Avada - Popular website builder put to the speed test

Bloat-fest or speed demon? 😈

So we’ve seen that Elementor and Elementor Pro can be brought into line and encouraged to score well in PageSpeed Insights. What about Avada? Let’s take a look at the popular website builder and theme and see how it fares.

Step 1 - Install an Avada Site

As usual, I started off with a basic WordPress site, and then made things more difficult for myself…

• Installed Avada, along with the required Fusion Builder and Fusion Core plugins

• Used the Avada studio to load in the code for a landing page

• Added in Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics to simulate some 3rd party JavaScript a normal site would have

• I duplicated the page so I had a DOM size of around 1000 elements (to simulate a big homepage)

Hmmmm, which site to choose?

Step 2 - Let’s test the speed!

As ever, I then headed over to the failtful PageSpeed Insights to test the site. Let’s see how it scored:

Pretty standard for an unoptimised site. So, let’s get to work on fixing it up.

Step 3 - Fix all the warnings

• Used Compress X to serve the images in next-gen format

• Used SpeedifyPress to fix the properly size images and defer offscreen images issues

• Used SpeedifyPress to fix the Eliminate render blocking resources, Reduce unused JavaScript, Reduce Unused CSS

• Used SpeedifyPress to fix Ensure text remains visible during webfont load

• Used SpeedifyPress to fix Avoid an Excessive DOM Size

• Still had a problem with the LCP, so I tweaked the website fonts to use system fonts on mobile, by adding this snippet to the website head (using the Header & Footer code plugin):

@media (max-width: 800px) { h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, p, :not(.fa):not(.fab):not(.fas):not(.far):not([class*=" awb-icon-"]):not([class^="awb-icon-"]):not(.ld-icon):not([class*="fusion-icon"]):not([class*="icon"]):not(input) { font-family: -apple-system,system-ui,BlinkMacSystemFont,"Segoe UI",Roboto,"Helvetica Neue",Arial,sans-serif!important;}}

• I changed the Avada settings to stop fonts being preloaded and also told SpeedifyPress to stop preloading the fonts (as they were no longer being used on mobile)

Click for link to the full report

There we go! A great score for Avada, and a nice responsive site that that feels speedy for users. You can check it out for yourself here: https://avada.speedifypress.com/

---

How to optimise your own site

If you’d like to have a crack at tweaking your own site for performance, then have a read through My List of Tools and Resources.

If you’d like access to SpeedifyPress, you can subscribe below:

Not interested in DIY? Want me to do it for you? Find out how here.