Hi everyone! I’m working on a WordPress site locally and running into major performance issues. I set up a local development environment using XAMPP and installed WordPress to build a vehicle rental website. I’m using the Astra theme which came with a nice car rental template that fits my needs perfectly. However, when I try to use Elementor page builder to customize the site, the performance is absolutely terrible. Simple tasks like adding text blocks, modifying colors, or even just clicking on elements takes forever to respond. Sometimes I wait 2-5 minutes just for a single action to complete. The interface often becomes completely unresponsive and I have to restart everything. This makes development nearly impossible. I also tried switching to LocalWP thinking it might help, but the same sluggish behavior persists. Has anyone experienced similar issues with Elementor performance in local WordPress setups? Any suggestions for improving the speed would be greatly appreciated!
Had the same Elementor issues on my local setup until I figured out it was resource allocation. In XAMPP, edit your php.ini file - set max_execution_time to 300 seconds and memory_limit to 1024M. Also bump up innodb_buffer_pool_size in your MySQL config, it makes a huge difference for database stuff. Turn off WordPress debug mode too if you’ve got it on, it really slows things down. These changes dropped my Elementor load times from minutes to seconds.
Dealt with this for months before fixing it. Usually comes down to your computer’s virtualization settings and how local servers handle dynamic content. First, check if hardware acceleration is enabled in BIOS - sounds odd but it matters for local dev environments. Your antivirus is probably the bigger issue though - it’s constantly scanning WordPress files as Elementor modifies them. Add your local dev folder to antivirus exclusions. If you can, switch from Apache to Nginx in your local setup. Nginx handles Elementor’s constant AJAX requests way better. Night and day difference once I made these changes.
yep, totally get your pain. try increasing that php memory limit in xampp, go for 512MB or more. also, disable any extra plugins u don’t need, and clear the elementor cache - worked for me!