Author: Marine Larmier

Are you hesitating between Beaver Builder and Elementor for your next WordPress project? Page builders are efficient tools that help design beautiful websites faster than ever. However, you want to make sure that you are opting for a builder that offers clean code, an intuitive interface, and that provides regular updates. You also need a tool that does not slow down your WordPress site because website speed is essential for the user experience and SEO. 

In this article, we’ll look at the performance of Beaver Builder and Elementor to help you decide which one fits your next project. We’ll also share some activable tips about boosting performance and review the main features to help you choose the best solution for your needs.

Which page builder is faster: Beaver Builder or Elementor? Let’s find out!

How We’re Testing Beaver Builder vs. Elementor Speed (Full-Mobile Approach)

To measure the performance of Beaver Builder and Elementor, we are taking a full-mobile approach with servers based in Paris. Beaver Builder and Elementor offer both a theme. We are using them respectively on each test site. 

WordPress Versions, Tools, and KPIs

Themes we are using: Beaver Builder theme / Hello Elementor theme 

Plugins we are using:  Beaver Builder Page Builder and the Beaver Themer add-on  / Elementor Pro 

Why is there another plugin installed on my Beaver Builder site? To be fair towards Elementor and compare similar features, I’ve installed another add-on on my Beaver Builder test site called Beaver Themer add-on. I’ll get more design flexibility and control over parts of my site (header, footer, custom templates, dynamic content, post grids, etc.). Those features are also included in Elementor Pro.

Performance tools and KPIs:

• Google PageSpeed Insights (Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift – Speed Index, Total Blocking Time and First Contentful Paint)

• GTmetrix (Fully loaded time, page size, and the number of HTTP requests on mobile – from an iPhone X in Paris)

The Test Sites

To keep things as equal as possible, we have built our test sites with modules available in both Beaver Builder and Elementor:

• A hero header with a 487 KB image (png format)
• A button with a link
• 3 services using icon boxes  (text and icons)
• A number counter 
• 1 FAQ with 3 toggles and some content 
• A pricing table (two plans available)

Important: Our tests have been conducted on a server based in France, and we built each page from scratch. The results we present are from our own experience, and they may differ from yours according to your whole technical setup and content.

Beaver Builder vs. Elementor Performance Compared

It’s time to compare our two test sites using PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix. Let’s get to the data!

Interesting reads: Our detailed guide about testing WordPress site performance to learn more about how to audit your WordPress site.

This is how both our testing sites look like: 

Our page with Beaver Builder (same modules)	Our page with Elementor (same modules)

On Google PageSpeed Insights, the first finding is that the mobile performance is orange for both, with an advantage for Elementor (83/100) over Beaver Builder (68/100). 

Elementor vs. Beaver Builder Summary Performance

We put together a summary table with all the performance KPIs so you can visually compare both builders: 

KPIs (Mobile performance)	Beaver Builder	Elementor
PageSpeed mobile score	68/100	83/100
Total Loading time	4.2 s	3.8 s
First Contentful Paint	2.5 s	4.8 s
Largest Contentful Paint*	7.1 s	3.3 s
Cumulative Layout Shift*	0 s	0.026 s
Speed Index	6 s	4.7 s
Total Blocking Time	30 ms	30 ms
Total page size	0.98 MB	0.96 MB
HTTP requests	17	39

*Core Web Vitals

Is Elementor Faster than Beaver Builder? – Key Takeaways  

• Elementor’s full loading time is 3.8 seconds, slightly faster than Beaver Builder, which loaded in 4.2 seconds. Both builders are not too far away from each other regarding speed.

• Core Web Vitals: Elementor is performing better than Beaver Builder. Beaver Builder’s Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is 7.1 seconds against 3.3 s for Elementor. The Content Layout Shift (CLS) is in green for both. 
• Beaver Builder has a better First Contentful Paint score (2.5 s – it’s 4.8 s for Elementor)
• Their page size is similar, but Beaver Builder triggers fewer HTTP requests than Elementor (17 against 39).  

To go further in the performance analysis, we are sharing the diagnosis and opportunities section from Lighthouse below.

PageSpeed Insights Opportunities Section for Beaver Builder

• Eliminate render-blocking resources – some resources are blocking the first paint of our page, making the page load slow. We should load critical JavaScript and CSS inline immediately and defer/delay all non-critical JS and CSS. 
• Enable caching for static assets text compression – we should cache our content to improve the page speed loading time and offer a better user experience.
• Enable text compression –  we should enable GZIP compression to compress HTML, CSS, and JS files to get smaller and faster files to serve on the visitor’s browser.
• Reduce initial server response time – we should try to eliminate or delay JS to let the server answer faster. 

PageSpeed Insights Opportunities Section for Elementor

Below are all the improvements we need to do for the test site built with Elementor. We found out that a lack of caching, text compression, and a poorly optimized code are responsible for the red flags below: 

Important: Most of the performance issues mentioned above can be fixed with WP Rocket, which we introduce as a solution in the next section.

Now that we have tested both builders’ performance and got the PageSpeed Insights recommendations, it’s time to take advantage of WP Rocket to fix all these performance issues easily!

How to Speed Up Elementor And Beaver Builder 

To speed up Elementor and Beaver Builder, Lighthouse recommends using a caching plugin like WP Rocket. The goal is to reduce the server response time, for example, or even optimize your code. WP Rocket is one of the best caching plugins that helps improve performance and pass the audit on GTmetrix and PageSpeed Insights. 

Important: If you run your report on PageSpeed Insights with WP Rocket activated, PageSpeed Insights automatically detects it. Then, it tells you which features of WP Rocket you should enable to fix the performance issues.

