Speeding Up WPBakery: How to Make the Page Builder Load Faster

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Let’s set the record straight: WPBakery doesn’t slow down your website. People may have formed this opinion about it coming across a slow WPBakery-powered WordPress website, but it won’t be the culprit.

In this article we’ll cover:

Here’s what’s slowing your website down

Ask any WordPress optimization Pro about performance optimization, and the response will look something like the list below. If your website is slow, it’s likely suffering from a combination of these issues.

  • Lack of caching
  • You’re running too many plugins
  • Images are too big
  • External scripts are taking forever to load
  • Your hosting is slow

WPBakery is fast, and it’s not just us saying that: look at our page speed test results on WP Builders Fight Club.

WP Builders Fight Club - Results Table

Source: WP Builders Fight Club

If you do your research you’ll come across comments like this one that hit the nail on the head:

“WP Bakery is one of the faster page builders, especially with low page generation times. What’s going to slow the site down is other plugins or a slow hosting environment.”

antonyxsi on Reddit

WPBakery is a mature product that has been fine-tuned for over 15 years. The development team is well-resourced and capable, and performance optimization is a priority, even when considering new features. It makes commercial sense to invest time in making the plugin’s footprint as small as possible and ensuring a better user experience.

WPBakery also performs well against the most popular page builder. According to WP Builder’s Fight Club, we won the WPBakery vs. Elementor speed battle.

That said, there are settings you can change that will help We’ll cover these first, before looking at the other factors that may be slowing your website down.

WPBakery Settings: What Can You Change To Improve Speed

Let’s look at what WPBakery settings can be tweaked to improve performance.

Local Google Fonts in the General Settings tab

Loading Google fonts locally instead of from Google’s servers offers several key benefits, some unrelated to performance. We introduced this feature with the WPBakery 8.0 release.

  • No external requests are needed to fetch fonts from Google’s servers
  • Improved reliability – your fonts will load even if Google’s servers are temporarily unavailable
  • Better privacy – reduces tracking since users don’t need to connect to Google’s servers
  • Better GDPR compliance – helps avoid sending user data to third-party servers

If you’ve ever looked at a report of how long it takes for a web page to load fonts from an external resource, you’ll appreciate the time saved by doing the same locally – hosted as files on the same server running your WordPress instance.

Module Manager

The Module Manager lets you turn off unnecessary WPBakery features. These features are hidden and don’t load into WordPress, freeing up resources.

Screenshot of WPBakery's Page Builder settings

Custom JS and CSS Settings

This tool allows you to add custom CSS and JavaScript code to all pages of your website.

This isn’t a performance setting, but here’s a useful tip: only use this option when code needs to run on every page. For page-specific code, use WPBakery’s Page Settings option instead. Alternatively, use a plugin that provides more granular control over code and scripts.

An Important Point: WordPress Themes Are NOT Slow

A well-coded and structured theme that doesn’t bundle in heavy elements will perform very well. Bloated ones are easy to spot too. They tend to feature sliders, and animated elements, and use video too much. You can experience how slow they are even from the demos.

But here’s the thing: all the elements that slow a website down may contribute to a better brand experience and help boost conversions. It’s better to invest in great WordPress hosting to make it look great AND load fast. If you need a 4X4 to venture out in the wilderness, you need a car with a big engine and plenty of torque, right? Don’t get a Corolla.

Let’s not forget that many businesses develop a custom Theme to spec, finding the right balance between functionality, performance, and ‘wow-factor’ elements.

Speeding Up WPBakery With Performance Plugins and Services

This is not a step-by-step guide to fine-tuning a WPBakery website. Instead, it’s a list of performance plugins and services I have used over the years, and that have worked well. These plugins offer advanced settings to optimize and configure WordPress to run faster and, in some cases, integrate with third-party services that boost performance at the ‘edge’.

Bear in mind that WPBakery is compatible with most if not all performance plugins. There are millions of WPBakery websites out in the wild, and our support teams rarely get a ticket relating to this.

Please note: we’re not gaining anything from listing these products, or using affiliate links. As I mentioned, these are tools I have experienced firsthand.

WP Rocket

WP Rocket is one of the most recognized performance plugins and one of the most comprehensive.

They have been around a long time and used on close to 5M websites, so have access to a lot of (opted-in) data to help improve the product. Even more so today, as group.one, the parent company that owns them, bought GTMetrix, one of the most popular website performance testing tools.

Features include:

  • Page and browser caching
  • Image optimization and lazy rendering
  • File optimization
  • Database optimization
  • A customer CDN called RocketCDN
  • Cloudflare integration

Perfmatters

Perfmatters is co-owned by Brian Jackson, Kinsta’s former CMO, and is light on the system. It focuses on disabling unnecessary scripts, giving you control on a page-by-page basis via ‘Quick-toggle’ options. Pricing is also accessible, starting from $29.95 per year for one site.

