Rebuilding a slow Elementor site.
Improving the build, increasing the speed and conversions
Why did Vita Mojo need a new website?
Vita Mojo had a phase one website. It was built on Elementor, it was slow, it was ranking for virtually nothing, and the marketing team could barely touch it without calling a developer.
Vita Mojo provides digital ordering, kitchen and operational software for hospitality brands. Their website is central to how they support sales conversations and introduce the business to prospective clients. It needs to explain a technically complex product clearly, generate enquiries, and keep pace with a team that is publishing content regularly.
The old site could not do any of those things properly. Elementor had made updating the site slow, unreliable and dependent on third-party developer support for anything beyond the most basic changes. The marketing team was working around the platform rather than with it.
The brief was not a complete redesign – the brand was sound and the general direction was right. It was an evolution: better platform, better performance, properly in the hands of the people who use it every day.
Issues with the old site:
- Built on Elementor – slow, bloated and difficult to maintain without developer support
- Ranking for virtually nothing despite the marketing team’s SEO efforts
- Updates were time-consuming, limited, or required third-party developer involvement
- The internal team could not manage the site confidently day to day
- Design and layout templates had dated and needed refreshing
- The platform was a barrier to the marketing activity the business needed to do
Our approach
Project overview
An evolution of an existing site rather than a ground-up redesign. Existing brand retained. Layouts refreshed for clarity and consistency. The Elementor build replaced entirely with a bespoke WordPress theme – and the result handed properly to the marketing team.
Design and build
- Bespoke WordPress build aligned with existing brand guidelines – familiar to visitors, far better under the bonnet
- Layout templates refreshed for clarity and consistency across product, service, team and contact pages
- Worked collaboratively with Vita Mojo’s internal team who produced content in house throughout
- Existing content reused and refined rather than replaced – continuity of messaging preserved
Editing experience
- Purpose-built ACF content blocks replace the Elementor setup entirely
- The marketing team can update content quickly and safely without developer involvement for day-to-day changes
- Publishing new blog posts, product updates and resource content no longer requires calling anyone
- Default Gutenberg blocks disabled – every page stays on-brand regardless of who makes changes
SEO and performance
Clean page structure and flexible internal linking built throughout – supporting the Vita Mojo team’s in-house SEO activity rather than fighting against it. Analytics, tag management and CRM integrations all connected so performance and conversions can be tracked properly from day one.
The marketing team supplies page titles, meta data and SEO strategy. The platform is built to support that work, not constrain it.
Content and structure
The new site covers 10 to 15 core pages plus a blog and resource centre. Product and service overviews, individual product pages, team content, testimonials and contact – all consistently templated and properly structured for both users and search engines.
Stuck on Elementor?
If your site was built on a page builder and your marketing team is working around it rather than with it – we should talk.
Tell us where you are and we will tell you what a proper rebuild would actually look like.
The results
100
Google PageSpeed score on mobile and desktop – replacing a site that could not get close
0
Elementor – removed entirely and replaced with a bespoke build the marketing team can actually manage
100%
Of content manageable in house – publishing, updating and expanding the site no longer requires developer support
Ranking
The marketing team can now add content and gain rankings – something the old Elementor site made effectively impossible
Integrated
Analytics, tag management and CRM all connected and working – conversions tracked properly from launch
Evolved
Existing brand and content direction preserved – a better platform underneath, not a different site on top
Technical details
WordPress theme
Built on our own bare-bones WordPress starter theme. No inherited styles, no third-party framework dependencies, no bloat. Before any design work goes in, we run the blank theme through Google PageSpeed Insights and aim for 100 out of 100 on both mobile and desktop. That discipline is what makes the performance scores possible – and what Elementor, by its nature, cannot deliver.
Plugins
We keep third-party plugins to a minimum. This site uses ACF-powered content blocks edited in the Gutenberg editor. The default WordPress block library was disabled entirely – editors can only use the purpose-built blocks we created, which means every page is built consistently and on-brand regardless of who published it.
Integrations
Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and CRM integrations all configured and working at launch. The previous site had made tracking conversions unreliable – this build gives the Vita Mojo marketing team the data they need to measure what is actually happening on the site.
SEO foundations
Clean page structure and flexible internal linking built throughout. The Vita Mojo team handle their own SEO strategy and page-level optimisation in house – the platform is built to support that rather than get in the way of it. No retrofitting required.
Why the problem was Elementor, not WordPress.
Vita Mojo’s site was technically on WordPress. It was functionally on Elementor. Those are not the same thing.
Elementor is a page builder plugin. It works by generating its own code on top of WordPress, adding significant weight to every page in the process. Sites built on Elementor are slower than they need to be, harder to maintain than they should be, and more dependent on the plugin continuing to work correctly than most clients realise when they sign up for it.
The Vita Mojo marketing team had a WordPress site they could barely use. They needed developer support for changes that should have taken five minutes. They were producing content but struggling to get it live. And they were ranking for virtually nothing, despite having a product worth writing about, because a slow, bloated Elementor build is one of the less effective SEO environments you can operate in.
The rebuild did not change the brand. It did not change the content direction. It changed the platform underneath – stripping out Elementor entirely and replacing it with a bespoke WordPress theme built the way we build all our sites: blank, lightweight, performance-first, with custom content blocks the team can actually use.
The result is a site that feels broadly the same to visitors and completely different to the people managing it. That is exactly what it should feel like.