PageSpeed also suggests enabling the “Remove Unused CSS” and “Load JS deferred” features in the WP Rocket dashboard to eliminate render-blocking issues. 

We activated WP Rocket’s options. It’s now time to look at how both page builders perform.

Improved Performance Results With WP Rocket 

WP Rocket improved the score on Lighthouse for both Beaver Builder and Elementor. We finally got a green score mobile and went from 68/100 to 100/100 for Beaver Builder and from 83/100 to 99/100 for Elementor.

Beaver Builder + WP Rocket (PSI)	Elementor + WP Rocket (PSI)

Thanks to WP Rocket, we passed the PageSpeed Insights audit! We fixed all the issues flagged in the opportunities and diagnostics sections for Beaver Builder. The same improvements and fixes happened for Elementor.

Beaver Builder’s issues flagged by Lighthouse	WP Rocket fixed them all!

Here’s a comparison table showing both builders’ performance with and without WP Rocket activated: 

Performance KPIs	Beaver Builder Builder Performance (no WP Rocket)	Beaver Builder Performance with WP Rocket	Elementor Performance (no WP Rocket)	Elementor Performance with WP Rocket
PageSpeed mobile score	68/100	100/100	83/100	99/100
Total Loading time	4.2 s	2 s	3.8 s	1.8 s
First Contentful Paint	2.5 s	1.1 s	4.8 s	1 s
Largest Contentful Paint*	7.1 s	1.1 s	3.3 s	2.2 s
Cumulative Layout Shift*	0 s	0 s	0.026 s	0 s
Speed Index	6 s	1.1 s	4.7 s	1 s
Total Blocking Time	30 ms	20 ms	30 ms	10 ms
Total page size	0.98 MB	179 KB	0.96 MB	252 KB
HTTP requests	17	13	39	11

*Core Web Vitals

Key Conclusions With WP Rocket

We have noticed major performance improvements for both builders, namely: 

• The mobile performance grade on PageSpeed Insights moved up to 99/100 for Elementor.  We hit a 100/100 for Beaver Builder.
• All Core Web Vitals moved to the green. The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) went from 7.1 s to 1.1 s  for Beaver Builder, which is quite impressive. 
• The fully loaded time metric has decreased for both (it went from 4.9 s to 2 s for Beaver Builder and 3.8 s to 1.8 s for Elementor). 
• The number of HTTP requests has also decreased for both builders: from 39 to 11 for Elementor.
• The total blocking time (TBT) has decreased for both.
• The Speed Index is now 1.1 s for Beaver Builder (against 6 s without WP Rocket).
• The page size is much smaller for both page builders. It went from almost 1 MB down to 252 KB for Elementor and from 1 MB down to 343 KB for Beaver Builder.
• All the issues flagged in PageSpeed insights issues are now in the passed audit (green section), thanks to WP Rocket.

With WP Rocket – no matter the page builder you choose – you increase your chances of passing crucial and complex audits on the Google PageSpeed Insights report.

Did you know? WP Rocket automatically applies 80% of web performance best practices to guarantee blazing-fast websites. Let’s discover all the WP Rocket’s features that helped to give an extra speed boost to both page builders: 

• Caching and GZIP (text) compression – WP Rocket automatically applies caching and GZIP compression as soon as you activate it. On top, you can take care of caching for mobile devices and change a few more settings, including the cache lifespan (the time after wich the global cache is cleared).

• Minify CSS, Combine CSS, and Remove Unused CSS — all the features you need to optimize CSS files.

• We also have activated the options to minify, defer and delay JavaScript — all the features you need to tackle JavaScript.

You can go further with optimizing your site by implementing more WordPress page speed optimization best practices.

Our performance audit is now done. Let’s look at each builder’s main features and pricing to help you choose the right tools for your next project. 

Beaver Builder vs. Elementor: Key Features and Pricing

Both Elementor and Beaver Builder are intuitive and powerful visual drag-and-drop page builders for WordPress. We put together a list of similar features, and you’ll see that they have quite a lot in common. 

Common Key Features For Elementor and Beaver Builder

• Powerful front-end page builder based on the “what you see is what you get” principle  (WYSIWYG) – they have intuitive and ergonomic interfaces that are very easy to use. You don’t need to be an advanced developer or web designer to use both tools.

Beaver Builder Global  Interface	Elementor Global Interface

• Ability to design advanced custom layouts for your WordPress posts, pages, and custom post types.
• Easy customizable modules/widgets – the whole design process is straightforward for both builders, thanks to the “advanced design” tab.

Beaver Builder Styling	Elementor Styling

• WooCommerce builders – both builders allow you to create single product templates and customize your WooCommerce shop page. We personally find Elementor WooCommerce builder easier to use and customize.  

Beaver Builder Woo Builder	Elementor Woo Builder

• Full theme editing/building features – you can design everything around the page’s content, such as custom headers, footers, and other parts of your website. You get full control of everything. 

Header builder (Beaver Builder)	Header builder (Elementor)

• Global modules – you can easily create your own library of reusable content for your website. That’s time-saving because you can reuse your work indefinitely. 
• Dedicated themes and add-ons – Beaver Builder comes with its own theme that offers a lot of customization. Elementor has the lightweight Hello theme that is more of a simple canvas to get you started. The most popular WordPress theme houses (and the best-sellers on Themeforest) have some dedicated designs and themes built with Beaver Builder and Elementor (Astra, OceanWP, etc.). If you need to extend the features of both builders, you’ll find hundreds of interesting add-ons for Beaver Builder and Elementor.
• Extensive international community – both have a great community worldwide with interesting Facebook groups (70K for Beaver Builder and 140K for Elementor). You can also come across both teams at different WordCamps.

