Hi, I’m Amy from Digital Elements.Graphic designers play a valuable role in web design. They create visual appeal and improve how a site feels for human visitors. But a good website has to serve more than just human traffic. It also needs to perform well for search engines - and increasingly, for AI-driven search. Problems arise when complex designs are built without technical consideration, relying solely on visual page builders. That approach is one of the most common causes of slow page speeds, directly impacting SEO and overall performance. We see this often with websites built using tools like Divi, Elementor, or similar platforms. These tools are designed to help non-technical users create reasonably simple websites — and they do that well, particularly for post-launch content updates.Issues appear when they’re pushed beyond that purpose. Layer upon layer of sections, columns, and modules quickly creates a massive DOM tree. That extra structure slows load times, affects performance, and becomes a serious issue for Google’s PageSpeed metrics and Core Web Vitals. Ironically, the more complex a design becomes, the more it benefits from custom code (not more builder layers) to keep the structure clean, fast, and efficient. At that point, a design issue becomes an architecture challenge. So before focusing on how a website looks, it’s worth asking how it’s being built - and whether the skills and structure support performance as the site grows. At Digital Elements, that’s where we begin.