Is Elementor bad for site speed?

[darklocal]

I was told by someone that my bounce rate is high because my site loading speed is slow, I am not sure if it's that bad but I checked it using GTmetrics and it looks like it is not that bad. He said that the Elementor plugin is the one that is causing the site to load slow. Do you have any suggestions?

 

[Stones]

Bounce rate is a very unreliable metric to use when trying to ascertain whether a visitor was satisfied with your page's content. All it means is that they came and left without interacting with your site, clicking things or visiting another page etc. You'd be better off looking at the time on site then the bounce rate.

<edit> I've been hearing about bounce rate as an important metric from marketing teams for years, I think it's one of these myths that people have latched on to cause they read it on a Moz blog. It's importance largely depends on the type of page and the user intent. Would be interested in what others think.

Elementor can be pretty slow out of the box, but there are plenty of guides available with tips on how to speed it up. A quick dive through the options disabling any unneeded features and a well optimised caching plugin will get the most of the way there.

 

[sleepysentry]

I was told by someone that my bounce rate is high because my site loading speed is slow, I am not sure if it's that bad but I checked it using GTmetrics and it looks like it is not that bad. He said that the Elementor plugin is the one that is causing the site to load slow. Do you have any suggestions?

Did you check speed on mobile? This is what Google looks at. Lighthouse in Chrome Developer Tools (Right Click -> Inspect -> Lighthouse) is great for checking this.

I ran a Lighthouse report on your site and got a performance score of 59/100. This is ok but not great. The site took 6 seconds to load. Your site is slow but at this stage it isn't going to kill your rankings.

One thing you can do is reduce image size. For example the rocket on your site (Homepage-rocket.png) is 195kb in size.

I would run Light House and look at the recommendations yourself. Just keep in mind that speed is only one of many factors, and it's also speed relative to competitors that counts. Don't spend days optimizing your site if your competitors also have slow speed but 100x as many links.

 

[Padi]

I was told by someone that my bounce rate is high because my site loading speed is slow, I am not sure if it's that bad but I checked it using GTmetrics and it looks like it is not that bad. He said that the Elementor plugin is the one that is causing the site to load slow. Do you have any suggestions?

There's been issues with Elementor recently but it wouldn't be fair to blanketly say it causes your site to load slow. Can be a drawn out discussion, but in short, no, it wouldn't be the single/main thing to impact your site load speed. It's how you use it. A good example is sticking in a large image file which may be the issue, as sleepysentry pointed out. Ask around and don't just rely on one friend's opinion, as it may be biased / limited to what they know. Or don't.

Bounce rate - load speed is only one of many things that affect BR. Take a closer look at the source of the traffic that bounced. What were they looking for, and does your page provide it?

 

[John Thomas]

We tried using Elementor for a landing page for a digital ebook.

It was slow, integration with services like Aweber, etc felt unintuitive. In the end we ended up hiring a elementor specialist to take care of everything.

After hiring an expert it was good. But it is not a good experience out of the box. Which is something we try to avoid when scaling up.

 

[bernard]

I don't know, Google probably thinks so, but I live in a first world country and not in some backwater with 3G internet, so my site loads within 2 secs on mobile.

In other words, it loads plenty fast enough for me to have high visitor value and make money.

Google seems to want that I should make my site load so fast that people in the rural third world, who can't understand my language, can load the site within 1 sec. Weird expectation, but ok.

 

[Monk]

If you add too many elements to a page it will be slow regardless of the builder you use. I've built several websites using Elementor and none of them has a speed issue.