SEO for websites built with Elementor

Elementor is a popular WordPress plugin. SEO Ninja is often involved in SEO projects nadat The new website has been launched. Elementor is a sort of graphical building block system with features (widgets), where the emphasis is on design and attractive effects. Agencies are often completely unaware that this can have a negative impact on loading times. That’s fine, but it does require a bit of extra care to get that attractive website to rank highly.

Navigation challenges

If your website consists solely of pages and news items (the most basic WordPress installation), you’ll encounter few problems with Elementor. When you wants to integrate the most important keywords into the navigation structure in the best possible way, you’ll often find you can’t avoid using additional custom post types and taxonomies. An example of a custom post type is a job vacancies module. The job vacancies are then displayed in a separate menu item within WordPress. Custom post types are also the ideal solution for projects, products, services, calendars, etc. It gets really interesting when you want to share taxonomies (categories, tags) with other custom post types.

Customised modifications available

Fortunately, Elementor has been developed on top of the WordPress framework, so you can utilise what are known as hooks. Using these hooks, you can make customisations to specific Elementor widgets. However, this does require a good knowledge of programming.

Challenges with images

WordPress automatically saves images in various sizes. Elementor – unsurprisingly – uses these standard sizes. Google’s guidelines require images to be uploaded in exactly the correct sizes. So an image displayed at 150 by 150 pixels must be available in that size. Elementor will use the standard 300 by 300-pixel size, which is not optimal. If only one image were used on a website, this wouldn’t be such a disaster, but often many images are used, and then the issues pile up rapidly.

Avoid disastrous slideshows

The biggest improvements for SEO often focus on images. Slideshows, for example, are also a disaster. On average, people spend just a few seconds on the homepage, so they almost never get as far as slide number 2. However, the browser still has to load all those images in the slideshow. What’s more, the images are always too large. So do do away with that slideshow and just use one attractive, optimised image. 

Design versus code optimisation

In many agencies, the tension between designers and developers is clearly visible. A designer has strong views on the end result, whilst a developer wants efficient code. This often leads to clashes. Front-end developers are the more creative of the two, and they often take a greater interest in the final visual outcome. A developer focuses solely on code. A (technical) SEO specialist sits between a front-end developer and a back-end developer. To achieve results with the website, the design must be attractive and conversion-focused. In addition, the structure must take the most important keywords into account and be lightning fast.

Elementor is a great plugin, but to keep SEO specialists happy too, it requires some customisation. We’ve now got the hang of optimising Elementor for SEO. Please feel free to get in touch.