Disabling Beaver Builder Modules for Better Performance
Enabling and disabling modules (before and after 2.3)
Below is the default screen you’ll see under Settings > Beaver Builder > Modules. Here you can deselect modules which prevents them appearing under the modules tab in the Page Builder.
Deselecting these modules has no impact on your site. If you have already used a module on a page it will continue to work. You will also be able to edit the module on the page.
As you can see (below) only the selected modules (Text Editor only in this case) can be added to a page.
This could be useful if you don’t want clients to add a certain type of module. I believe by default the Social Buttons module has been deselected by Beaver Builder team. It is not as light weight as it could be.
Enabling and disabling modules for performance
If you add this filter to your (child) themes functions.php file:
add_filter( 'is_module_disable_enabled', '__return_true' );
…deselected modules will no longer load and will not show on pages. For these reasons they have added information showing where modules are presently being used.
This will also show where 3rd Party modules are used ( ie. PowerPack and UABB). But how 3rd party module behave is down to them. UABB has long had the ability to stop modules loading from their own setting page. Power Pack stayed with how Beaver Builder worked and presently still loads it’s modules. This may change with the release of Version 2.3.
Update: Power Pack added their own Module Manager to disable all their modules too.
What are the performance improvements like?
For many (probably most) the difference will be hard to detect. Simon Prosser from the BB team who worked on this shared this test showing a 31% faster load and 26% less ram usage by deselecting everything but the Text Editor. Incidentally on the modules setting page you have to select one module, but this can be a 3rd party module.
In my own tests the difference was almost imperceptible on some pages and minimal on others using the essential BB modules and with no 3rd party plugins.
There is quite a fair bit to unpick with performance as all modules are not equal in terms of the resources they use. I suspect this could most benefit using 3rd party modules that replace the Beaver Builder ones. Either way, I am grateful this option is available.
Links
Beaver Builder knowledge Base Article
Simon Prosser’s Speed Test (temp link)
Usage DD (video of this performance testing plugin)
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