Elementor Evaluation: Is It The Very Best WordPress Page Builder? – Elementor Category Page Template
Trying to choose if Elementor is the best page Builder for your WordPress website? In this hands-on Elementor evaluation, we’ll assist you comprehend:
- How Elementor can benefit you
- Who must utilize Elementor
- The unique functions that assist Elementor stand out from the competitors
- Whether you ought to use the complimentary variation or open up your wallet for the premium version
Elementor Category Page Template
We have actually developed Astra, one of the most popular themes for Elementor, as well as a popular add-on for Elementor, so you can most likely guess that we’re fans of Elementor. Let’s get that out of the way – this is a positive Elementor review. Elementor Category Page Template.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
However understanding why we like Elementor and have constructed products in the Elementor environment is more important than just the truth that we like it – that’s what we’re going to try and communicate in this evaluation.
By the end of our Elementor evaluation, you ought to have whatever that you require to make an informed decision about whether or not Elementor is the best tool for your WordPress site.
Elementor Category Page Template
What Does Elementor Offer?
Elementor is a visual, drag-and-drop page Builder. If you’re not familiar with these terms, this means that you can:
- See a sneak peek of precisely what your page will look like to visitors as you’re constructing it.
- Drag and drop various content and design elements to create the best style.
Basically, it transforms developing a great-looking, custom-made website design from something you require to be a designer to do, to something that anyone can do. Elementor Category Page Template.
Elementor is now actively used by over 4 million WordPress sites, that makes it the most popular WordPress page Builder. It’s also kept an impressive 4.7-star rating (out of 5) on over 5,900 reviews, so the majority of those users are quite delighted with Elementor.
There are a great deal of WordPress page contractors that use a visual, drag-and-drop user interface, however, so what makes Elementor stick out and why is it so successful?
Well, we’ll enter this in more depth later on, but a few of Elementor’s standout features are:
- Lots of content aspects – these are the foundation of your page. They’re what you “drag-and-drop” to make your design.
- Responsive design – the majority of people search the web on smartphones, so it is essential that your styles look fantastic on all devices. Elementor’s designs are responsive by default and you get lots of choices to control how it works.
- Templates – staring at a blank page is frightening! Elementor comes with numerous professionally created design templates so that you do not need to go back to square one.
- Design choices – you get lots of detailed style choices to make your style pixel-perfect without resorting to customized CSS (though you can do that too).
- Benefit – you get great deals of handy tools like right-click support, a quick discover tool, and more to help you develop beautiful pages much faster.
- Theme Builder – with the Pro variation, you can create your whole WordPress theme utilizing Elementor (though we still suggest pairing it with a quality style).
- Dynamic material – you can include dynamic material from custom fields and plugins like ACF, Pods, and Toolset.
- Popup Builder – with the Pro variation, you can likewise design all types of popups utilizing the very same visual, drag-and-drop interface.
- WooCommerce Builder – if you’re developing an eCommerce store, you can design your WooCommerce shop using Elementor and include products in your other designs. Elementor Category Page Template.
Who Is Elementor For?
Elementor is for … well, almost anybody who’s using WordPress.
A digital online marketer may like Elementor for its capability to help them rapidly produce landing pages and popups, while a casual user might simply be looking for a way to add some extra style to their blog site posts.
Let’s look at some particular circumstances:
Elementor Category Page Template
The Casual User
If you’re just a casual user searching for a method to add some style to your post or construct a beautiful homepage, Elementor is ideal for you.
You’ll be able to utilize the visual interface to spin up some beautiful styles without requiring any technical knowledge … and you’ll most likely be able to do it free of charge! More on whether you should utilize the complimentary or paid version later. Elementor Category Page Template.
The Digital Marketer
Elementor is excellent for digital marketers and teams due to the fact that it includes tons of marketing aspects.
For instance, the Form widget in Elementor Pro lets you produce all types of lead kinds and link them to popular email marketing services. It also has a Zapier integration, which lets you link to your CRM.
You can likewise use the Popup Builder to develop opt-in popups and target them anywhere on your site. And if you’re offering service or products, you can utilize WooCommerce Builder to create your sales pages.
The core Elementor plugin itself is also an exceptional service for structure WordPress landing pages.
The Site Builder
If you’re constructing websites for customers, Elementor is an ideal (and popular) choice.
You can integrate Elementor with a versatile style like Astra to construct 100% custom-made customer websites without any code needed. You can also use Theme Builder when needed, like creating the design template for a customized post type and incorporating dynamic information from ACF, Pods, or Toolset.
Elementor Category Page Template
Elementor Rates
Short answer: It’s Free.
The base version of Elementor that is available in the WordPress Plugin repository is completely totally free to use. There is likewise a professional variation with a lot more versatility and a lot more functions.
Check out our post on Elementor Vs. Elementor Pro if you want to get a detailed evaluation of both.
Elementor is a feature-packed plugin that works for all websites. It is restricted at specific points.
With Elementor Pro you can tailor your header, footer, posts page, single posts page, or product pages. Elementor Category Page Template.
The Elementor base variation provides the bare minimum you require to develop and tailor your site. But if you wish to have the liberty of upgrading the whole website, Elementor Pro is the best choice.
With Elementor Pro you can likewise include pop-ups, contact kinds, membership types, global widgets, and customized CSS.
Here is a list of extra functions that you get in Elementor Pro:
- 50+ additional widgets
- 300+ premium demonstration imports consisting of imports for header, footer, and pop-ups
- Complete site modification through Theme Builder. This lets you change the header, footer, and posts pages
- WooCommerce Builder for modifying product and classification pages in eCommerce websites
- Popup Builder with sophisticated features like, exit intent, after scroll, and controls to display particular pop-ups on certain pages
- Visual Kind Builder that can be incorporated with popular e-mail marketing tools
- You can develop international widgets and utilize them site-wide
- Include custom-made CSS
- Deploy any Elementor widget pretty much anywhere you want
Elementor Pro Rates
Elementor Pro has a 5 tier pricing plan based upon the number of licenses you desire.