Beaver Builder vs. Elementor: The Main Differences

• The block and template library is richer for Elementor – Elementor comes with many pre-made blocks that can be used, such as header, testimonials, pricing tables, and call-to-action. Beaver Builder has a library with pre-built pages, but the blocks are not as impressive from a design perspective. Elementor provides more premade headers, so it’s a good idea if you are a beginner or don’t want to start from scratch. 

Beaver Builder Library (pre-made pages)	Elementor Library pre-made(blocks and pages)

• A/B testing (Beaver Builder only) – The split testing is only available for Beaver Builder thanks to the module called “Beaver Builder Lead”.
• White labeling (Beaver Builder only) – Elementor does not offer this feature, and you’ll need a third-party plugin if you want to go ahead with white labeling. On the contrary, Beaver Builder gives you the option to do it. 

• The loop/query builder (Elementor only) – This allows you to build advanced queries and loop custom post types.

• Conditional logic: Beaver Builder is better than Elementor on that, and everything is controllable from the settings panel: 

Beaver Builder vs. Elementor Pricing 

If you buy the whole Beaver Builder suite, you’ll have access to a theme, a page builder, a theme builder, a WooCommerce builder and a templates library from $199/year. You must go with the agency package if you want the white-label option. Something great with Beaver Builder is that you can use their product on an unlimited number of sites, even if you subscribe to the cheaper package.

For Elementor, the pricing starts at $59 for 1 single site. To have the same features as Beaver Builder (which offers unlimited sites), you’ll need the agency plan, which costs $399/year.

Wrapping Up

When it comes to performance, the two-page builders balance each other out. The loading time was about the same. The number of HTTP requests was higher for Elementor, but the Largest Contentful Paint was much better than Beaver Builder. The final choice will depend on your needs and if the white label option is important for you when you hand over the site to clients. 

WP Rocket is recognized by Lighthouse as a powerful plugin to reduce your server response time, for example. GTmetrix recommends the plugin, and PageSpeed Insights detects that you are using WP Rocket on your site and gives you recommendations based on the functionalities available in the WP Rocket admin.

GTmetrix recommends WP Rocket	PageSpeed Insights gives tailored advice according to WP Rocket’s available features.

So, which page builder are you going for? Are you experiencing any performance issues? Remember that WP Rocket has significantly increased performance and the PageSpeed Insights scores for both Beaver Builder and Elementor (we went up to 99/100 and 100/100). Try WP Rocket to improve the speed of your WordPress site built with a page builder today! You don’t take any risks. If you don’t see any improvements, we provide a refund if you request it within 14 days of your purchase. 

The post Beaver Builder vs. Elementor Performance 2023: Which WordPress Page Builder Is Faster? appeared first on WP Rocket.

Are you looking for a fast WordPress theme to start your next project? We did the heavy lifting for you and ran some speed tests on the most used WordPress themes. In this guide, we share the performance of lightweight and more customizable themes such as Divi or Avada. We also show you how to optimize your theme and make your website faster, which should help you to choose the right tools for your next development project. 

For our analysis, we have selected the most popular themes on the market (free and paid), and here’s our shortlist below: 

5 Lightweight Themes 

1. Hello
2. Astra 
3. OceanWP
4. GeneratePress
5. Kadence

5 Themes That Come With a Page Builder

6. Avada (Fusion builder)
7. Divi (Divi Builder)
8. BeTheme (BeBuilder)
9. The 7 (Elementor page builder)
10. Salient (WPBakery page builder)

Let’s review and go over the performance results for each theme:

The 10 Fastest WordPress Themes + Test Data

1. Hello

A plain vanilla free theme developed by Elementor and tailored for their page builder. It takes up just 6kb of memory resources, so as a result, the customization options are limited if you use the theme alone. 

Performance results for the Hello theme:

• PageSpeed mobile score: 90/100
• First Contentful Paint: 3.1s
• Largest Contentful Paint: 1.8s
• Cumulative Layout Shift: 2.9s
• Speed Index: 1.4s
• Time To Interactive: 1.4s
• Total Blocking Time: 0 ms
• Total Loading time: 2.2s
• Total page size: 990 KB
• HTTP requests: 13

2. Astra

Astra is one of the most popular free WordPress themes due to its lightweight code, user-friendly features, and thousands of ready-to-use templates.

Performance results for the Astra theme:

• PageSpeed mobile score: 91/100
• First Contentful Paint: 2.1s
• Largest Contentful Paint: 1.9s
• Cumulative Layout Shift: 2.8s
• Speed Index: 1.3s
• Time To Interactive: 1.4s
• Total Blocking Time: 0 ms
• Total Loading time: 2.1s
• Total page size: 890 KB
• HTTP requests: 12

3. OceanWP

Lightweight and highly extendable, it will enable you to create almost any type of website. It’s a fully responsive theme that looks great on mobile and has its own translation tools. It has many templates built with Gutenberg (the WordPress editor) and popular builders like Elementor or Beaver Builder.

Performance results for the OceanWP theme:

• PageSpeed mobile score: 88/100
• First Contentful Paint: 1.1s
• Largest Contentful Paint: 2.9s
• Cumulative Layout Shift: 1.8s
• Speed Index: 2.3s
• Time To Interactive: 1.4s
• Total Blocking Time: 0 ms
• Total Loading time: 3.2s
• Total page size: 996 KB
• HTTP requests: 13

4. GeneratePress

GeneratePress is a lightweight theme built with a focus on usability and speed (a fresh GeneratePress install adds less than 10kb to your page size). The theme takes full advantage of the block editor (Gutenberg), which gives you more control over creating your content. 

