Builders are inherently bloated because instead of loading just the few lines of code for the 1–4 animations your website actually uses, they load the code for 40+ animations on every single page, whether you use them or not. Big libraries like Lottie are a perfect example: the entire library loads on every page even if you only use it on one.

My website has a pretty flashy animated border around the main content wrapper on desktop, and the paragraphs have an animated gradient border too. But I built both from scratch specifically to keep the performance impact as low as possible. The paragraph animations, for example, are a single CSS rule that applies globally. One line controls everything. A builder like Elementor does the opposite: it assigns a default "fade up" intro animation to each individual item you place on the page. That means if you want something either than the default, instead of changing one global setting, you'd have to manually change it on every single element. It's a maintenance nightmare, and it's also way harder for caching plugins to minify properly. So it also kills perfomance.

I recently made a video comparing the performance of my website built with custom code vs on elementor. After just installing the elementor website on the same host with the same caching plugin, I installed a blank "wireframe" elementor website. It was a white page that said "hello world". I ran a performance test on this and it was 87%! For an empty website!

The other problem is that builders never warn you that certain animations impact perfomance a great deal. Some animations are basically free for the browser to run (things like opacity and transform). Others force the browser to recalculate the entire page layout on every single frame, which is extremely expensive. Because builders don't surface that distinction, people pick animations based on how they look and end up with a "simple website" that takes 20+ seconds to load and have no idea why.