Watch this video to see a comparison of Oxygen, Divi, Elementor, and Beaver Builder in terms of CSS & JS bloat loaded on the frontend and cleanliness of HTML output.
First, a little backstory...
Every time we run ads for Oxygen on Facebook, so-called "real" developers always comment on the ads saying "I would never use a visual builder because the code output is garbage."
Yes, we know. That's one reason we built Oxygen.
So we wanted to publish a comparison showing Oxygen's clean code and lack of bloat vs Elementor vs Beaver Builder vs Divi's disgustingly horrible code output and bloat.
In this test, we set up a blank page using just a heading and a button using:
- Oxygen
- Beaver Builder + Themer + Beaver Builder Theme
- Divi
- Elementor + Elementor Pro
To make the test as fair as possible, we entirely disabled Google Fonts. We also don't count jQuery or blame the other builders for bloat loaded by WordPress by default (such as WP emojis or Gutenberg styles), even though much of the default WP bloat can be disabled in Oxygen's bloat eliminator feature.
If you want to speed up your website so it loads faster, watch our ultimate guide on optimizing a WordPress website for fast load times in 2019. This video contains real-world practical advice to identify what is slowing your website down and eliminate it, and will work for you even if you didn't build your website with Oxygen.
Nice! So a site using Oxygen with all the optimisations (which I do already) can still load in <0.5sec?
Okay you created a good product I have to agree though I don't know about the feature comparison. But what about the future of your product? What happened to oxygen 1 pro users? What will happen to oxygen 2 users when you release oxygen 3?will they be supported and provided upgrade?
Oxygen v3 will be fully backwards compatible with v2. The upgrade from v2 to v3 is free, as per our lifetime free updates policy, for all current license holders.
Oxygen v1 was not compatible with v2 for three reasons:
1. V2 was a very radical departure from V1 - almost a completely different product.
2. There were very few users of Oxygen v1.
3. 95% of the Oxygen v1 users wanted us to ship v2 as fast as possible, even without backwards compatibility.
There are very few Oxygen v1 sites currently in existence. The v1 users continue to be supported and necessary security updates will be provided. A Gutenberg/WP5.0 compatibility patch for 1.x has been provided to the TWO users that have requested it - that's right, only TWO users have asked us for it. That's how few people are/were using Oxygen v1.
The backwards compatibility issue continues to be brought up by affiliate marketers for Elementor, Beaver Builder, and Divi over a year after the first alpha of v2 was made available. These are people who get paid a commission if you buy those products through their link. Oxygen has no such affiliate program. Of course those affiliate marketers want to make Oxygen look as bad as they possibly can - the mere fact that Oxygen exists and you know about it means there is the potential for them to lose out on a commission.
Very strange comparison test, on my test website, the same page (with Astra) on Elementor weighs only 145 KB, is your demonstration deliberately distorted?
Screenshot ere : http://megastock.free.fr/down/test-elementor.jpg
Regards.
Jean
We test all builders with no Google fonts, no 3rd party themes, no host-level optimizations, no caching plugins, and no gzip compression.
Your report shows obvious gzip compression, which is good - this should be enabled on any modern web host.
But to do a fair comparison you need to test all the other builder with gzip compression enabled also. They will all be smaller with gzip compression, but Elementor will still come in 3rd place in the test.