800website builds on Elementor, so here is the criticism taken seriously rather than dismissed.
Is Elementor bad for site speed?
Elementor adds weight, and it is rarely the main reason a site is slow. It loads more CSS and JavaScript than a hand-coded theme. On a well-hosted site with optimised images that difference is measured in fractions of a second and does not decide your Core Web Vitals.
What actually decides them, in order: unoptimised images, cheap hosting, plugin sprawl, and render-blocking scripts. Elementor is fourth at worst, and it is the one people blame first because it is the most visible.
The evidence is that well-built Elementor sites routinely hit PageSpeed 60+ on mobile. We commit to 40+ on our Business package and 60+ on Premium in writing, which would be an unwise promise if the builder made it impossible.
How do I make my website load faster?
In order of impact per hour spent:
- Fix your images. Serve WebP at the size actually displayed. A 4MB phone photo in a 400px slot is the most common single cause of a slow page.
- Set explicit width and height on every image, so the page does not shift while loading.
- Move to decent hosting. Time to first byte should be under 600ms. On oversold shared hosting it is routinely over 2 seconds and nothing on the front end fixes that.
- Cut plugins. Every plugin loads assets on every page whether that page uses it or not. Sites we take over commonly run three plugins doing overlapping jobs.
- Enable caching and a CDN. Usually included with managed hosting.
- Lazy-load below-the-fold images so the visitor downloads what they can see first.
Speed optimisation on an existing site is AED 1,200 with us as a standalone job, targeting PageSpeed 60+.
What is a good PageSpeed score?
60+ on mobile is a sensible working target for a content-rich business site. Treat 90+ as a bonus, not a goal — chasing it usually means removing things that earn money.
More useful than the score are the three field metrics underneath: Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1. Those are measured on real visitors rather than in a lab, which is why a site can score well in a test and still feel slow to use.
Check field data, not just lab data. Google’s Chrome UX Report shows what actual visitors experienced, and that is what feeds ranking.
Should I rebuild without a page builder?
Almost never worth it purely for speed. You would spend a rebuild budget to gain a fraction of a second, and lose the ability for your team to edit pages without a developer — which is usually a bigger practical cost.
Fix hosting, images and plugins first. If you are still slow after that, the builder was not your problem.
See our WordPress development, published pricing including speed work, or talk to us.
Talk to us
800website is a Dubai web design and development agency with published fixed prices. Send the details and you get a fixed scope and a fixed price back — no hourly billing. Contact us, message us on WhatsApp, or call +971 58 578 5380.