Performance results for the GeneratePress theme:

• PageSpeed mobile score: 86/100
• First Contentful Paint: 3.3s
• Largest Contentful Paint: 1.7s
• Cumulative Layout Shift: 2.8s
• Speed Index: 1.3s
• Time To Interactive: 2.5s
• Total Blocking Time: 0 ms
• Total Loading time: 3.1s
• Total page size: 890 KB
• HTTP requests: 12

5. Kadence

Kadence Theme is a lightweight yet full-featured WordPress theme for beautiful fast-loading sites. The developer made the demos accessible and built a drag-and-drop header and footer builder to build any type of header in minutes. The multi-purpose template library has different designs that can fit hundreds of projects.

Performance results for the Kadence theme:

• PageSpeed mobile score: 89/100
• First Contentful Paint: 3.1s
• Largest Contentful Paint: 1.9 s
• Cumulative Layout Shift: 2.9s
• Speed Index: 1.3s
• Time To Interactive: 1.7s
• Total Blocking Time: 0.3 ms
• Total Loading time: 2.8s
• Total page size: 898 KB
• HTTP requests: 10

Important: The next themes are coming with their page builder (or are bundled with Elementor or WP Bakery). That’s why they are in a separate section, and the results are from a new test site with similar elements across the page builders.

6. Avada (+ Fusion Builder) 

The #1 selling theme on Envato for years. There are thousands of easy-to-customize templates in the library. It’s a website builder that allows you to build your site from the header to the footer, thanks to the powerful Fusion Builder. Avada is 100% maintained in-house by the same team and is not reliant on third-party tools. 

Performance results for the Avada theme:

• PageSpeed mobile score: 87/100
• First Contentful Paint: 3.1s
• Largest Contentful Paint: 1.5s
• Cumulative Layout Shift: 1.7s
• Speed Index: 1.5s
• Time To Interactive: 2.4s
• Total Blocking Time: 0 ms
• Total Loading time: 2.4s
• Total page size: 998 KB
• HTTP requests: 12

7. Divi (+ Divi Builder)

Divi is a powerful theme thanks to its visual page builder. Elegant Themes was among the first companies to bring the WYSIWYG to WordPress. You can build everything visually using the Divi framework without ever touching a single line of code (and without installing and configuring any plugins to bring additional features). 

Performance results for the Divi theme:

• PageSpeed mobile score: 84/100
• First Contentful Paint: 4.1s
• Largest Contentful Paint: 1.1s
• Cumulative Layout Shift: 1.8s
• Speed Index: 1.4s
• Time To Interactive: 1.1s
• Total Blocking Time: 0.1 ms
• Total Loading time: 3.1s
• Total page size: 1.2 MB
• HTTP requests: 14

8. BeTheme (+ BeBuilder)

BeTheme is a multipurpose website builder and best-selling WordPress theme with 650+ pre-built websites (with very modern and trending designs). Their BeBuilder is also fully compatible with WooCommerce, and they recently launched a query builder to build dynamic websites. 

Performance results for the BeTheme theme:

• PageSpeed mobile score: 80/100
• First Contentful Paint: 4.1s
• Largest Contentful Paint: 2.9s
• Cumulative Layout Shift: 3.8s
• Speed Index: 1.9s
• Time To Interactive: 1.4s
• Total Blocking Time: 0.2 ms
• Total Loading time: 4.1s
• Total page size: 1.4 MB
• HTTP requests: 15

9. The7 (+ Elementor)

It’s the #1 selling Elementor themes that offer a lot of customization from the WordPress dashboard. The7 has 60+ prebuilt dummy websites with exclusive templates for Elementor, WPBakery Page Builder & Slider Revolution.

Performance results for The7 theme:

• PageSpeed mobile score: 81/100
• First Contentful Paint: 2.4s
• Largest Contentful Paint: 1.8s
• Cumulative Layout Shift: 2.9s
• Speed Index: 1.1s
• Time To Interactive: 1.2s
• Total Blocking Time: 0 ms
• Total Loading time: 3.8s
• Total page size: 1.1 MB 
• HTTP requests: 16

10. Salient (+ tailored version of the WPBakery Page Builder)

Salient offers access to a library of professional templates with over 400 to choose from. They have taken the WP Bakery Bakery page builder as a base and added some extra features to it. Finally, Salient has an average rating of 4.8 out of 5 based on 5700 ratings on Themeforest.

Performance results for the Salient theme:

• PageSpeed mobile score: 82/100
• First Contentful Paint: 2.5s
• Largest Contentful Paint: 1.7s
• Cumulative Layout Shift: 1.8s
• Speed Index: 1.9s
• Time To Interactive: 1.2s
• Total Blocking Time: 0.35 ms
• Total Loading time: 3.8s
• Total page size: 987 KB
• HTTP requests: 13

Table of the Test Results

Below you’ll find a summary of the performance results for each theme. We used the “PageSpeed mobile score” KPI to rank them, but the total loading page metric is also important, so don’t forget to look at that row.

Lightweight themes

KPIs	#1 Astra	#2 Hello	#3 Kadence	#4 OceanWP	#5 Generate Press
PageSpeed mobile score	91/100	90/100	89/100	88/100	86/100
First Contentful Paint	2.1s	3.1s	3.1s	1.1s	3.3s
Largest Contentful Paint	1.9s	1.8s	1.9s	2.9s	1.7s
Cumulative Layout Shift	2.8s	2.9s	2.9s	1.8s	2.8s
Speed Index	1.3s	1.4s	1.3s	2.3s	1.3s
Time To Interactive	1.4s	1.4s	1.7s	1.4s	2.5s
Total Blocking Time	0 ms	0 ms	0.3 ms	0.2 ms	0 ms
Total Loading time	2.1s	2.2s	2.8s	3.2s	3.1s
Total page size	890 KB	990 KB	898 KB	996 KB	890 KB
HTTP requests	12	13	10	13	12

Themes That Comes With a Page Builder

Similarly, the ranking is based on the PageSpeed mobile score.

