I tried a number of the demo sites for elements themes and every single one presents a very poor showing on speed and security.
Please forgive that I am not a web designer, but it seems to me that if I could get a 110 rating (A+) on security on Mozille Observatory (for security) and a 100 on speed for both mobile and regular sites on Google Page Speed using an off the shelf Rapidweaver theme with me being a total rookie, and with a few additional settings, why would I ever choose Elements or their themes when their demos show consistently D’s or F’s on security and low speeds?
I want to move to Elements and I am not saying this for me, but for those who want to promote Elements in general, including to those who may not know anything about it or Rapidweaver.
Just a thought that developers who show their wares ought to put their best try forward to the public.
I have already migrated several websites from Classic to Elements, and after the move, almost all of them have achieved significantly better “Google Page Speed for Mobile” scores than before.
For desktop, it’s almost always a 100%. On mobile, the average is around 98%. There are also some sites with a slightly lower score, but that’s usually because of extra JS scripts running here and there, or because Google thinks some images aren’t properly sized or compressed.
That’s probably often the main reason why the demo websites have a lower score. They’re just templates, quickly put together as examples, without a specific focus on web optimization, speed, or similar details.
If you want a project to achieve top scores, you need to keep in mind that it takes an incredible amount of time to make all the necessary optimizations. Every little change can either improve or hurt your result.
The amount of time developers would need to invest here would drive up the price of those templates—probably far beyond what people would actually want to pay.
Thanks for the feedback. In our testing the Google Page Speeds have been excellent, and better that what we generally saw in Classic.
I’ve not tested with Mozilla Observatory, but will look into it.
The code Elements outputs is very clean, and you have access to the template so I’m sure you could make Element built sites hit 100% without too much effort!
By the way: To get good scores on “Mozilla Observatory”, you often need to add certain entries to your .htaccess file. It also depends a lot on where your projects are hosted, and so on…
These are all settings that are up to you and depend on your level of technical knowledge.
For most people, the “Mozilla Observatory” score isn’t really important anyway, as long as they’re not handling big databases with sensitive information like credit card data. Most users are just sharing information and a few images. For that, the achieved score is more than enough… and honestly, Elements doesn’t have much control over how high that score will be.
