Elementor Performance Tip – Reduce Your DOM Size To Make Your Website Faster | Elementor

In the digital sphere, every fraction of a second matters. Therefore, the performance of a website is crucial for user satisfaction and engagement. Enhancing performance can increase the likelihood of achieving your website goals.

A website with a large DOM output increases the size of the HTML, which can harm the site’s performance. However, there are techniques to diminish your site’s DOM size. This post will delve into how to enhance Elementor websites by employing various strategies to minimize HTML size.

Understanding the “Extensive DOM Size” Problem

The DOM (Document Object Model) represents a webpage’s structure. An extensive DOM size usually indicates a complex DOM structure, often caused by the use of excessive HTML elements, nested nodes, or dynamic content injections. Pages with a large number of HTML elements tend to load slowly and can impact animations and other user interactions.

DOM Size Impact on Page Performance

A large DOM size can increase rendering time, causing delayed page rendering and slower load times. This is because browsers have to parse and render each node. Furthermore, each DOM node requires browser memory, potentially leading to system resource exhaustion and increased memory consumption. This can result in performance degradation, especially on low-end devices.

Moreover, excessive DOM size can cause sluggish user interactions and decreased responsiveness during website use. A high number of DOM elements often includes many event listeners, adding overhead and slowing user interactions. We won’t mention all the reasons, but the rule of thumb is that the larger the HTML size, the slower the page.

How to Measure DOM Size With External Tools?

To measure the impact of DOM size on website performance, you can use the following tools:

Google Chrome DevTools – Go to the “Elements” panel to check DOM elements and their nesting depth. Use the “Performance” tab to assess rendering performance and spot potential bottlenecks caused by DOM manipulation.

Lighthouse – Lighthouse audits offer insights into DOM size metrics such as “DOM Size,” “DOM Depth,” and “Maximum DOM Depth,” pointing out areas for improvement.

WebPageTest – Assess DOM size metrics in Waterfall charts and Performance results to understand the relationship between DOM complexity and page load times.

What is Considered a Large DOM Size?

Lighthouse flags pages with DOM trees as follows:

• Warns when the element has more than 818 nodes.
• Errors when the element has more than 1,400 nodes.

However, these metrics may change in the future. Furthermore, different tools may set different thresholds to warn of extensive DOM size.

Reducing Elementor DOM Size

Elementor is a visual drag-and-drop website builder that simplifies the process of adding elements onto the page. Using Elementor typically doesn’t negatively impact your site’s performance. However, there are steps you can take to further optimize the pages you build. This includes reducing the number of HTML elements that can minimize the DOM, without affecting the design.

To optimize effectively, it’s useful to understand the structure of Elementor’s layout elements. We’ll focus on layout elements because a typical page contains dozens of such elements, so optimizing them yields a higher impact.

There are three recommended techniques to optimize your layout elements:

1. Migrate from section/columns to containers.
2. Flatten containers with single nested containers.
3. Implement full-width rather than boxed-width nested containers where possible.

Let’s learn more about reducing Elementor DOM size.

Elementor Element Types

Elementor has two types of Elements:

• Widgets – all the regular elements you use to build your website like heading, image, icon, button, divider, etc.
• Layout Elements – structural elements like Section/Columns and Containers. These elements wrap the widgets and group them together.

We’re going to focus on layout elements in terms of how to reduce the DOM size.

HTML Structure of Layout Elements

In Elementor, each structural element consists of two