KPIs	#1 Avada	#2 Divi	#3 Salient	#4 The7	#5 BeTheme
PageSpeed mobile score	87/100	84/100	82/100	81/100	80/100
First Contentful Paint	3.1s	4.1s	2.5s	2.4s	4.1s
Largest Contentful Paint	1.5s	1.1s	1.7s	1.8s	2.9s
Cumulative Layout Shift	1.7s	1.8s	1.8s	2.9s	3.8s
Speed Index	1.5s	1.4s	1.9s	1.1s	1.9s
Time To Interactive	2.4s	1.1s	1.2s	1.2s	1.4s
Total Blocking Time	0 ms	0.1 ms	0.35 ms	0 ms	0.2 ms
Total Loading time	2.4s	3.1s	3.8s	3.8s	4.1s
Total page size	998 KB	1.2 MB	987 KB	1.1 MB	1.4MB
HTTP requests	12	14	13	16	15

Key takeaways:

• All the themes go from acceptable to very good for their grade on PageSpeed Insights. There are either in orange or in green, there are none in red in terms of performance. 
• Astra seems to be the fastest of the lightweight themes, with a 91/100 on mobile and a 2,1 s page load. 
• Avada (with its own builder) also makes it to the top of the list with an 87/100 on mobile and a 2,4s page load. 

How We Tested the Themes 

Our selection was based on 2023 popularity, high numbers of downloads or sales on Envato, and quality reviews. Then we run an audit through the following performance tools:  

Powered by Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights, and GTmetrix, both analyze the performance and the user experience of your website. The most important KPIs are the Core Web Vitals which come with a detailed report about how your pages perform and what are areas for improvement. That’s why we have included the 10 following metrics in our tests – measured on mobile: 

From PageSpeed Insights:

• PageSpeed mobile score 
• First Contentful Paint
• Largest Contentful Paint
• Cumulative Layout Shift
• Speed Index
• Time To Interactive
• Total Blocking Time

From GTmetrix:

• Total Loading time
• Total page size 
• HTTP requests

Then, we chose 10 themes that we divided into two categories: 

#1 The free and lightweight themes that come with a minimalistic approach and are more like a basic canvas to start a website:

• Hello
• Astra 
• OceanWP
• GeneratePress
• Kadence

#2 The other category contains the “heavier” themes that come with their own page builder. We thought comparing Avada (and its Fusion builder) with a lightweight theme like Astra would be unfair. So the themes for the second category are the following:

• Avada (Fusion builder)
• Divi (Divi Builder)
• BeTheme (BeBuilder)
• The 7 (Elementor/WP Bakery page builder)
• Salient (WPBakery page builder)

The Testing Sites

For the first category, we built a realistic test site using the WordPress Editor, and we used the blocks to create a hero banner with a button, 5 testimonials with pictures, 1 call to action (full section with an image), 4 icons and text, 2 titles and 2 subtitles and 8 services with pictures.  

For the second category, we made sure every time to build a page with similar elements present in each builder: a hero banner with an image and a button, 3 services with icon and texts, 2 images (we re-used the same), 2 text elements, 3 icon lists, and a call to action section with a header, sub-header and button (full section). 

By following the same testing scenarios and the same content for each theme, we could conduct a fair performance comparison analysis. We did a new installation for each theme and used the same server for each theme’s speed testing. 

Important: Those tests have been performed on a server based in France, and we built each page ourselves. The results we have presented are from our own experience, and the results may differ according to the size of the images you upload, the amount of content you use, or even your location around the world.

Give an Extra Performance Boost with WP Rocket

WP Rocket is one of the best caching plugins for WordPress that can optimize any theme in a few clicks. It also improves the performance of your site and your Core Web Vitals. 

To understand the large impact of WP Rocket on speed, let’s see it in action with BeTheme, which was the “slowest” theme in our tests. 

For the record, there were a few issues flagged by Lighthouse, listed under the “Opportunities” tab: 

The recommendations include using caching, enabling text compression, reducing unused CSS/JS, and deferring offscreen images.

We activated WP Rocket on that test site, and we noticed a huge improvement:

All our performance KPIs also improved thanks to WP Rocket which also improved the PageSpeed Insights score (my site moved to the green with a 98/100) score. 

WP Rocket also boosted the Core Web Vitals score and decreased the total loading time (from 4.1s to 2.1s). WP Rocket also reduced the page size and the number of HTTP requests:

Performance KPIs	BeTheme Score (no WP Rocket)	BeTheme Score (WP Rocket)
PageSpeed mobile score	80/100	98/100
First Contentful Paint	4.1s	2.1s
Largest Contentful Paint*	2.9s	1.8s
Cumulative Layout Shift*	3.8s	1.1s
Speed Index	1.9s	1s
Time To Interactive	1.4s	1s
Total Blocking Time	0.2 ms	0 ms
Total Loading time	4.1s	2.1s
Total page size	1.4 MB	780 KB
HTTP requests	15	8

*Core Web Vitals

To fix all the PageSpeed Insights warnings and boost the performance KPIs, we activated the following WP Rocket features:

• Implement caching and text compression upon activation of the plugin:

You can also tweak your own options from the cache tab in the WordPress admin:

• The file optimization tab to reduce unused CSS (amongst other CSS optimization features):

• A dedicated subsection to optimize JS:

• The lazy-load feature to defer offscreen images (and load only the images located above the fold):

Which is the Best Theme For You?

