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Breitloh

Move off Elementor

Elementor makes the first page easy and the fortieth impossible. The layout lives inside the page rather than in a template, so every page drifts, the markup piles up, and the speed goes with it. The rebuild turns forty one off pages back into a handful of templates.

Book a callWebsite rebuild
A site built from plugins on the left, redirected page by page to a single clean build on the right, with the page weight falling

Where it usually hurts

Every page is its own design
Because layout is built page by page, no two pages quite match. Padding differs, headings differ, and a brand refresh means opening every page instead of changing one thing in one place.
The markup is enormous
A builder wraps every element in several more, and the page a visitor downloads is many times bigger than the content in it. On a phone that is the difference between a site that appears and one that assembles itself while you wait.
It is fragile in a specific way
The builder, the theme, and the plugin that adds the missing widget all update on their own schedules. When a layout breaks after an update, the fix is somebody rebuilding that page.

What the job covers

  • Your pages reduced to the handful of templates they actually are
  • Spacing and type set once, so every page matches without anyone policing it
  • Content brought across, kept separate from the layout this time
  • A redirect for every old address
  • An editor where changing a page cannot break the design of it

What it has to talk to

The widgets you rely on
Sliders, tabs, accordions, and pricing tables get rebuilt as components. The accordions matter for a different reason: the builder ones hide their content from search engines, and the rebuilt ones do not.
Whatever the theme was doing
Elementor sites usually sit on a theme doing some of the work. Both go, and the parts that were earning their place come back as part of the build.
Your forms and popups
Rebuilt to send to the same place, without the licence. Popups are worth revisiting while everything is open, since most of them were added years ago and nobody has looked at what they do since.

A worked approach, not a client

How I would approach a builder site with forty pages

  1. 01

    Find the templates hiding in the pages

    Sort every page by what it actually is. Forty pages almost always turn out to be five or six shapes with different words in them.

  2. 02

    Build the shapes, not the pages

    Each template built once, properly, with spacing and type set centrally. The pages then fill up quickly, and the next one costs almost nothing.

  3. 03

    Compare before and after on a phone

    Same pages, same content, measured on a phone on mobile data. This is the comparison worth showing whoever signed off the original build.

Questions I get asked about this

The ones that come up on almost every first call. If yours is not here, ask it and you will get a straight answer.

Will my team still be able to edit pages?

Yes, and more safely than now. They edit content: headings, text, images, and the order of sections. What they cannot do is accidentally break the layout, which is the trade that makes a site stay consistent as it grows.

We have forty pages. Is that a big job?

Less than it sounds, because forty pages is usually five or six templates. The work is in identifying them and building those properly. Once they exist, pages are quick, which is also why the site stays cheap to add to afterwards.

Can you rebuild it to look identical?

I can, and I would push back gently on parts of it. Builder layouts drift over time, so identical means keeping the drift. Most people want the same design tidied rather than reproduced exactly.

Will it look different afterwards?

Slightly, and usually better. Builder layouts drift over time, so an exact reproduction means keeping the drift: the heading that is four pixels out on one page, the section with different padding. I rebuild it consistently, and I show you the differences rather than making them quietly.

What happens to our WordPress logins and users?

They go with WordPress itself. Whoever needs to edit the new site gets an account on the new editor, which is a shorter list than the one you have now, because most WordPress user accounts belong to plugins or to people who left.

We use a few Elementor features we would miss.

Tell me which on the call. Sliders, tabs, and accordions all get rebuilt as part of the job. Popups and forms usually get rebuilt and improved, since most of them were set up years ago. The honest answer is that almost everything moves, and the exceptions are worth knowing about early.

Why is our Elementor site so slow?

Because a builder wraps every element in several more, then loads its own stylesheet and script for each widget on a page. The page a visitor downloads is many times larger than the content in it, and that shows up on a phone as the layout assembling itself while you wait.

We pay for Elementor Pro and a few add ons. Does that stop?

Yes, along with whatever the theme, the slider, and the popup plugin cost. Those licences renew every year whether or not anyone opened them, and they are worth totting up against what the rebuild costs before you decide it is expensive.

Does moving off Elementor hurt our Core Web Vitals?

It usually fixes them. The two that suffer on builder sites are largest contentful paint, because there is so much to download before anything appears, and cumulative layout shift, because sections resize as scripts run. Both are structural, so both improve when the structure changes, which is what the new site is built on rather than anything clever.

Related

Tell me what you have now

Half an hour on a call, and a straight answer about whether this is the right job and whether I am the right person for it.

Book a callhello@breitloh.com