wordpress Visual Composer slowing the site

Question

I am trying to speed up my wordpress site. In this case, it is powered by Visual Composer. We have attempted to speed up the site using smaller images, static text, and CDN-movement of movies.

However, I am being told by a service that Visual Composer is the main culprit on why the website is extremely slow. I have no idea how to begin troubleshooting this, and I am asking this group if anyone has had this told to them and what they did about it.

My Site is https://www.trekfederation.com/

Anything to start with would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You shouldn't use Visual Composer. Have a theme custom made so you don't have extra bloat in your site. Visual Composer creates plugin madness and bloats your database. Its not a quick process but making a brand new theme or starting with one of WordPress's themes and making it your own is your best bet. You could also hire someone to do it.

Answer 2

I too was curious about the same question and could not find a reasonably satisfactory answer to my question and so I decided to test the results with and without VC using https://gtmetrix.com/

Following are the results:

Speed before creating the page; using Visual Composer:

Speed of page; when created with Visual Composer:

There is a drastic fall in the speed; having said that; if you tend to use Visual composer some of the premium themes; which have been optimized for VC, you will not face such issues. Wowmall is one such theme on themeforest; which has a decent speed. They do use VC and also provide it free with the purchase of their theme.

Here is the checklist I follow to make sure my WordPress sites do not slow down.

• Test the themes well before implementing them on the live project (generally use https://gtmetrix.com/ https://tools.pingdom.com/ https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
• Use Max CDN for content delivery network https://www.maxcdn.com/
• Use w3 total cache plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/ (I stick to free version; unless I expect high traffic on the website)
• Use a minimum number of plugins; it's very tempting to use some plugin to get things done quickly however it may backfire in terms of speed.

PS: you can consider https://wpengine.com/ for hosting solution; I have not personally used their services, however, know that they take care of caching needs quite effectively.

EDIT: I have also observed the Revolution slider script slow down the website, whether or not the slider is used on the page; the js runs once the plugin is activated.

To conclude Wordpress is a double-edged sword; if not wisely used will result in a poor web performance.