 What's up everyone? I'm Jeffrey from Lightbox and that back there, that's Yoda. He's also from Lightbox. He's about to go to work right now. All right, cool. So today we're going to talk about keeping your website fast, clean and healthy and how to start a new WordPress and Elemental website with best practices. So that way it remains optimal and you are set for a clean and fast website. Are you brand new to Elemental or maybe even new to WordPress and you're building one of your first sites and you're probably asking yourself, am I doing this right? Like maybe your site feels a little bit off, a little slow, starting to get messy, disorganized and you're wondering like what's going on with it. Well, there's a lot of videos out there. They're going to show you step by step how to start building a WordPress website. Take you from the beginning to the end. I mean, this is how I learned. I actually learned how to build my first WordPress websites on YouTube videos and I'll watch in step by step tutorials and they're great, fantastic way to get started. The thing is there's a few things we need to do to get started to make sure your site stays fast and it's healthy and that you set your site up to be clean for the future because if you don't and you start off with some bad practices, you're actually creating a snowball effect that it might be okay at first but as it rolls it starts getting bigger, messier or junkier and then, you know, down the line disaster strikes and then you got to rebuild it all over again. So let's take a look at a few best practices that you can do to make sure your website stays clean and fast. Step one, the install. Whether you're starting a website on your hosting like Site Ground or you're using a local host or wherever you start your WordPress website when you install it, it comes with stuff you do not need. So the first step is let's remove that. That way we're starting on something that is absolutely clean. Delete pages, posts, unused themes and plugins that come default with WordPress installs. By default, whenever you download WordPress, it comes out with some extra stuff that we just don't need. So what we want to do is delete it, clear it out. So that way we got a fresh clean start. So let's show you, we'll start off with pages. Whenever you start your WordPress website in 2020, it's going to look like this right here. You're going to have a screen like this. And when you go to the back end, it's going to look like this. And you can already see this is a fresh install. I did it from my hosting. I use Cloudways for this one. But you can also see there's already updates needed. And well, it doesn't come ready. So let's get it ready. Let's navigate to pages. And you're going to see it starts off with two pages. We don't need these. So go ahead and select over here and let's move them to trash. Now once we're in trash, let's go to trash and let's delete them permanently. Now let's go to post and we're going to do the same thing. All WordPress sites come with this Hello World post. So let's trash this, go over to trash, and let's delete it permanently. And let's go over to our plugins. So this is going to depend on wherever you downloaded your WordPress from. They're always going to come with usually a couple plugins are just not needed. Like these, we do not need. I still after five years, I don't even know what Hello Dolly does. So let's go ahead and delete these. All right, next step, let's go over to our themes from appearance to themes. And you're going to see this comes with three. I've seen some WordPress installs that come with like six themes. Right now, we just want to keep one. That's it. So let's go ahead and delete this 2019 will delete the 2017. And right now we're going to keep the 2020. Go ahead and update it if it's not updated on yours, like how mine came not updated. And the only reason why we're keeping one of them is it's going to be our backup thing. So that brings us now to step number two. Step number two, install your theme and your child theme. So whenever using WordPress, we have a few themes that are highly recommended. And we're not going to talk too much about themes. For this one, let's go ahead and use the Hello theme. So let's add that theme right here in your search. You can see already my recommendations are those two. That's how often I use them. And we got the Hello Elementor. So click on install. Now, we aren't going to activate this theme. What we want to do first is set up our child theme. And this, what I'm about to show you works for just about most of the base plugins, whether it's Ocean WP, Generate Press, Astra, Hello, you know, the top recommended ones for Elementor is finding your child theme. And all you got to do is Google it. Let's go ahead and put Hello theme, child theme. And there should be a way to download this. And here we go right here at the top, Elementor Hello child theme. So let's download this. Let's go back over here, upload our theme. Here it is. Install. And then we're going to activate this. You always want to make sure we have a child theme. And we want to set that up from the very beginning. And you see here, we have three themes. And that's all we need. We're going to have the child theme. We're going to have the base theme. And then we're going to have a backup theme, which is our 2020 theme. And that is just for backups, in case if we have to do bug testing later on, all those other themes that come with WordPress, we do not need. It's just extra blow. Step number four, check your site health. Ever since WordPress 5.0 came out, it came out with a new feature called site health, which lets you know if there's anything that needs to be fixed in your site. To find this, navigate over to your tools, and then select on site health. And when you go here, it'll let you know if anything is wrong. As you can see, we have no issues going on. But if something does come up right here, fix it. It shouldn't be too difficult. If you see something that you don't understand what it is, I'm sure you could copy paste that in the Google search, and it'll give you more information on it. Step number five, installing Elementor and performing your Elementor setup. Now that everything is ready to go, let's add our main page builder, which of course is going to be