Designer Powerup claims that it does not affect your speed even a bit despite all the features being active all time.
(Here, we are only referring to the frontend load, i.e. the part visible and accessible by your visitors; the public)
What does that mean for you?
For that, let’s first define the aspects added by an addon that contribute to the page speed making it slower:
When an addon adds additional CSS/JS files on the frontend (to make any feature work), it creates more requests and payload. So naturally, it takes more time to download and process those extra requests, and that’s what affects the page speed.
Now, the degree to which it affects depends on the number of additional requests and its size.
It’s generally considered “bloat” when unused resources are also loaded for a particular page, and that is why the addons that load the resources for all features (despite whether it’s used on a page or not) need settings to turn off unused features.
But Designer Powerup works differently
For every feature currently present, Designer Powerup does not load even a single CSS/JS file on the frontend.
So, if no extra resources are loaded on the frontend, how do the features work?
Due to the nature and type of features, we don’t really need to load extra assets at all.
A bunch of our features are editor-only (enhancing only the logged-in editing-side Elementor experience) and the rest are carefully integrated natively within Elementor.
To break it down:
- Quick Spacers, Page Grid, and Input Nudging only load within the Elementor editor, hence they don’t have anything to do with the frontend.
- Shape Dividers and Blob Generator have SVG output, i.e. pure HTML with no scripting shenanigans. So again, no additional frontend assets required.
- The rest are all features that output CSS based on its settings. The way we make them work is that its output is combined along with the “post-{{ID}}” CSS file that Elementor always creates for every post/page. So although these are the kind of features where there could have been additionally loaded resources, we avoid them by taking advantage of Elementor’s functionality (which is why we call it a “native” integration).
And that is how, although Designer Powerup loads a couple necessary files in the Elementor editor to power its functionality, not even a single asset is loaded on the frontend keeping it lean and clean for your visitors.