It’s almost impossible to suggest you one single theme as it depends on your specific needs and your client brief, but here are a few takeaways:

• If you have a client willing to take over his website, update the content, and access the WordPress dashboard, then choosing a theme with a page builder may be easier (like BeTheme or the 7).
• If you are a freelancer looking for a theme with greatly designed demos for different industries, then Divi and BeTheme may be your best choices. 
• If you plan on creating an advanced WooCommerce site with thousands of products, a lightweight theme like Astra may be wiser. Plus, it comes with advanced WooCommerce features. 
• If you need to create your own forms, and product layouts and add dynamic data to your website, then a theme bundled with Elementor Pro is a great option. Elementor was one of the first companies to launch the WooCommerce builder, allowing you to build your own product template and shop page in no time. 
• If you are hesitating between a few themes, install one of their demos and look at them on mobile. Responsiveness should be essential when building a website.
• If you are a web and design agency, Divi offers the Divi Cloud, where you can easily store your project and share it with the team. The collaboration and potential modifications can be done faster from everywhere.

Finally, choose a theme with fast support, recent updates, and accurate documentation. For example, OceanWP has an academy that offers webinars and tutorials to use the theme to its fullest. 

Wrapping up

Now, you should be able to decide and choose the right WordPress theme for your next project. And remember, no matter which theme you choose for your next project, WP Rocket is the easiest way to improve the speed of your WordPress site and pass the performance audits on PageSpeed Insights. 

The post The 10 Fastest WordPress Themes in 2023 (Free and Paid) appeared first on WP Rocket.

Are you looking for the best WordPress cache plugin to boost the performance of your website? Caching is one of the most powerful ways to improve page speed and gain a few extra positions on Google. 

In this guide, you’ll learn what a caching plugin is and why you need it to make your site faster. We also compare the top caching plugins available on the market to make you choose the best one for your needs. 

What’s a Caching Plugin and How it Works

A caching plugin creates an HTML (static) version of your web page to deliver it faster to your future visitors. Usually, a page request implies PHP processing, fetching data from the database, and much more time- and resource-consuming tasks on the server side. But thanks to a caching plugin, you can get rid of unnecessary data roundtrips and improve your page loading speed.

What’s Caching and What Happens When it’s Enabled

Web caching means storing data such as images or a web page for future reuse. The first time a user visits the page, this data is cached (or stored). The second time a user requests the content, the cache will serve the copy, preventing the data from being downloaded from the origin server again. 

When a visitor attempts to access a web page, it first checks the cache. If the data is found there, that is referred to as a cache hit, and the content will be displayed much faster. 

What a Caching Plugin Does

A cache plugin makes it easy for returning visitors to access your website content faster by eliminating the many steps a browser takes to generate pages dynamically. It stores data so future requests can be served faster and prevent the origin server from overloading. As a result, it makes your site faster by removing unnecessary requests to the database and saving the content to HTML files. The ultimate goal is to save some loading time for the next user thanks to that stored content. 

Each cached page on your site has the cache files in a dedicated folder. Most of the time, you can find them by following the path: /cache/name-of-the-plugin/your-domain.com/.

What Happens When You Update a Page

Say you update the image in the header of your homepage but don’t make any other changes on your site. A caching plugin will delete the cached version of your homepage and save a new version. The updated page will be served to visitors, but the rest of the pages on your site remain unchanged in the cache.

Pro tip: When you update your page by adding an image or more text, set up your plugin’s expiry time properly. You need a smart tool that updates the cached files as often as you post updates.

Why You Need a Caching Plugin to Make Your WordPress Website Faster

A caching plugin is one of the best ways to boost performance, make your site load faster, improve conversion and enhance the whole user experience. Let’s go over each benefit, and you’ll understand why you need one.

Benefit #1 – Optimize Performance and SEO

When someone visits your website, many processes start automatically in the background: reading the CSS files, loading and executing JavaScript, pinging the database, etc. All of these background tasks are necessary to display the website correctly, but they also require a certain amount of waiting time for the user. 

Thankfully there is a solution recommended by Google PageSpeed Insights to reduce this loading time: caching plugins.

If this loading time is too long, it will have a negative impact on the Core Web Vitals (user experience) and the ranking of your page by Google (SEO). For example, when SmartFurniture decided to speed up its website, the company saw 3 main benefits: 

• A 20% increase in organic traffic 
• 14% more page views
• Gained 2 positions in the search engine rankings.

Benefit #2 – Improve Conversions

Caching makes your page load faster and leads to increased sales and conversions. An interesting case study about mPulse mobile shows the impact of load time on the conversion rate. As you can see below, the faster the site loads, the better the conversion rate is (around 2% for a page that loads in 2.4s). On the contrary, a slow page that loads in 5.7s brings down the conversion rate to 0,6%.

Benefit #3 – Enhance the User Experience (Especially on Mobile)

Caching is one of the most effective performance techniques for having fast pages and improving loading speeds on mobile. The infographic shows that 64% of smartphone users expect pages to load in less than 4 seconds. 

Hint: when choosing your plugin, make sure that there is a mobile cache option.

A caching plugin also reduces the load on the server and bandwidth consumption by minimizing the database queries. This saves some server memory, making caching suitable for WordPress site owners with limited web hosting plans.

Caching Plugins vs. Hosting Caching Option

You may also have heard of “hosting caching” which is another way of caching your content. Some hosting providers like Kinsta have their own caching options – they implement and manage full-page caching for all sites server-side. 

While the hosting cache comes before the plugin cache, they are complementary – in other words, you can use both. For instance, the plugin implementation should be able to clear the server cache.

