long time listener, first time caller. I love designers. seriously. I love getting a nice juicy Figma file and not knowing how the heck I'm going to do half the wild stuff in it, but it's beautiful, so I'll figure it out. Go ahead, send it to the client. But designers who learn how to use something like Elementor or one of those crappy kitchen-sink themes, call themselves developers, and win work with clients I share with them. I'm the one fixing everything when that crap breaks. I would never in a million years present myself as a designer, even though I know I know a damn sight more about design than they do about dev. I get it, everyone needs to make a buck, but every time this happens it makes me sick to my stomach. We're on the same team. I always, ALWAYS, go to the mat for good design. Why don't more designers have an equal amount of respect for us? Design phase always goes over deadlines and we always have to pick up the slack to make the hard launch date. Well, now I'm just rambling.

This will be my last project ever with WordPress. Seems like they added a site "customizer" (wysiwyg) which looks fancy and all, but after a few minutes configuring options the customizer starts lagging, fan starts getting louder, CPU & RAM go up so I do some profiling on that page:

Full layout repaints on every mousemove event, mem usage starts at 125MB and goes up up up to even 200MB while staying idle.. wtf? How did this even get shipped?

A client wants me to build his website. He want a WordPress one, with a tool named Elementor to let him build stuff and upgrade the website by his own.

Seriously, Wtf is this shit !? That's a pure nightmare to work with !

A blackbox seo tool that was made by aliens we use says that a couple of our WordPress sites are loading very slowly, so I enable caching through nginx and increase the resources available to them through high capacity fpm pools. They scan again and almost nothing has changed with the page load score.

So I look in lighthouse, which I just learned about, and I find that several of the pages have several MB size images. So that means I'll have to mogrify the entire uploads directory to try to get the size down.

It also suggests I use avif to save a ton of data, which I'm torn on. I hate downloading an image and it not being a normal format that everything can open. But my sites are not image sharing sites, so it's a lot less annoying to the user since they will never realize they're getting an avif. That also means I will have to redo all the image links to point to the avif instead of the original, which sounds like the least fun activity ever.

Another thing that I keep seeing is that Elementor is just slow and slow page loads are part of the deal. If we have to scrap Elementor, that means I will have to be more involved in developing the WordPress sites and I really don't want to.

"Non-technical" users must have some magic skill that goes beyond my understanding. How can anyone work with no-code page builders? I tried Wix, Webflow, Gutenberg, Elementor, Divi, and Semplice. Each one sucks in their way, but they have one thing in common: their UI behaves even more erratically than Microsoft Word.

Is there a "non-technical personal computer user" class where people learn that logic? How did they manage to hide their secret understanding from developers? Or what did I miss?

I don't like Elementor for WordPress. The stuff it does for caching and performance sake causes hard to debug problems that the non-technical users it is marketed toward could almost certainly never figure out.

WooCommerce sucks, Block editor sucks, Elementor is no better, but if you want a real mess, just add more plugins. Bonus: if you use any "third party WordPress plugin", WooCommerce support can always say, oh yeah, I see that you are using a third party plugin, so we cannot support you, sorry.

Fuck, that's not the kind of front-end development that I was hoping to do in 2023.

Seeing an Elementor ad on Facebook is so annoying to web developer because it's like your ex who constantly reminds you of how bad you are in sex despite the fact that you are not dating a super model.

Any tips to speed up wordpress site. I have googled and tried as many solutions I can except adding cdn. I have minified images, html, css and js. I have used caching on the server with litespeed cache. There are not many plugins on the site.

The plugins installed are elementor, litespeed, orbit fox, wp-optimize, updraft plus and wpforms lite. The site takes around 4 to 5 seconds to fully load. I am doing this for a releative(don't worry he is sane and I am doing pretty simple stuff for him which is simply not worth charging). I cannot use cloudflare cdn since they need nameserver access and the hosting service used is hostinger which have put a lot of dns records which I don't understand and don't wanna mess with unless it is the last option.