Elementor Addons Performance Test

As an Elementor user, you are tempted to install multiple Elementor addons on your WordPress site to accomplish specific designs. But what about the performance? What influence do specific WordPress plugins and addons have on a website’s performance? Does it make any difference in terms of loading speed to turn off the unused widgets? Well, I asked myself the same questions. Let’s have a look at the results of the Elementor addons performance test.

What was the Test Environment?

All the Elementor addons from this list have been tested on the same server with the same configuration. The server and WordPress configuration is as follows:

• Alfahosting (German Hosting Company)
• WordPress Multisite
• WordPress Theme Twenty Twenty
• Activated Plugins on each subsite:
  • All in One WP Security
  • Elementor (free version)
  • UsageDD (to measure the queries and the memory usage)
  • and each of the tested addons

This setup without any Elementor addon activated leads to the following test result:

Total Page Size and Requests have been tested with GTmetrix.com and webpagetest.org

Comment on GTmetrix Lighthouse Update

You may wonder why I didn’t include the new metrics from GTmetrix after the Lighthouse update in the performance test. However, if you’ve already clicked the “Re-test” button a few times, you probably already know why I didn’t include this data for the test. From my point of view, the metrics of the new GTmetrix tool are not reliable. That’s why I focused on the results that are always consistent independently on how many times you repeat the test.

Elementor Performance for Optimized DOM / Improved Assets Loading

The next table shows the differences in Elementor Performance depending on whether the options optimized DOM and improved assets loading are enabled or not:

The testing of Elementor addons performance was carried out, having the Elementor’s options optimized DOM and improved assets loading activated.

Overview of Elementor Addons Performance

File Sizes of Elementor Addons

Let’s see how many Megabytes are being added to your webspace by installing a certain Elementor addon. If your selected Elementor addon is not listed below, just download the plugin from wordpress.org to your computer and check the size. Here you can see the file sizes comparison of the most popular Elementor addons:

As you can see, the zip file of Elementor already contributes 6,2 MB to the total webspace. Apparently, some addons add almost the same quantity as the main plugin to your website’s size. The file sizes of the plugins are for orientation only. I would not decide in favor or against a specific addon based on this information alone. Some of the addons offer widget templates with dummy content which is also included in the zip file. But if you find two exchangeable addons for your project, you could decide on the lighter one.

Best Elementor Addons from Performance Perspective

And the winner is…

Considering the test results I would say that the best Elementor addons from the performance perspective are: Happy Addons* and Premium Addons*.

From my point of view, these two addons are not only the best option from the performance perspective but also from the quality and functionality at least in the category widgets collection.

Attention!

Most of the tested Elementor addons are not loading any files or adding extra kilobytes to the page size if their widgets are not used. However, the following addons are making requests to the server and loading unnecessary resources even on pages where they are not in use:

• HT Mega
• The Plus
• JetWidgets
• Element Pack
• JetEngine (minimal influence)

Better Performance by turning off unused widgets?

Does it really make a difference from the performance perspective if you turn off the unused widgets? According to my testing, turning off the widgets has no impact on the total page size and the number of requests. However, it has a slight influence on the number of queries and memory usage.

On average, by deactivating the widgets you don’t need, you can reduce the number of queries by 1 and the memory usage by 5 MB per addon. The memory usage indicates how large your site’s code is. Ideally, it should be below 50 MB, and as you can see, the test results are almost at this limit even though I only used one heading widget. If you have problems with high memory usage, you can reduce it by using OPcache, like, for example, with the leading WordPress caching plugin WP Rocket*.

Conclusion

As you can see, the performance loss is comparable for all the tested Elementor addons. You probably can imagine what impact it has on your website loading time if several addons are activated on your site.

Surprisingly, Elementor Addons like Element Pack, HT Mega, and The Plus Addons are loading their files even though you don’t use any of the addon’s widgets. That means that unnecessary files are loaded on each page of your website.

Bonus Tip!

Use the plugin Assets Cleanup to unload unnecessary files on each page of your website.

So think wisely before you activate an addon on your Elementor site. Ask yourself if you really need this specific functionality or adapt your design so that you don’t need an additional addon. By the way, what is true for Elementor addons also applies to WordPress plugins. If you only install extensions (addons or plugins) on your WordPress site that you really need to accomplish a certain goal, you will keep your site lean and fast.