I ran Web-Tastic on Elementor for years. It’s the same drag-and-drop editor a lot of charity, church and small business sites use, because it lets you build a page without touching code. Then I ripped it out of my own site and rebuilt on Gutenberg instead. Here’s what was actually wrong, and why it might be worth checking your own site for the same thing.
The problem wasn’t how it looked
Elementor doesn’t just add a design layer on top of WordPress. It loads its own JavaScript and CSS on every page, whether that page uses any of Elementor’s fancier features or not. My old homepage was pulling in Elementor 4.1.3 and everything that comes with it before a visitor saw a single word of content. That’s weight the browser has to download and process before the page does anything useful, and Google has treated page speed as a ranking factor for years now.
There was a structural issue underneath that too. The old site was one long page with anchor links: click “Services” in the menu and it jumps you down the same page instead of loading a new one. That’s a common shortcut, and it looks fine to a visitor. To Google, it means one URL, which means one shot at ranking for anything. A charity with a foodbank page, a volunteering page and a donations page all fighting for space on a single scrolling homepage isn’t going to outrank three separate pages built to answer three separate searches.
The headings were a mess as well. My H1 and H2 said the same thing, word for word — an Elementor default that nobody goes back and fixes. Below that, H5 tags were doing the job of section labels, sitting above H2s and H3s that should have come first. Search engines read heading order to work out what a page is actually about. Skip the order and duplicate the text, and you’re not giving Google anything to go on.
What changed
The new site runs on Gutenberg, WordPress’s own block editor, on the Ollie theme, on WordPress 7.0. No page builder plugin sitting between me and the HTML. Pages load faster because there’s less to load, and the markup is cleaner because I’m not fighting a third-party framework to get a paragraph to sit where I want it.
I also broke the site apart into pages that can each stand on their own: web design, WordPress hosting, WordPress care plans, and WordPress plugin development. Instead of one homepage trying to rank for everything, each page targets what it’s actually about.
Why this matters if you didn’t build the site yourself
If your site was built a few years ago through Elementor, Divi, WPBakery or something similar, there’s a fair chance it’s carrying the same weight without anyone noticing. This isn’t really an argument about which editor is nicer to work in. It’s about how much a visitor, and Google, have to get through before either one finds anything useful.
For a charity running on a basic hosting plan, or a church volunteer updating the site between everything else on their plate, that difference isn’t cosmetic. It’s the gap between a donor staying on the donation form long enough to finish it, and a donor giving up because the page took too long to load on their phone.
If you’re not sure whether your own site has this problem, run the homepage through Google PageSpeed Insights and see what comes back. Or just send me the URL — I’ll give you a straight answer, no pitch attached.
Web-Tastic builds and maintains WordPress websites for charities, churches and small businesses across the UK. If your site is still running on a page builder and you want to know whether it’s holding you back, get in touch below.