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12 Things We Need to See From WordPress Page Builders in 2017

Though SEO is a multi-step process, where everything is predominantly determined by hosting, image and video optimization, etc., poorly coded plugins can significantly decrease an overall website speed, in result, have a bad effect on site rankings.

That’s already clear even for WordPress newbies. Moreover, the vast majority of builders are shortcode-based and their parsing is a highly processor-intensive operation. Complex layouts with tons of content can take much more time to render pixels to screen; the more complicated styles, the more time is taken for painting them.

For WordPress page builders, the measure of speed comes with 2 aspects:

  • Firstly, the speed of editing process (inside the builder): how fast the builder is loading, how fast the content modules are loaded and added, and sometimes, how fast the user loses patience staring at a preloader.
  • Secondly, how long it takes to load the site page created with the builder. While the first aspect is more about providing a happy user experience, the second one is a significant SEO factor. The backend of the builder should be loaded maximum quickly and at least the basics of page speed rules and recommendations should be taken into account.

For example, one useful strategy is performed by the developers of Elementor page builder: to speed up the loading time of content created with the builder, CSS generated by Elementor are saved to external minified CSS files, therefore CSS markup is processed much faster. A great way to lighten the source code and load the page faster.

There are too many external factors that can worsen a website SEO. The page builder as a major plugin of many websites that use it should not be one of them.

To understand which builder is really good at speed (loading live site pages), all of them should be tested in terms of a particular project or in the same testing environment and conditions.

5. Well-coded plugin

Taking into account that builders oftentimes take a role of main content keepers, nobody wants to have a buggy overloaded plugin to host their content. Nobody wants to have a site that takes forever to load because of one plugin. That’s why an “extremely well-coded” plugin is becoming something vendors emphasis in their advertising more often. And this is what users pay attention to, even without being able to properly check whether it’s true.

Still, many WordPress page builders produce a heavy markup or non-semantic code that is impossible to debug and takes much more time to load the page. Very often, this is an outcome of a super “can do everything” plugin. Ultimately, there is a room for working on valid code markup, improving caching system for rendering CSS and JavaScript, eliminating nested elements in the code, etc. It’s all about improving the user experience and SEO after all.

To recap, as well as it’s significant to leverage coding standards for page builder plugins, builder creators may invest more time in educating users providing real examples on what they mean by a “well-coded product”. Or they can invite to discuss some critical topics and start some behind the scene talks.

6. Ready-to-use design layouts

This article was first published here

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