Support is great, including detailed but easy-to-understand documentation. This is not surprising given Brian’s track record writing content for Kinsta.

Features include:

  • Disabling elements that slow down WordPress
  • Script Manager
  • File optimization
  • Database optimization
  • lazy loading and preloading resources
  • CDN integration
  • Hosting Google fonts locally

NitroPack

NitroPack is somewhat different and possibly powered by voodoo. Well, that’s what I thought before I took the time to understand how it works. Simply put, they grab a whole website and optimize it on their server. This also means you’re not running a performance plugin on your WordPress instance, and saving resources in the process.

They have been accused of being Black Hat, but their counterpoint is valid – Google would never have agreed to run a webinar with them back in 2022 (which is worth a watch).

One word of warning: NitroPack is not compatible with a bunch of plugins because of how it works. But it works well with WPBakery, as documented here.

Features include:

  • Advanced caching
  • Image optimization
  • Built-in global CDN
  • File optimization
  • Critical CSS, DNS prefetching, and preloading

These are not the only options, of course. Here are a number that I haven’t used personally, but are well-regarded in the WordPress space.

I should also mention CloudFlare’s Automatic Platform Optimization for WordPress, which costs $5 / month and offers a more comprehensive and effective set of optimization options. It works well with many of the performance plugins listed above too.

Have a look at these and any others you come across and see what works best for your level of technical savviness.

Next, I’ll talk about another critical piece of the speed optimization puzzle: hosting.

Choosing WordPress Hosting Optimized For WPBakery

At the time of writing, only one provider optimizes its solution for WPBakery: Indystack. It’s also WPBakery’s sister company, with many devs having worked on both products ensuring they work faultlessly together.

Screenshot of Indystack's homepage

WPBakery runs well on most hosting, but rather than repeat what has been written a thousand times over in hosting reviews and guides, I’ll focus on what we know best.
Indystack is a solid product even without considering the WPBakery optimization. Here’s why

  • Built using next-gen technology, container-based hosting  – is a relatively new approach where a lot of innovation is happening. Many legacy web hosting brands use technologies and solutions that haven’t changed much in the last 20 years. True, they just work. But providers leveraging container technologies (eg. Docker and Kubernetes) go to market with more efficient and effective products. Often, this translates to lower prices, as was the case with Indystack’s recent price drop.
  • Get truly dedicated resources and better security – Indystack websites run in isolated containers, are hosted on Google Cloud, and with its fully dedicated resources. Unlike shared hosting, where hundreds of other websites running on a server compete for resources. Running WordPress in separate containers is more secure too. Malware affecting one website will not infect another.
  • Speed optimization – In the same way, a car is tuned for a particular country or region, Indystack was tuned for WPBakery. Of course, if more optimization is needed, there are plenty of options, as mentioned above.
  • Expert support that knows WPBakery inside out – It’s like taking a car to be fixed and the mechanics were also involved in designing and building the car. They can troubleshoot issues much faster, and even advise you on what plugins play better with WPBakery.
  • What Managed WordPress Hosting should cost – Indystack’s pricing is a little more expensive than the volume players offering glorified shared hosting plans and significantly cheaper than most premium WordPress Managed hosting providers. Starting from $17.40 / month, you get the best of both worlds: performance and affordability. With the bonus of a free WPBakery license, saving you $69 / year.

Of course, I am biased. WPBakery can run fast on virtually any hosting environment. However, the case for Indystack is strong, given the tech and support staff that know WPBakery inside out.

If you’re hosting with a cheap host and a frustrated by the speed of your website and their support, give Indystack a go. Do the maths too – you may well save yourself money over 2 years or more (once the intro pricing doesn’t apply anymore). They offer a 30-day money-back guarantee, so there is no risk in trying them out.

Conclusion

Performance optimization is complex and something busy business users don’t want to spend time on. Getting a website to load fast is important, though. There are plenty of studies showing that faster-loading websites convert better.

The good news is that WPBakery is fast. Make sure that you’re not adding elements that a) slow your website down and b) you don’t need. The Keep It Simple philosophy works wonders in page speed optimization.

If you need help, feel free to ask in the WPBakery Official Community. Many of the regulars are very tech-savvy and happy to help.

Lawrence Ladomery
Lawrence trained as an Architect, but spent half his career building and managing websites, and the other half Marketing them. He's an Italian-Australian Marketer, AS Roma fan, and one of the organizers of the Melbourne WordPress Meetup.

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