Nice! I Was Finally Able To Leave Elementor And Pass Web Vitals Thanks To This

I was using Elementor Pro in my sites using Generate Press Premium to display recent posts based on categories on my Home pages as well as category pages. The problem is that Elementor (like most page builders) adds a ton of unused CSS & JS that’s render-blocking. This, despite my best efforts, failed Web Vitals in Pagespeed Insights.

My idea was to replicate the layouts I have with Elementor by using a lighter weight post grid plugin and just some shortcodes. The problem, I discovered, is that the many post grid plugins I tried are (1) poorly coded and still have far too much overhead, failing page speed tests, and (2) aren’t very refined and don’t look as good as their demos when in real use.

As a last-ditch effort (before hiring a paid developer to work on render-blocking Elementor code) I tried WP Show Posts and it worked! I’m now using WP Show Posts Pro and have been able to remove Elementor Pro completely yet have a nearly identical layout & styling. Pagespeed Insights scores are 99 on mobile for these pages and all Web Vitals are passed!

Bear in mind, that took some custom CSS and tweaking to get WPSP working as I liked, as in some regards it wasn’t mobile friendly like I expected – still some room for improvement there I think (ex.: desktop thumbnails don’t resize to fit the post grid container on mobile). Also, documentation isn’t so great in my opinion, and the demo pages are missing some of the layout styles you can use, making it hard to know which to try.

Also, you can’t export Lists you create and then import them on other sites, meaning for all 4 sites I had to manually re-do all of it manually. Those are all relatively minor complaints when compared to the end results.

It’s very lightweight and recommended. The Card and 3 Overlay options are nice as well. I recommend it. ??

• This topic was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by martymcleod.