A caching plugin also differs from a hosting caching option because the hosting cache might not be configured to accommodate specific use cases that a plugin cache can address — separate mobile cache, cookie-based cache, and query-strings-based cache. Exceptions like these arise more often than you expect, so addressing them is important.

We suggest checking with your host what their cache options are and their compatibility with the caching plugin you want to use. 

Before we compare the best caching plugins to speed up WordPress, let’s go quickly over the best features you should look for when picking a cache plugin. 

What’s Important When Choosing a Caching Plugin?

When choosing a caching plugin, there are 9 important criteria to consider. We share our checklist below: 

1. Speed – you should measure your page load before and after activating the plugin. When caching is enabled, you should see an improvement in your performance score measured by Lighthouse.
2. Ease of use – choose a plugin with a lean interface that’s easy to understand and configure. 
3. Exclude pages from being cached – stay in control of the pages you want to see cached or not (e.g., dynamic pages).
4. Compatibility – pick-up a tool compatible with your web hosts and the rest of your WordPress theme and plugins. 
5. CDN support – the plugin should support the Content Delivery Network you are using and not create any issues. 
6. Minification – ​​this option is important to compress your static files and save valuable space on your server (and lower bandwidth costs). 
7. Support – it’s always crucial to have some technical help and efficient support if things get complicated. 
8. Updates – stay away from plugins that have not been updated for 2 years. Instead, opt for a plugin with more frequent updates, meaning that a team is actively working on it. 
9. Price – you have free options and more premium ones. If you are working on a complex site for a client, you may want access to fast support and advanced performance features. 

Choosing the best caching plugin comes down to understanding your performance needs. Do you need more speed for desktop or mobile users? How often are you updating your website? Are you also looking to optimize your code and your images? Are you an advanced developer, or are you looking into a one-click installation solution? 

In our next section, we have put together a list of 7 caching plugins you can use to speed up WordPress. Let’s go over them. 

Best Free and Premium Caching Plugins for WordPress 

1. WP Rocket

WP Rocket is a powerful plugin that applies caching in one click. It comes with many features, such as CSS/JS optimization and lazy-loading, which further boost the performance of your WordPress site. 

It’s perfect for beginners because WP Rocket does the heavy lifting for you. The installation requires no coding skills, and no configuration is needed to start seeing results. Upon its activation, the cache feature is automatically activated.
It’s also compatible with most tools, from hosting to other plugins.

Key features

• Caching of all the pages, for mobile visitors and for logged-in users (apply optimal browser caching headers)
• Preloading the cache of pages
• Decreasing bandwidth usage with GZIP compression
• Minification and combination of JavaScript and CSS files
• Remove unused CSS
• Deferred loading of images (LazyLoad script on images)
• WebP compatibility (next-gen format created by Google to serve smaller images)
• Deferred loading of JS files and Delay JavaScript Execution
• Database optimization
• DNS prefetch
• CDN integration with RocketCDN and Cloudflare

Pricing

WP Rocket starts at $49/year, including support, updates, and a license for one WordPress site. 

2. W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache enhances your site’s user experience by improving server performance, caching every aspect of your site, and reducing load times. 

It’s one of the most popular free cache plugins for WordPress.

While being an excellent choice for your site, you’ll need to have some technical expertise and go through 16 pages of settings to configure the plugin.

Key features (free – no support included) 

• Mobile support: respective caching of pages by referrer or groups of user agents and accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) support
• Caching of (minified and compressed) pages and posts, CSS and JS
• Caching of feeds (site, categories, tags, comments, search results) in memory or on disk or on CDN
• Caching of search results pages (i.e., URIs with query string variables) in memory or on disk
• Caching methods include local Disk, Redis, Memcached, APC, APCu, eAccelerator, XCache, and WinCache
• Minify CSS, Minify JavaScript, and Minify HTML with granular control
• Defer non-critical CSS and Javascript 
• Defer offscreen images using Lazy Load
• Browser caching using cache-control, future expire headers, and entity tags (ETag) with “cache-busting”
• Leverage our multiple CDN integrations to optimize images
• Caching statistics for performance insights of any enabled feature
• Image Service API extension provides WebP image format conversion from common image formats (on upload and on demand)

Key features (premium – support included)

• Full Site Delivery via CDN
• Lazy Loading for Google Maps
• Fragment Caching
• WordPress Rest API Caching
• Eliminate Render Blocking CSS

Pricing 

To access more optimization features and customer support, you have to upgrade to Premium and pay $99/year for one website. W3 Total Cache premium is only available from within the admin interface of the plugin (not the WordPress one).

See how W3 Total Cache compares to WP Rocket.

3. WP Super Cache

Owned by Automattic (the creator of WooCommerce and WordPress.com), it’s also one of the most popular cache plugins, with more than 2 million installs. It’s a performance plugin that helps customers manage caching directly inside the WordPress Dashboard.  

It’s a free and powerful plugin, but its installation takes some time; you will have to review 20 different options manually.

It doesn’t have a premium version, and it doesn’t provide a dedicated support team. 

Key Features

• Dynamic caching
• Expiry time & garbage collection
• Possibility to exclude pages that you don’t want to cache
• The plugin serves cached files in 3 ways (ranked by speed):
  • Expert -using Apache mod_rewrite (or whatever similar module your web server supports) to serve “super cached” static HTML files.
  • Simple – PHP can serve super cached static files.
  • WP-Cache caching – mainly used to cache pages for known users, URLs with parameters, and feeds.
• Serves static HTML files to the vast majority of your users: users who are not logged in, have not left a comment on your blog, and have not viewed a password-protected post.

