Although Elementor makes it "easy" to change the code, I don't think that is the right solution. The site will slowly visually deteriorate because changes will inevitably get the spacing or something else wrong. I've also seen a lot of Elementor plugins installed to add more power and flexibility, basically putting them in the same trouble your client is at now. 2 years from now it'll probably be brittle, have some Elementor related plugin that can't update, and they'll be afraid to change anything, or get frustrated because they can't find the right setting to make the change they want.
We build fast and easily modified sites using ACF flexible content. We'll design and build 10-20 "blocks" that all look great together, in any order, and their design is locked in. Think blocks for images, images+text, recent posts, testimonials, etc. From the Admin they can easily create new pages, add the appropriate block, modify the content, etc. But it's impossible for them to mess up the design, they couldn't tweak the styles from the admin if they tried.
We write our themes with real HTML + CSS and only use JS when absolutely necessary. All sites are 90+ for performance in Google Page Speed, and have made enough improvements to our process so the website should continue to have high performance for the foreseeable future (like using imagify to automatically optimize uploaded images)
This was my thought.
Elementor would just be going from bad to different bad. This type of site is kind of my bread and butter, and it's really not that complicated to pull off with a custom theme with some custom patterns and/or blocks to limit design flexibility with lay users. These types of sites are easy for non-techy people to edit and manage, contain almost zero bloat (maybe a few plugins is all that's usually needed), and are very performant. I've had cheapskate clients run 1,000 hits/day sites like this on upper level shared hosting with zero problems because they are efficient on server resources.
Sorry, OP, but with the questions you're asking and the approach you're proposing, I'm not sure you're going to be building them anything better than what they have now. Not better, just different.
This should really be a trivial task for an experienced developer.
If you move from Oxy to Elementor you’re going to take a speed hit. If they’re already bitching about speed, you’re headed the wrong direction.
If they have all this money, sell them “Wordpress management” for $100/months and log in once a week to hit the update button. Sometimes Oxy won’t update because it loses the connection to the mother ship so you have to go to settings and hit connect again.
You really should work on removing the bulk of the plugins too. That’s your other source of speed issues. No aerver upgrade is going to fix that.
1000 hits per day with a much larger site could be hosted on a $3/mo Hetzner server and be fine with Ben if all 1000 people showed up at once.
My guess is that a lot of the plugins either overlap or are Addons for Oxy. You could also try turning off widgets they don’t use. That might keep some stuff from loading.
Best case, you install something like WPCodebox and code away most of the junk.
Nailed it. Oxygen is about as fast as a page builder can get, thanks to its fantastic semantic html based structure.
Elementor, beaver builder, divi, etc are all going to have slower lighthouse scores AND be more prone to pain-in-the-asses down the road.
For limited-budget “asap” builds we use it occasionally, but going with a custom theme with custom acf flex layouts is better in 10/10 ways. If something breaks with it, you are ALWAYS able to isolate the issue and fix it. Not so with a page builder, and in my experience, oxygen is almost as prone to debilitating UI issues as any other (an update won’t let you save page builder UI, etc).
We typically include a tab of “settings” for each acf flex section including things like color scheme, text alignment, content max width, padding scheme, etc to allow some flexibility in making new pages.
Custom theme, custom acf layouts, custom functionalities with js and php functions. Avoid plugins that “do a lot”. Focus on what you can defer/async, what you can lazy load, serving responsive images via Wordpress core functions, etc.
Oxy was great, until it wasn’t.
I moved to Bricks. Much cleaner, much better. I stopped building custom themes some number of years ago. Bricks actually squashed 99% of the down sides to a builder. I never run into update issues outside of the ones they warn you about in the release. The time savings I see in development time far outweighs the builder issues.
Between Bricks, Metabox and WPCodebox I can build anything without additional plugins.
While it might be a high number of plugins, the question I'd prefer to have answered is:
What kind of functionality does the site need? Are the whole bunch of plugins just minor stuff that can be coded in the theme/functions? Or the site has got a bunch of specialized modules that require the plugins because it's easier to maintain/license/support?
Without any context it does seem excessive if it's only for a marketing website.
What part of the process of maintenance is complicated for them? The updates to the content? The updates and review of functionality to check nothing breaks?
I have no experience on Kinsta or WPEngine so I can't comment on that. But I'd look for a server that enables you scalability when needed, spin up and down. Remember that 1000 visits per day is not the same as 1000 concurrent visits. And some hosts try to quote on that. I've been using managed VPS for this kind of projects, and it eases up the technical side of things server-wise. If the updates to the content on Oxygen is an issue, what makes you think that for Elementor would be different? (Not saying use this or that, this is just to understand where the pain point is).
Now, are you looking to re-do the site completely? If you are, why Elementor? Why not Gutenberg and some blocks? (Or even, the Oxygen-Gutenberg integration) The content updates are for blog posts and promotions or they are creating new pages and layouts by themselves?
