Moved A Small Yarn Shop Off Elementor To Blocks And Mobile LCP Went From 2.9 To 1.4 Seconds

NataliaMurad633

Who here still defends a page builder on a small shop, and why? i'm asking because I just finished moving a knitting yarn shop from Elementor to the block editor with a handful of patterns and I measured it before and after because I didn't trust the numbers people throw around.

Mobile LCP went from 2.9 s to 1.4 s. Same host, same Woo, same products, same images, nothing else changed, I only rebuilt the templates with core blocks and one small snippet for the product grid spacing.

That's a lot for doing nothing clever.

The thing I keep hearing is "but the client can edit it". Fine, but the client edits a product description twice a month and never touches the layout, so I'm not sure what the builder is buying them. It should be something. You don't all use it for fun. What is it?

MellowThistle0520

"The client never touches the layout" is your client, not mine. Ours do. The dog harness shop owner builds her own landing page every time a new collar colour comes in, with Elementor Pro 3.33, and that's literally what she pays us for, not the speed.

Also I dont believe the 1.5 s came from the builder alone.

On our shop the mobile LCP dropped from about 3.2 to 1.8 and we never left Elementor. I had to resize 400 product photos that were uploaded at 4000px, switch on WebP and move off the shared plan to the VPS. Those three did it, the builder stayed.

So in your case you could've had most of that gain by fixing the images and keeping Elementor.

Not saying blocks are bad: saying the number proves less than you think.

MellowThistle0520

One thing I forgot to ask and it matters more than the LCP. What does the yarn client edit landing pages with now?

Because "a handful of patterns" sounds tidy until she wants a page for the autumn wool sale with a banner, three product cards and a countdown and the pattern doesn't have a slot for that.

With Elementor she'd drag it in herself. In blocks she either learns the editor properly or she calls you.

So on your end, who builds the new pages? If the answer is you then you moved the work from the client to the agency and the shop got faster, which is fine as long as you bill for it, but it's not the same service.

If the answer is she does it herself in the block editor and is happy then Im wrong and I'd like to hear how you set it up.

Our clients would call us. Every time.

N3onc0m3t

Why are you still paying for Elementor Pro every year when a synced pattern does the collar page? our IT support client edits his own pages in blocks and he is not a web person at all, he just swaps text and images inside the pattern and it holds.

The images were your problem, sure, but open the DOM of one builder page and count the wrapper divs.

NataliaMurad633

She does it herself. Synced patterns for the banner and the product cards, everything else is locked - and she has called once since, about a colour 🙂

Turkan.Turgut

Can I say something as the person who has to use it? I never found anything in Elementor, every setting was three panels deep and I broke the layout twice just looking for the font size.

My helper moved my parts shop to blocks last winter and I got my pages back. I edit a sale banner myself now.

BraveWalrus

That's what Im super curious about. The owner side. How long did the whole switch take, days or weeks?

And did your rankings move? Please tell me it stayed flat!

Turkan.Turgut

three weekends. Product URLs stayed the same and Search Console shows no drop at all! thx

Atif

What is the yarn shop hosted on and what was the TTFB before and after? Because I measured this on two client sites last year and the builder markup itself is worth a few hundred ms on mobile at most, the rest of the 1.5 s has to come from somewhere else.

The builder cost 200 to 350 ms, mostly its CSS and the extra scripts it drops into wp_enqueue_scripts. Images, fonts and server time were the other second.

So I'm with you on this one, on your end the images and the VPS did the work. I'm not sure the yarn case is any different, that's why I ask about the host.

MellowThistle0520

Ok, I went and counted. The collar landing page has 611 divs for a banner, a text block and six products, and the same thing built with core blocks on a test install came out at a bit over 200, and I cant argue that away, that is just junk in the page. You're right on that.

So for a new client shop I'd try blocks first. We have one coming in November (a small bike parts shop, two people, they want to edit their own promo pages) and I'd rather build them synced patterns like Natalia did than hand them another Elementor licence, and if the owner cant work with it after a week we still have the old way.

Where I don't move: the existing Elementor shops stay. The dog harness owner has 40 landing pages she built herself over three years and a rebuild would cost her more than the 300 ms earns her, and she'd have to relearn everything (she still calls the sidebar "the thingy on the left"). That would be me solving my problem, not hers.