🚀 Our company had an old WordPress site, so sticking with WordPress for the new one was an easy choice. The real question was: Gutenberg or Elementor? The tech team was against Elementor, calling it slow. But that’s a misconception.
“It’s because you don’t know how to cook it,” I said. After running some tests, I convinced management to choose Elementor.
Why Elementor?
🔧 Managers can make changes without needing a developer.
🎨 They can adjust the design as needed.
⚡ It streamlines approvals, making everything more agile and flexible.
But what’s the main benefit?
💡 Some developers make you reliant on their services, like a never-ending subscription, like a drug, haha! If you need to change a picture in a slider, you have to contact them. This is not right. You should be in control of your website. It’s a simple example.
Each project needs its own setup - there’s no one-size-fits-all solution.
For this project, I used:
<ul>
<li>Elementor Pro</li>
<li>WPE hosting</li>
<li>Cloudflare (Pro Plan)</li>
<li>WP-Rocket</li>
<li>CSS JS Manager plugin</li>
</ul>
Proper setup requires expertise - there’s no “Make It Perfect” button. 💼
Proud to share the results! 🌟
<img src="https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--qN7YEP-9--/f_auto/v1721065952/ugc/content_5ec2ed82-e0d3-43c3-9be8-656ef0245e80" alt="virto-page-speed">
<img src="https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--xjCjPdGw--/f_auto/v1721065962/ugc/content_35b4034e-c1ed-441f-9c16-a7fe711268f7" alt="speedvitals">
<img src="https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--DO0pE4DW--/f_auto/v1721065973/ugc/content_0e74c07a-45b1-44d9-bef9-131ece3eb5ff" alt="debugbear">
<img src="https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--__0Ik0TI--/f_auto/v1721065983/ugc/content_d453e18f-6744-4e14-9c2c-a68e9313cba6" alt="uptrends">

Digest of news from the world of WordPress, WooCommerce & PHP.
Also about JAMStack, HeadlessCMS, NextJS, NuxtJS etc.

WordPress & WooCommerce

When updating their WordPress site, the company chose to use Elementor over Gutenberg due to its flexibility and ease of use for non-developers. A proper setup, which included Elementor Pro, WPE hosting, Cloudflare Pro Plan, WP-Rocket, and CSS JS Manager plugin, led to impressive performance results. The post argues that Elementor allows managers to make changes independently, thus avoiding dependency on developers.

Gutenberg or Elementor?

This website has only good scores because WP Rocket starts to load Javascript after interaction and a lot of CSS is inlined in HTML.
So first it loads 116kb compressed/ 893KB uncompressed HTML with minimal JS and when you click on the page, it loads another 500KB of JavaScript, when measured uncompressed. And I just remind for those who don’t understand much of the code that it’s the uncompressed size that matters to the CPU of the user’s device.
Doing this oldest way to trick Google Page Speed insight into good scores. The real speed of websites like this will be shown real-world data, but only if there is enough traffic. The practice of hiding data and displaying Potemkin’s village is definitely not in the long-term interest WP itself or WP community.

I’m sorry but I doubt anyone could convince me that Elementor has any part to play in any professional WordPress project. It’s a complete horror show in all respects. Performance, client experience, developer experience, code output, vulnerability to breaking updates etc. And a separate problem is that Elementor attracts the worst kinds of fly-by-night, no-code, no-skill developers. Lumping any business with Elementor is doing them a huge disservice.
That’s not to say out-the-box Gutenberg is a great improvement, but there are many other superior options besides those two. GeneratePress + GenerateBlocks would be a huge step up from stock Gutenberg. Custom blocks with ACF Blocks or Blockstudio would be a bigger step up still. And even a straight-up page builder like Bricks or Oxygen that can at least output clean code and stick to basic web dev principles would still be dramatically preferable to Elementor imo. Pinegrow is another decent option for visual site building.
Basically, use anything but the main junk builders: Elementor, Divi, WPBakery. And use products that have awesome communities of skilled devs around them. Bricks does particularly well in that regard.

AIRLIFT plugin work well for optimization

Gutenberg offers a lot of flexibility and is fully integrated, it should be such a no brainer choice imho!

Your hamburger menu is buggy, which I’m sure happened because the menu block you used was under the consideration that they’re always full width. Good luck customizing it.
<img src="https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--_snlRdvW--/f_auto/v1726407412/ugc/content_d121b576-2d11-4dbd-996b-6db0a14d59ab" alt="image">
This language switcher needs to be clicked on, instead of being a dropdown
<img src="https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--d4RCj6rL--/f_auto/v1726407459/ugc/content_51a642e3-588b-4055-8369-ea31cf202606" alt="image">
None of the buttons offer any indicators that’s they’re being pressed or being hovered on.
Search prompt is hidden in some pages and tons of styles broke
<img src="https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--D5j10by4--/f_auto/v1726407538/ugc/content_c078b349-6e2f-472f-b8c9-55fb6233c2e0" alt="image">
You have no mobile menu for your website.
If I’m a technical customer I would never in hell hire you guys. Just from your front page it’s clear you would fall back into hacky solutions instead of industry’s best practices. Most of the heavy lifting was done with the theme you used. None of the out-of-the-box solution you drag-and-drop’d in is easily customizable.
Not to mention it looks so boring and corporate-ish. Try to make something like <a href="https://www.aftermetoo.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">https://www.aftermetoo.com/</a> or <a href="https://lunarwheel.it/" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">https://lunarwheel.it/</a> in Wordpress.