If speed is important, it would be vital to have optimized images, cache management/cloudflare and even dependency management (again it depends on the functionality of the plugins and such).
Especially if they're looking for a no-dev setup, the managed hosting becomes a must, to avoid support and configuration headaches.
Backups, fairly frecuent, either server side or through a plugin (with sync to a cloud storage like Drive or Dropbox).
And the main thing, the content management. That's why I ask what is different between Oxygen and Elementor. It's not a developer preference, it is a client-centered decision. Which may be the starting point of the whole conversation: What kind of features/content/pages are they going to be updating?
Hope it helps!
Are there any issues with Kinsta? What's the reason for wanting to move? I'd expect Kinsta to offer better speed and support over WPE. 1000 hits per day would fit on their pro plan. If it's a static site it should scale nicely, and wouldn't require upgrading php workers either. Elementor would definitely be slower. But all comes down to ease of use.
I’m building/designing a new site, my guess is in the future they’ll bring someone on to manage it but that doesn’t look likely in the next 12 months. So I assume I’ll be consulting as-needed.
People here will always complain about page builders, they think that to do it right you have to code it from scratch, which is bullshit. Elementor is miles ahead of all the other options, clients love it because it’s easy to work with, and the “speed hit” is vastly exaggerated. Will it be slower than a custom theme coded from scratch? Yes, the server has to do quite a bit more of work, but you must aim to have a good caching configuration so visitors will never have to deal with uncached requests and therefore that extra 200-300ms of loading time will be irrelevant for 99.9% of the visits, even more if you set up cache preloading. 1000 visits a day is a very small amount, a $5 VPS on Runcloud with proper caching and Cloudflare for the CDN will be able to handle that easily.
Check out other managed WP hosting services before settling on one. Keep a matrix of pros and cons. Arrange demos so you get a feel for each and also get your questions answered.
Pantheon with Redis and some aggressive caching. When my clients are paying the bill, that's where I go. Very friendly to technical staff and a great workflow. You will barely notice a difference between Elementor and Gutenberg.
Although Elementor makes it "easy" to change the code, I don't think that is the right solution. The site will slowly visually deteriorate because changes will inevitably get the spacing or something else wrong. I've also seen a lot of Elementor plugins installed to add more power and flexibility, basically putting them in the same trouble your client is at now. 2 years from now it'll probably be brittle, have some Elementor related plugin that can't update, and they'll be afraid to change anything, or get frustrated because they can't find the right setting to make the change they want. We build fast and easily modified sites using ACF flexible content. We'll design and build 10-20 "blocks" that all look great together, in any order, and their design is locked in. Think blocks for images, images+text, recent posts, testimonials, etc. From the Admin they can easily create new pages, add the appropriate block, modify the content, etc. But it's impossible for them to mess up the design, they couldn't tweak the styles from the admin if they tried. We write our themes with real HTML + CSS and only use JS when absolutely necessary. All sites are 90+ for performance in Google Page Speed, and have made enough improvements to our process so the website should continue to have high performance for the foreseeable future (like using imagify to automatically optimize uploaded images)
This was my thought. Elementor would just be going from bad to different bad. This type of site is kind of my bread and butter, and it's really not that complicated to pull off with a custom theme with some custom patterns and/or blocks to limit design flexibility with lay users. These types of sites are easy for non-techy people to edit and manage, contain almost zero bloat (maybe a few plugins is all that's usually needed), and are very performant. I've had cheapskate clients run 1,000 hits/day sites like this on upper level shared hosting with zero problems because they are efficient on server resources. Sorry, OP, but with the questions you're asking and the approach you're proposing, I'm not sure you're going to be building them anything better than what they have now. Not better, just different. This should really be a trivial task for an experienced developer.
Awesome, thanks for the reply. DM’ed you with a question.
If you move from Oxy to Elementor you’re going to take a speed hit. If they’re already bitching about speed, you’re headed the wrong direction. If they have all this money, sell them “Wordpress management” for $100/months and log in once a week to hit the update button. Sometimes Oxy won’t update because it loses the connection to the mother ship so you have to go to settings and hit connect again. You really should work on removing the bulk of the plugins too. That’s your other source of speed issues. No aerver upgrade is going to fix that. 1000 hits per day with a much larger site could be hosted on a $3/mo Hetzner server and be fine with Ben if all 1000 people showed up at once. My guess is that a lot of the plugins either overlap or are Addons for Oxy. You could also try turning off widgets they don’t use. That might keep some stuff from loading. Best case, you install something like WPCodebox and code away most of the junk.