Elementor. Also, it is highly recommended to get Elementor Pro. Without it, you're going to be seriously limited on what you can do. Now, after you've installed it, take your time with it and go through each one of the settings. We want to make sure that everything is done first with Elementor before starting to add more plugins or before starting to build pages. This will set you up later on and will save you a whole lot of time. Step number six, installing additional Elementor add-ons. Now, this one is super important and something I didn't do in my very first Elementor websites. And as a result, later on, when I had to clean it up and improve the performance, speed things up, it created a really big headache for me. So I want to go ahead and show you now what I do to avoid that headache and to keep my Elementor site running fast. Now, there's a few plugins that I will only use with Elementor. And because they allow you to turn off and on the code that you use. Let me show you what I mean right here. So for this one, I'm going to show you one of my favorites is the plus add-on. Let me upload this real quick. We'll install this. Now, whenever you install one of these add-ons, every single widget has its own code. And when you have all the widgets showing their code together, you know, running their code together, that's where the slowdown happens. That's where the bloat happens. So with plugins like the plus, and there's a few others as well, I'll go ahead and list them in a minute. But these plugins will allow you to pick and choose which widgets that you want to activate, but also which ones has code that is going to be used. So what I mean is the ones you don't use the code won't be used. So maybe you have an add-on and it has like 30 widgets, but you only need to use two of them. It makes no point running code for all 30 of those widgets when you only need two. So what I do now is let's go to our settings right here. When it shows your widgets, it lets you turn them off and on. So you can see there's already all these that come by default on. Now if we were to start building the site right now, and we're probably not going to use like 90% of these, you're going to have all kinds of stuff going on. You're going to have all this bloat. It's going to slow it down. And then what's going to happen later, your website is going to be finished. You're probably going to add a few more plugins to it. And then you don't know which ones you actually use. That's the problem. When you leave all these activated and you go back to clean it up, now you're stuck wondering, wait, did I use this button one here? Which button did I use with Elementor and which one did I use here? Or with any of these widgets. And then you got to try to figure it out. And then you got to rebuild stuff. It becomes messy. It's a headache. So the first thing you want to do is deselect all of them. Alright, so deselect them. I know the plus you need to have one active. So let's think of one we're going to use. So we're going to use the info box. Let's go ahead and save that. Alright, so now we're starting with the clean slate right here. Then let's go through the rest of the settings to because there's there's more things going on here. So we see everything's cool here. It's all disabled. We're not going to import any designs. Let's see our extra options right here. So like for example, icons, mine, we're not going to use this right here. If we were to keep this on, it'll load all the icons on all the pages, which again will slow everything down. We're not going to use a Google map, map IP API right here again, that'll add more stuff to it that will slow it down. Then let's go over here to performance. Let's go ahead and clear the cash for everything. Again, a really good plugin. This is the reason why I like the plus is they have this really thought out for performance right here. Then once everything is set up on your widget, and you feel like it's clean and ready to go. Now, whenever you want to add a widget, whenever you need it, you add it only when you need it. So when you're actually building your your page and be like, Hey, I need to add an accordion, then you could go over here and select on accordion. That way, you know what's being used and you don't have extra widgets that aren't being used in there that confuse you later on and wondering, are these being used? And yeah, just making a mess of things. Really good plugin or add on for elements, or they will have performance in mind, and they will have these options. And they're the only kind that I use a couple that I recommend would be the plus add ons, ultimate add ons for Elementor, and dynamic widgets or dynamic who those are my three go tos. And the reason is that they have these performance options, and they make it easy to manage the code that I'm going to use in there. So bottom line, you can't keep an Elementor site running fast and healthy. But the trick to it is, from the very beginning, you got to think performance first. There's a trade off with Elementor, and there's pros and cons, just like everything. The pros for it is it makes sites easy to build, you're able to do it fast. And it also you can get super creative, you can do all kinds of stuff. I mean, I can make an hour long video about all the pros for Elementor. But for the cons, now there is one big com with Elementor. And that is it can't blow and slow down your site. If it's not done right. Alright, so there are some practices that you got to follow with Elementor if you want to keep your site running fast, especially when you start adding on more plugins. That brings us to our last step. Step number seven, adding additional plugins. Alright, you're going to need to add plugins to your site as you go. But be very, very careful when doing this, add as very little as you can. Keep in mind, Elementor and Elementor Pro is already huge. It's already a very big plugin. So anything you add to your site, be very careful, try to add as little as possible. And only what's necessary. I hope this video helps. If it did, like, subscribe, you know, all that YouTube stuff. Well, we could use the support for a new channel. So all the support really helps. And we look forward to bringing more content based on web design and Elementor coming up really soon. Alright, bye.