MellowThistle0520 wrote
Same here: Elementor puts lazy on everything (client never notices) and it's a fight.
that is not Elementor doing it, that is core. Since 5.5 WordPress runs every img in the content through wp_filter_content_tags and adds loading="lazy" to all of them, and Elementor widgets go through the same filter becuase they print normal img tags, so your theme or page builder gets the blame for something it never asked for.
Elementor does have its own lazy option, but only for background images, and it sits under Settings, Features, Lazy Load Background Images. That one is off by default last time i checked. If your heroes are background images on a section, that setting is the one to look at, not the img tag.
To answer the question: yes, it fixed it, but not the whole gap. Driving school blog went from 2.1 to about 1.7 on mobile after removing lazy from the hero; the rest was Hostinger's object cache being off and a font file.
How i'd check it on your end, step by step. Open the page on mobile size in Chrome, right click the hero, inspect, look at the img tag. If it says loading="lazy" that is core. If thier is no img at all and it is a style attribute with a url, that is the Elementor background setting.
Then look at what else is in the head before the image. On my site a Google font was the actual first thing fighting for bandwidth.
i'm on a classic theme so I can't tell you what Hello theme does with the first image, i have not tested it. Query Monitor won't show you any of this, you need the network tab with throttling on.
One more thing. Removing lazy from everything is wrong too, you'd just move the slowness to the bottom of the page. Only the first image above the fold.