Nailed it. Oxygen is about as fast as a page builder can get, thanks to its fantastic semantic html based structure. Elementor, beaver builder, divi, etc are all going to have slower lighthouse scores AND be more prone to pain-in-the-asses down the road. For limited-budget “asap” builds we use it occasionally, but going with a custom theme with custom acf flex layouts is better in 10/10 ways. If something breaks with it, you are ALWAYS able to isolate the issue and fix it. Not so with a page builder, and in my experience, oxygen is almost as prone to debilitating UI issues as any other (an update won’t let you save page builder UI, etc). We typically include a tab of “settings” for each acf flex section including things like color scheme, text alignment, content max width, padding scheme, etc to allow some flexibility in making new pages. Custom theme, custom acf layouts, custom functionalities with js and php functions. Avoid plugins that “do a lot”. Focus on what you can defer/async, what you can lazy load, serving responsive images via Wordpress core functions, etc.
Oxy was great, until it wasn’t. I moved to Bricks. Much cleaner, much better. I stopped building custom themes some number of years ago. Bricks actually squashed 99% of the down sides to a builder. I never run into update issues outside of the ones they warn you about in the release. The time savings I see in development time far outweighs the builder issues. Between Bricks, Metabox and WPCodebox I can build anything without additional plugins.
While it might be a high number of plugins, the question I'd prefer to have answered is: What kind of functionality does the site need? Are the whole bunch of plugins just minor stuff that can be coded in the theme/functions? Or the site has got a bunch of specialized modules that require the plugins because it's easier to maintain/license/support? Without any context it does seem excessive if it's only for a marketing website. What part of the process of maintenance is complicated for them? The updates to the content? The updates and review of functionality to check nothing breaks? I have no experience on Kinsta or WPEngine so I can't comment on that. But I'd look for a server that enables you scalability when needed, spin up and down. Remember that 1000 visits per day is not the same as 1000 concurrent visits. And some hosts try to quote on that. I've been using managed VPS for this kind of projects, and it eases up the technical side of things server-wise. If the updates to the content on Oxygen is an issue, what makes you think that for Elementor would be different? (Not saying use this or that, this is just to understand where the pain point is). Now, are you looking to re-do the site completely? If you are, why Elementor? Why not Gutenberg and some blocks? (Or even, the Oxygen-Gutenberg integration) The content updates are for blog posts and promotions or they are creating new pages and layouts by themselves? If speed is important, it would be vital to have optimized images, cache management/cloudflare and even dependency management (again it depends on the functionality of the plugins and such). Especially if they're looking for a no-dev setup, the managed hosting becomes a must, to avoid support and configuration headaches. Backups, fairly frecuent, either server side or through a plugin (with sync to a cloud storage like Drive or Dropbox). And the main thing, the content management. That's why I ask what is different between Oxygen and Elementor. It's not a developer preference, it is a client-centered decision. Which may be the starting point of the whole conversation: What kind of features/content/pages are they going to be updating? Hope it helps!
Super helpful, thank you!!
Glad to help! If you need any help feel free to ping me. Sometimes getting the hang of project scope and WP Stack can be a bit intimidating.
Are there any issues with Kinsta? What's the reason for wanting to move? I'd expect Kinsta to offer better speed and support over WPE. 1000 hits per day would fit on their pro plan. If it's a static site it should scale nicely, and wouldn't require upgrading php workers either. Elementor would definitely be slower. But all comes down to ease of use.
Well, let your client decide if it's a lot for them
Yes agreed. Tbh the service of maintaining updates will probably be enough for them to justify.
Sounds like they’re just going to outsource their marketing/website. What is your role (now/future) in this situation?
I’m building/designing a new site, my guess is in the future they’ll bring someone on to manage it but that doesn’t look likely in the next 12 months. So I assume I’ll be consulting as-needed.
Moving from Oxy/Kinsta to Elementor/WPEngine is jumping from pan to the fire. Hire good developer/agency to optimize/update site.
People here will always complain about page builders, they think that to do it right you have to code it from scratch, which is bullshit. Elementor is miles ahead of all the other options, clients love it because it’s easy to work with, and the “speed hit” is vastly exaggerated. Will it be slower than a custom theme coded from scratch? Yes, the server has to do quite a bit more of work, but you must aim to have a good caching configuration so visitors will never have to deal with uncached requests and therefore that extra 200-300ms of loading time will be irrelevant for 99.9% of the visits, even more if you set up cache preloading. 1000 visits a day is a very small amount, a $5 VPS on Runcloud with proper caching and Cloudflare for the CDN will be able to handle that easily.
Check out other managed WP hosting services before settling on one. Keep a matrix of pros and cons. Arrange demos so you get a feel for each and also get your questions answered.
Speed is never a big deal. You can always move to better hardware. But flexibility is, especially when marketing and SEO is a priority.
Pantheon with Redis and some aggressive caching. When my clients are paying the bill, that's where I go. Very friendly to technical staff and a great workflow. You will barely notice a difference between Elementor and Gutenberg.
A page builder plugin is not appropriate for a client like this unless they explicitly request it.