Executive Summary
Digital marketing agency, a firm specializing in building websites with Elementor, faced consistent difficulties in achieving high performance scores, particularly on mobile devices. Despite internal efforts, their own website and client sites were bogged down by heavy resources, leading to poor mobile page speed scores. They required a developer to not only optimize their flagship site but also to demonstrate a repeatable process for their internal team.
Client:
Digital marketing agency
Industry:
Digital marketing and website development (specializing in Elementor-based sites).
Core Objective:
Optimize Elementor sites for mobile speed and establish a repeatable performance framework.
The Audit: Identifying the Bottlenecks
A comprehensive website audit revealed several critical issues impacting performance:
Bloated HTML and Elementor Popups
Every page load triggered the loading of approximately 228 popup templates, even if they were unused or blank. This added significant weight to the HTML document, which contained 4,000–5,000 lines of code in the section alone.
Redundant Scripts and Assets
Over 90 custom code snippets were being loaded globally across the site, many of which were no longer required.
Font and Icon Overload
Multiple font families and icon libraries (like FontAwesome) were loading, despite only two of them were actively used for design.
Caching Conflicts
There was an active conflict between the WP Rocket plugin and Kinsta’s server-level caching system.
The Solution: A Structured Optimization Strategy
Lime Street implemented a multi-phased approach to “slim down” the site before applying technical caching layers:
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Phase 1: Resource Reduction
Popup Cleanup: Deleted all unused and blank Elementor popups to prevent them from injecting empty elements into the browser DOM.
Font Consolidation: Disabled unnecessary icon libraries and non-essential Google Fonts, standardizing on the “Inter” font family.
Script Minimization: Reviewed all third-party tracking scripts, retaining only essential ones like GTM and Hotjar while delaying non-critical JS execution.
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Phase 2: Code Refactoring
Consolidating Custom Code: Moved global CSS to a centralized style.css in the child theme and global JavaScript to a single external file (custom-footer.js). This replaced nearly 100 individual internal HTML snippets with a more efficient file-calling method.
Cleaning Inline Styles: Manually removed unnecessary elements and consolidated inline styles into main CSS files to reduce the HTML “head” weight.
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Phase 3: Technical Configuration
Caching Synchronization: Resolved the conflict between WP Rocket and Kinsta hosting by ensuring WP Rocket’s page caching was disabled (handled by Kinsta) while keeping its file optimization and LazyLoad features active.
WooCommerce Deactivation: Removed the WooCommerce plugin and subscription features that were active but unnecessary for the site’s current functionality.
The Results: Significant Weight Loss
By implementing these changes on a staging environment, the following improvements were recorded:
Page Size Reduction
The homepage weight was slashed from 2.5 MB down to approximately 500 KB—an 80% reduction in total size.
Improved Efficiency
Transitioned from loading nearly 100 internal code snippets to just a few streamlined external files.
Team Education
Provided the client’s lead engineer with a detailed record of all adjustments, enabling the team to apply these optimization principles to future Elementor projects.
Conclusion
Through strategic “slimming” of assets rather than relying solely on caching plugins, Lime Street successfully transformed a heavy Elementor site into a lightweight, high-performance marketing tool. The project demonstrated that even feature-rich page builders can achieve fast mobile scores when unused dependencies and bloated code snippets are aggressively managed.
Thanks for the hard work!
ADAM S.
