Cache sections rendered html for editor use

[leonardola]

Describe the Problem

Sections can be added to a page by using a template widget.

Screen.Recording.2026-04-30.at.11.47.20.mov

These kind of widgets only include a reference to a section instead of copying the whole code to the page. This is extremely useful for big pages. Making the editor use much less ram as the sections can't be directly edited. Meaning you have to open a separate editor to edit them.

This is all good but Elementor still re-renders the section html in the backend every time a page editor loads. Taking a really long time even though it does not change without editing the section itself.

Propose a Solution

As sections can't be edited directly in the page editor why not cache the html when the section gets saved making the whole page editor load much faster?

What I'm proposing is that we render the section html when it gets saved and save it to the database as a post meta ( something like _elementor_rendered_html_cache ).

This way when a page loads instead of re-rendering the whole html we only load the html from the meta field saving lots of precious seconds on pages with tons of templates in them.

For instance I have a page editor that usually takes 30+ seconds to load meanwhile after implementing such cache strategy it only takes 1.2 seconds.

I'm open to discuss this further and even open a PR with a fix example if people think this makes sense.

If this can't be done because of backwards compatibility issues would it at least be possible to add hooks so 3rd party plugins could use them to implement the caching strategy on their side?

This could be achieved by adding a hook to the save section code and to the render template which would allow to pre-emptively return a rendered html.

Additional Context

How to simulate:

• Create heavy section templates (tabs are usually heavy to render. At least that's what I'm seeing on my end)
• Create a new page
• Add template widgets to that page selecting the sections you just created.
• Save the page
• Reload the editor
• Notice how long it takes load now

This proposal has nothing to do with front-end element cache it's meant to cache the section for editing purposes only.

Agreement

• I confirm I have read and followed all the guidelines and instructions outlined in the Feature Request form.
• I agree that my discussion may be closed without further action if it doesn't meet all the requirements outlined in the Feature Request form.