☞ Answer

This is a bumper question. I only spotted the first part at first and assumed it was all about Divi. Though I do love a good Divi question.

What's the downside of Divi?

Personally, I don't like Divi. Every time I've used it on a client's website, it's either been really slow or really buggy, or both. I've had to reach out to Divi support several times just to get unstuck. And they've had to fix it so those times it was definitely not "me" thing. So, yeah, I've not had a good experience with it.

But having said that, there are people using it and loving it. It's quite popular and probably the biggest Elementor rival (Elementor is another page builder).  If you never have issues with it, then you'll be perfectly fine. When you do have issues with it can be a pain to troubleshoot and find out what's actually wrong.

It's also quite prone to conflict with other plugins.

And if you ever move away from it, it doesn't uninstall itself cleanly. It leaves behind some Divi shortcodes that you have to manually delete. I think there's a Clean up feature now actually but it doesn't catch everything.

How to create popups for Divi?

I remember correctly, Divi has a pop-maker or pop-up builder. Personally, I use other plugins - one called Popup maker ha! 

Cheapest way to back up the site?

The free Updraft Plus plugin is amazing. You can connect it to Google Drive and it'll back up your site there.

Your web host also creates regular backups for you. Well, good web hosts, that is. So they are a last resort if you don't have one yourself.  Obviously, you'd have to wait for support to get back to you when you raise a ticket with your host so if you can do your own backup too then that will be more readily available. 

What are the downsides of having Divi and Elementor on a site? 

It shouldn't really happen. They do the same thing so you're duplicating code there. They are full of bloated code so not a good thing.

Both are highly likely to conflict with plugins on their own, let alone when they coexist!

I'm trying to think of a use case for both. Maybe you have a plugin like LearnDash that works well with one but you have already built your site using the other. 

In that case, I would suggest you learn the default Block Editor that comes with WordPress. It has improved a lot and you do wonders with it!

How to improve load speed?

A caching plugin is the first thing I'd recommend. Like WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache. There's also WP Rocket.

Caching is where a copy of your site is stored so it can be shown quicker to your visitors. So instead of every request going to get a fresh copy, it shows an older version from memory. 

Another thing you can do to improve speed is to optimise your images. So only upload images in the right dimension  (width x height)  for the space it's needed for. And compress it so it's smaller in terms of storage size (bytes).

So if you are uploading an image that's only ever going appear in a 500px x 500px space, there's no point using one that's 1000px wide. 

Also if you upload images straight from your phone, for example, they tend to be huge in storage size. Use something like Tinypng.com to compress them.

And finally, plugins on your site might have speed-saving settings. Like Elementor has the concept of loading images a bit later after the main page has started loading so the visitor is not waiting too long to see the content.

How to start tracking visitors with Google Analytics?

You'd install the Google Analytics plugin. Think it's called Site Kit or just Google Analytics. 

Then create a Google Analytics account and link up your website. You'll get a code, a GA4 code, which you can add to the plugin. I think the plugin has a step-by-step guide to tell what to do.

Want the video?

This was part of a live Q&A and my response starts around 12:20.