Milos

Hi there,

Thanks for the screenshots and the clear explanation. That helped a lot.

From what you’re describing, this isn’t a gallery bug itself but a CSS loading issue. When Elementor’s generated CSS doesn’t load correctly, galleries fall back to a basic layout, which is why you’re seeing one column, no spacing, and missing captions. The fact that clearing the Elementor cache fixes it temporarily is the biggest indicator.

What’s likely happening is that Elementor’s CSS files are being regenerated or overridden after some time. Clearing the host cache doesn’t help because the problem isn’t cached HTML, it’s the CSS files Elementor creates and relies on.

The first thing I’d suggest is going to Elementor, then Tools, then General, and clicking “Regenerate Files & Data,” followed by “Sync Library.” After that, go to Elementor, then Settings, then Advanced, switch the CSS Print Method to “Internal,” save, and clear the Elementor cache once more. This often stabilizes layouts when external CSS files aren’t being served consistently.

Since you’re using OceanWP, it’s also important to check whether any performance or optimization settings are enabled in the theme. CSS minification or file combination can interfere with Elementor’s generated styles. If those options are on, try disabling them and see if the galleries stay stable over the next day.

Another thing worth checking is file permissions on the server. Elementor needs to be able to reliably write to the uploads slash elementor slash css folder. If permissions are too restrictive, the CSS gets regenerated repeatedly and layouts break again after some time.

The reason this keeps coming back after about 24 hours is usually because something is clearing or overriding Elementor’s CSS automatically, or Elementor isn’t able to recreate those files properly.

If the issue continues after trying the steps above, pleae contact your host to provide to check this from their side.

Best regards,

Hi there,

Thank you for contacting us.

Before any recommendation is offered, I’d like to highlight that Elementor is already optimized for speed. However, from a technical standpoint, there will inevitably be a small impact on performance. This happens with any page builder that you use. There are quite a number of steps to optimize your website for speed, but there aren’t as many to optimize it for loading and how the content is served initially by the server and the website until it is fully loaded. Since this has been a bit of a widely asked question, and the answer cannot be exact due to too many aspects affecting it (Elementor is just one plugin on an entire WordPress platform), our team has come up with a checklist of sorts with some good steps to take to ensure your website performs as best as possible. You may have a run through it and see if it helps.

Guides:

-https://elementor.com/help/speed-up-a-slow-site/

-https://elementor.com/blog/speed-up-wordpress-website/

-https://elementor.com/blog/wp-rocket/

Solutions to effectively increase site performance based on other users’ experiences:

-https://www.facebook.com/groups/wordpressspeedup/

From the technical agent perspective, I would be more than happy to help, but unfortunately, since Elementor is a site builder, we do not yet have the tools to do so. Elementor is not a plugin that serves content, the server, the optimization plugins/modules, and the website do that, and we cannot affect how that is done from our side. Also, the website loading speed and optimization terms are extremely wide, and we cannot give exact advices or endpoints on how this should be improved as it all depends on too many aspects.

Best regards,

Hi there,

Could you please share the email address you used to contact us at support@elementor.com so we can contact you?

Please note that WordPress.org rules state that commercial products are not supported here.

Thank you for your understanding

Hi,

Since you are an Elementor Pro user, you can open a support ticket at my.elementor.com ref: https://elementor.com/help/how-to-submit-a-support-ticket/ I’d also suggest you check out Elementor Community Group on Facebook.

We have created it to connect Elementor users together and share knowledge, Global Elementor Community.

WordPress.org rules state that commercial products are not supported here.

Hi there,

Thanks for contacting us and hope you are doing well and having a great day.

To rule out the possibility of a plugin or theme conflict, please deactivate all your plugins from your server side (besides Elementor).

If it solves the issue reactivate them one by one to find the culprit. If it didn’t help, switch your theme also from the server side (temporarily) to a default WP theme such as Twenty Nineteen and see if it makes any difference.

Kind regards,

Hi there,

Thanks for contacting us and hope you are doing well and having a great day.

To rule out the possibility of a plugin or theme conflict, please deactivate all your plugins (besides Elementor ). If it solves the issue reactivate them one by one to find the culprit.

Also, this could happen due to our Elementor performance experiments you can try to deactivate them. To deactivate them you can go to Elementor > settings > features

Performance features currently in the experimental stage are:

• Element Caching – Elements caching reduces loading times by serving up a copy of an element instead of rendering it fresh every time the page is loaded. When active, Elementor will determine which elements can benefit from static loading – but you can override this.
• Inline Font Icons – This experiment renders icons as SVGs without loading the Font-Awesome and eicons libraries. Since SVGs are vector-based images which are rendered using the browser’s engine, they do not increase server requests which improves performance

I am looking forward to hearing back from you soon.

Kind regards,

Hi there,

Glad to hear that it’s all working properly for you

If you run into any other issues, don’t hesitate to open a new topic.

Our team will be more than happy to help.

Best regards

Hi,

Elementor disabled WordPress template buffering for WP 6.9+ in v3.33.3 as a deliberate compatibility and stability measure.

WordPress 6.9 introduced internal template buffering via wp_should_output_buffer_template_for_enhancement() as part of ongoing rendering enhancements (primarily aimed at block/FSE workflows). Elementor already manages its own rendering and output flow, and allowing WordPress core buffering in parallel could result in:

• double buffering and unexpected markup output
• rendering order conflicts (headers, footers, dynamic tags)
• increased memory usage and potential performance regressions

To avoid these risks and ensure consistent rendering across WP versions, Elementor opts out of core template buffering in this context.

Re-enabling buffering conditionally may work in specific cases, but it carries a risk of side effects, especially around template hierarchy, hook execution order, and dynamic content rendering. Any workaround should therefore be carefully scoped and thoroughly tested.

For a deeper, more implementation-level explanation, we also recommend checking with our developers on GitHub, as they can go further into the technical reasoning and internal considerations behind this change.

Best regards,