How to Speed Up a WPBakery Site Without Rebuilding It

WPBakery has powered a huge slice of the WordPress ecosystem for over a decade, and it still ships inside a lot of premium themes. It also carries a reputation for slow sites.

There’s some truth to that. But before you start pricing out a full rebuild in another builder, it’s worth knowing where the weight actually sits. On many WPBakery sites, images account for a larger share of the page weight than the builder itself.

That’s good news, because they’re also one of the easiest performance bottlenecks to fix without rebuilding a single page.

Where WPBakery sites actually get heavy

WPBakery does add overhead. It loads its own CSS and JavaScript so all those rows, columns, and elements render correctly, and a page stuffed with nested rows and third-party addons carries more of that than a simple one. It’s worth trimming that overhead where possible.

If you run a WPBakery site through GTmetrix or PageSpeed Insights, take a look at the waterfall. Nine times out of ten, it isn’t the scripts taking up the biggest bars. It’s image files — a hero background, a gallery, a handful of full-resolution product shots someone dropped straight in from a phone. Add those up and the page is pulling down several megabytes before it finishes painting.

The builder often gets the blame, even though oversized images usually account for the biggest share of the page weight.

Why images are usually the biggest offender

WPBakery makes adding images almost too easy. You drag a photo into an image element or set it as a row background, and it just works. What WPBakery doesn’t do is compress that photo or resize it to what the layout actually needs.

So a 4MB, 4000px-wide image gets served at full size even when it sits in a 600px-wide column. Every visitor downloads the whole thing. Now put a hero, a couple of galleries, and some content images on the same page, and you’ve built something heavy for reasons that have nothing to do with your layout.

Format is the other half of it. Most of those images are still JPEG or PNG, when WebP and AVIF can deliver the same visual quality at a fraction of the size.

This matters beyond raw page weight. Oversized images are one of the most reliable ways to wreck your Largest Contentful Paint score, since the largest element on most pages is, you guessed it, an image. Fix the images and LCP usually falls into line.

The fix: optimize your WPBakery images with ShortPixel

Fortunately, fixing this doesn’t mean rebuilding your pages. You optimize the images your WPBakery site already uses, and every page that displays them gets lighter automatically.

That’s what ShortPixel Image Optimizer does. Install it, and it compresses the images in your media library, generates modern WebP and AVIF versions, and helps reduce the amount of data your visitors need to download. Your layouts stay identical. Only the files behind them change.

With a single plugin, you get:

• Compression, shrinking your existing images without visible quality loss
• Automatic resizing, scaling oversized originals down to a sensible maximum so you’re not serving pixels no one sees
• Next-generation formats (WebP & AVIF), generated automatically and served to browsers that support them, with a fallback to the original where needed
• CDN delivery, a delivery method that serves images from a location close to each visitor instead of from your own server

None of this asks you to understand WPBakery’s internals or edit anything you built. It works on the images every page already pulls from.

What kind of savings to expect

The numbers here aren’t small. We ran a batch test across 11,000 images from a diverse photo set, portraits, landscapes, product shots, street scenes and ShortPixel took the collection from 536.6 MB down to even less than 200 MB. That’s a huge reduction on mixed, real-world content, not a cherry-picked best case.

A WordPress media library sitting at around 500 MB could end up closer to 170 MB after optimization. Flat graphics and illustrations usually compress even further. Already-compressed images, less so.

On a WPBakery site, those savings translate directly into lighter pages, faster image delivery, and often a better Largest Contentful Paint score.

Setting it up

Getting ShortPixel running on a WPBakery site takes a few minutes.

Install ShortPixel Image Optimizer from your WordPress dashboard and activate it.

Add your API key, then choose your preferred compression level. For most sites, Lossy offers the best balance between image quality and file size.

Enable WebP and AVIF generation. If you want images served from a global network rather than your own server, select CDN as your delivery method. And if your uploads tend to be very large, set a maximum image width as well if you want to.

Then run the bulk optimization. ShortPixel works through your existing images in the background, one after another, generating the next-gen versions as it goes. When it finishes, every WPBakery page that uses those images is already serving the lighter files. New uploads get optimized automatically from then on, so you don’t have to think about it again.

Checking your results

It’s worth measuring the difference before and after the optimization.

Run a couple of your image-heavy WPBakery pages through PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix before you optimize, then again once the bulk process finishes. Do a few runs and go by the average, since scores wander a bit on their own. Watch the total page size and the Largest Contentful Paint number in particular, those are where lighter images show up most clearly.

You can also inspect one of your images in your browser to confirm it’s being served as WebP or AVIF instead of the original JPEG or PNG.

Conclusion

A slow WPBakery site doesn’t always need a rebuild. Its reputation gets pinned on the builder, but on most sites the real weight sits in the images and that’s the part you don’t need to rebuild anything to fix.

Instead of rebuilding your WPBakery site, start by fixing the part that usually weighs the most. Optimize your images with ShortPixel, let it generate WebP and AVIF versions, and serve them through its CDN if that suits your setup. You’ll often see a meaningful performance improvement without touching a single layout.