See how WP Super Cache compares to WP Rocket.

4. WP Fastest Cache

WP Fastest Cache is a freemium WordPress caching plugin that is easy to install, but the interface is not that user-friendly. Each setting can be tweaked by checking a box, as shown in the image below: 

There is a free version that offers basic features. For additional options, you’ll need to upgrade to Pro:

Key Features (free) 

• GZIP compression
• Browser caching
• Clean-up – all cache files are deleted when a post or page is published
• Preload Cache – create the cache of all the site automatically
• Exclude pages 
• Admin can delete all cached files from the options page
• Block cache for specific pages or posts with a shortcode
• Cache Timeout: All cached files are deleted at the determined time (and for specific page)
• Enable/Disable the cache option for mobile devices and logged-in users
• CDN + Cloudflare support
• Minify HTML and CSS
• Combine CSS/JS

Key Features (premium)

• Image optimization
• Convert WebP conversion
• Cache statistics
• Widget cache
• Mobile cache
• Delete cache logs
• Google fonts async
• Lazy load script
• Database Cleanup

Pricing

WP Fastest Cache is based on a one-time fee package. The price varies according to the number of licenses you need and goes from $49.99 (1 license) to $300.00 (10 licenses). Important: neither the free nor the premium version offers customer support.

See how WP Fastest Cache compares to WP Rocket.

5. Hummingbird

Hummingbird was created by WPMUDEV developers who are well-known in the WordPress ecosystem. The plugin is now active on more than +1 million sites. It’s easy to install and makes your website faster with fine-tuned performance controls. 

It offers good overall speed optimization but doesn’t address some PageSpeed recommendations that significantly affect the score.

Key Features 

• Scan and fix capability. in one click, the plugin scans your site to detect any performance issues and then tries to fix them automatically
• Full caching suite: including full-page, browser, and Gravatar cache.
• Gzip compression
• Uptime monitor
• CDN – 45 worldwide locations and Cloudflare integration
• Database cleanup
• Lazy load script on images
• Performance reports (integrated with PageSpeed Insights)
• Combine and minify files 
• Defer/inline assets
• Critical CSS 
• Google fonts optimization

Pricing

It’s a freemium plugin, and the Pro version starts at $7.50/month, giving you access to all the pro plugins of WPMUDEV (SEO and image optimizations, etc.), plus ticket support.

See how Hummingbird compares to WP Rocket.

6. LiteSpeed

LiteSpeed is an all-in-one performance plugin featuring a collection of optimization features. This plugin is intended to be a server-level caching plugin. As a result, its caching benefits are only available to LiteSpeed server users. 

Key Features

• Built-in page cache (LSCache)
• Free QUIC.cloud CDN Cache
• Image Optimization (Lossless/Lossy)
• Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
• Minify inline & external CSS/JS
• Combine CSS/JS
• Automatically generate Critical CSS
• Lazy-load images/iframes
• Load CSS Asynchronously
• Defer/delay JS loading
• Database Cleaner and Optimizer
• DNS Prefetch
• Cloudflare API integration
• Single Site and Multisite (Network) support
• Lean interface
• WebP image format support

Pricing 

It’s a free plugin, but a LiteSpeed server is required for the cache features, and fees are associated. 

See how LiteSpeed compares to WP Rocket.

7. NitroPack

With NitroPack, you get many performance features in one place: caching, image optimization, and a CDN that is ready to go out of the box. You’ll need technical knowledge to ensure some features aren’t faulty on your website.

Key Features 

• GZIP and Brotli compression
• Smart cache invalidation
• Automatic cache warmup
• Device and cookie-aware caching
• Browser and session-aware caching
• Built-in global CDN
• Advanced image optimization (WebP support, Lossy, and lossless image compression, preemptive image sizing)
• Lazy loading (including background images defined in the CSS)
• HTML, CSS, and JS minification & compression
• Deferred JS  Loading
• Critical CSS, DNS prefetching, and preloading
• Deferred loading of fonts 

Pricing

The plugin itself is free, and you can also create a free account for one website, 5,000 page views, and 1.00GB CDN bandwidth per month.

A monthly subscription starts at $17,50 per month for one website, 50,000 pageviews, and 25GB CDN bandwidth and includes customer support.

See how NitroPack compares to WP Rocket.

Now that we’ve been over WordPress’s most popular caching plugins let’s see how to install and set them up. We’ll take WP Rocket as an example. 

How to Install a Caching Plugin

Follow our easy tutorial below to understand how to install a caching plugin like WP Rocket. The installation process is pretty much similar for each plugin. For some of them, you may need to generate an API key and manually register your site from your account. 

Step 1 – After buying WP Rocket, go to your account and download the plugin.

Step 2 – From your WordPress dashboard, install the WP Rocket plugin from Plugins > Add New. Remember to activate the plugin.

Step 3 – Your site is automatically added to your account:

And that’s it! WP Rocket automatically applies more than 80% of web performance good practices upon its activation. Page caching, browser caching, and GZIP compression are completely automated and work out of the box! 

Wrapping Up

Using a caching plugin will help improve the performance of your website, your ranking on Google, and your sales. 

Without caching, visitors would have to download web pages whenever they visit your website. This is time-consuming and very inefficient for serving a fast WordPress site. 

With a top cache plugin such as WP Rocket, you can enjoy additional features like CDN integration, GZIP compression, and CSS/JavaScript optimization – which further boost your WordPress site performance. If you try WP Rocket today, you take zero risks:  we’ll gladly provide a refund if you request it within 14 days of your purchase. 

The post The 7 Best WordPress Caching Plugins (Free and Premium) appeared first on WP Rocket.