Search engines actively consider website performance as a metric when evaluating search result rankings. A poorly performing website provides users with a bad UX, and the result is a demotion in search results, no matter how great its content is.
Website owners and designers have discovered that creating a beautiful website is easy but ensuring performance and looks is a different task altogether. Often, great-looking designs incorporate too many assets that dramatically reduce page loading speeds.
Design platforms such as Elementor prioritize website performance these days and make it simple for users to create beautiful, great-performing websites. Here are 3 features that push a website’s performance to the next level.
Reduced Asset File Sizes
Modern websites offer designers no end of features. From lightboxes to hovering banners, to creative pop-ups, designers can minutely tailor user experience. However, these assets aren’t useful unless the user hangs around long enough on the page. If the page takes too long to load, all that effort is for naught.
Elementor 3.4 prioritizes reducing asset file sizes. While design practices play a role in reducing the number of on-page elements and subsequent HTML calls, back-end code can be simplified by reducing calls to redundant Javascript and CSS libraries. By dropping support for old browsers, HTML code sizes reduce, and the result is faster performance.
According to tests conducted by Elementor, server response time is improved by up to 23%, memory usage is reduced by about 5% and about 30% of data traffic to the Editor load is saved with these improvements. There’s no doubt that these lighter pages will lead to faster loading times. When combined with existing features such as smart asset files, conditional loading, and reduced extra DOM elements, designers will notice a definite bump in website performance.
Responsive Design Elements
Responsive design isn’t the first feature that designers think of when looking to increase performance. However, given the wide range of platforms on which users access websites, responsive design plays a role in providing users with a great browsing experience.
These days, users access websites from as many as 7 different platforms. With this in mind, Elementor’s 3.4 release offers an improved Font Awesome SVG icons mechanism along with up to 6 additional custom breakpoints. Designers can incorporate custom breakpoints without impacting speed, code, or reliability.
The 7 platforms that Elementor supports are desktop, tablet, tablet extra, mobile, mobile extra, laptop, and widescreen. Thus, no matter the device in question, web creators can create pixel-perfect browsing experiences for their visitors.
Streamlined Loading
Increasing the degree of streamlined asset loading is a point of concern for Elementor, and their future releases will prioritize improving existing asset loading workflows. In addition to this, streamlining HTML and reducing calls to CSS and Javascript libraries is also slated for a future release.
The bottom line for Elementor is improving website performance without compromising on site reliability or UX. By focusing on the under the hood elements of a website, designers can now deploy fast and beautiful websites with minimal disruption.
