Bricks + https://brixies.co/ + https://automaticcss.com/ (this isn't super necessary)

My stack for hosting is also Vultr HF Servers ($6/m) managed with Runcloud.io ($190/yr) + Flyingpress ($175/yr).

--

I've also used like every builder and started with Elementor and it's nested div gloriousness, then used Oxygen before their dev team tried to fuck their lifetime users, only to then say "sike just kidding in Feb. 2025" - but it was already too late and I converted almost everything from Oxygen to Bricks.

There is a bit of a learning curve at first but basically anything you want to edit, you can edit. Also regarding like "support" - the Bricks forum is pretty active, and there's a good chance other people have had the same issue you're having.

But if you're just doing a local lead-gen site, your issues are going to be very minimal.

Even the Brick's devs will get back to you in 24 hours - they had an issue with their licensing server's like 2-3 months ago and got me sorted manually so I could work.


All that stuff is easy to template:

1. Header + Footer
2. Homepage lander with CTAs (most of which you can just copy + paste if you're using Brixies).
3. Contact page with form (copy + paste from brixies)
4. Blog post template if you have them.
5. Other pages (again just copy + paste with brixies).

Swap colors, insert text, add images - double check your responsiveness for mobile,

Done.

 

[Joey_Broadway]

I am a regular Bricks user and like it far more than Elementor.

Basically any site you could show me, I can likely rebuild in a day or 2.

(a local lead-gen probably half a if you have all the assets ready to go like images, info, color palette - or even a base local site you want yours to look like)

I use the following:

Bricks + https://brixies.co/ + https://automaticcss.com/ (this isn't super necessary)

My stack for hosting is also Vultr HF Servers ($6/m) managed with Runcloud.io ($190/yr) + Flyingpress ($175/yr).

--

I've also used like every builder and started with Elementor and it's nested div gloriousness, then used Oxygen before their dev team tried to fuck their lifetime users, only to then say "sike just kidding in Feb. 2025" - but it was already too late and I converted almost everything from Oxygen to Bricks.

There is a bit of a learning curve at first but basically anything you want to edit, you can edit. Also regarding like "support" - the Bricks forum is pretty active, and there's a good chance other people have had the same issue you're having.

But if you're just doing a local lead-gen site, your issues are going to be very minimal.

Even the Brick's devs will get back to you in 24 hours - they had an issue with their licensing server's like 2-3 months ago and got me sorted manually so I could work.


All that stuff is easy to template:

1. Header + Footer
2. Homepage lander with CTAs (most of which you can just copy + paste if you're using Brixies).
3. Contact page with form (copy + paste from brixies)
4. Blog post template if you have them.
5. Other pages (again just copy + paste with brixies).

Swap colors, insert text, add images - double check your responsiveness for mobile,

Done.

Thank you for the insight. I appreciate the info.
I have to cut overhead as much as I can right now. So I’m going to stay with elementor and implement the above ideas. If things don’t pan out, I will consider Bricks and whatever else I need. If I can do without it, even for a little while, I will.

My website is real simple. Anyone with an inkling of design or coding experience could probably reproduce it in a few hours.