If you are working with a single website then the Necessary Plan would be best for you. If you are working on numerous websites, the Advanced plan or above strategies would be better.
All the plans come with an annual membership.
How Elementor Works: Exploring the User interface
Let’s see how Elementor works with this useful section.
Much like any other plugin, you need to set up and activate Elementor through the WordPress repository.
Next, you can either pick to tailor Elementor settings or dive directly into designing.
If you are just starting out, we advise utilizing the default settings just. Head over to pages and open one of the pages that you wish to modify.
Click Edit With Elementor to start editing.
For the sake of this presentation, we set up the Astra style and imported among its demo sites constructed with Elementor. Elementor Category Page Template.
Now, let’s go through the Elementor control panel using that demo site.
Here’s what the Elementor dashboard appears like.
Here’s the label of various parts numbered.
- The working area or the primary canvas. This is where you edit and redesign your website
- Elementor widgets area
- Elementor settings
- Open Elementor widgets
- International settings
- Revision history
- Change view (desktop, tablet, mobile).
- Sneak peek modifications.
- Release.
Elementor Structure Hierarchy
If you are completely brand-new to developing sites, you require to understand the structure of the Elementor page Builder.
Every page built with Elementor consists of areas and columns.
Section. An area is basically a row. You can include a background, alter its sizing, and more. Columns and widgets go inside areas.
Column. A column divides a section into different columns. You can then control each column individually. Elementor Category Page Template.
A page can have any number of areas in it. Areas contain columns and columns consist of the Elementor widgets.
Here is an illustration revealing what the structure in Elementor looks like.
Elementor Category Page Template
How to Style a Page in Elementor from Scratch
When creating a web page, you can either begin with a blank screen or import a pre-existing design template. In this area, we will cover how you can produce a page from scratch utilizing Elementor. Elementor Category Page Template.
Here’s how you do it:
Step 1: Open a blank page and click “Edit With Elementor”.
Step 2: Click the “+” button to include a brand-new area.
Step 3: Pick a section with a single column or numerous ones depending on your needs.
Step 4: Drag widgets from the Elementor panel into the columns that you wish to.
When you enjoy with the placement, you can change the finer information in the Content, Style, and Advanced Sections.
You can experiment with the choices when learning to discover the best designs for you.
How to Style a Pre-Existing Page in Elementor
Often you might require to edit a pre-existing page with Elementor. The procedure is not extremely various in this case either. It is much simpler to modify an existing Elementor page than beginning from scratch.
Here’s how you do it.
To add a new widget, drag it from the sidebar on the left.
To rearrange a widget on the visual preview, you can also utilize drag and drop. If you want to edit text, simply click and type on the visual preview:
To develop the designs for your widgets, use areas and columns.
To customize a widget, click on it. That will open the widget’s settings in the sidebar, which are divided into three tabs:
Utilize a comparable technique to tailor sections and columns:
As you alter a component’s settings, you’ll instantly see those changes reflected on the visual preview.
8 Awesome Functions That Help Elementor Stick Out
Next, let’s go through some of the things that help Elementor stand out from other visual, drag-and-drop page home builders.
1. Practical Modifying Features for Faster Design
Elementor comes with some practical editing features that help you construct styles quicker.
For instance, Elementor includes right-click assistance, which most other page contractors do not provide.
You can right-click on any aspect to duplicate it, copy and paste styles, and more:
It also comes with a helpful Navigator view that gives you an ordered list of all the material on your page, separated by areas and columns. You can use this to rapidly open the settings for any component on your page. You can likewise relabel components to make them much easier to discover: Elementor Category Page Template.
And to assist you rapidly browse between your styles, it likewise includes a Finder tool that lets you leap to anything that you’ve constructed with Elementor by looking for it by name:
2. Substantial Widget Selection for Design Versatility
Across the core plugin and add-ons, Elementor has an absolutely huge selection of widgets, which provides you a ton of versatility when constructing your styles.
It’s not practically the 60+ widgets that feature Elementor and Elementor Pro, however, there’s likewise a big choice of widgets from third-party developers.
Ultimate Addons for Elementor includes another 36+ new widgets that you can utilize in your styles, covering everything from form stylers to hotspots, content toggles, videos, and more.
With a lot of choices, you can often discover a widget that does exactly what you desire it to.
3. Detailed Design and Positioning Guidelines for Pixel-Perfect Designs
Another area where Elementor vanquishes a lot of the competitors is its style alternatives.
Elementor lets you do all the essentials – you can switch up colors, typefaces, spacing, and so on.
It likewise adds innovative alternatives like:
Shape dividers
Custom-made positioning
Animations, consisting of parallax scrolling, mouse tracking, 3D tilt, and more
Custom CSS for individual widgets
In other words, Elementor gives you more choices to develop a special, efficient design.
4. Substantial Design Template Selection to Save You Time
If you don’t want to construct your styles from scratch, Elementor includes a big choice of templates, divided into two categories:
Pages – full-page templates. All you do is personalize them to fulfill your needs. Elementor Category Page Template.
Blocks – templates for particular parts of a page, like a FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION. You can mix-and-match them like legos to construct total styles.
As with widgets, you can likewise discover templates from third-party sources.
If you utilize the Astra WordPress theme, it features loads of pre-made starter templates constructed with Elementor. Each starter website consists of several Elementor templates that you can customize as required.
5. Versatile Form Widget and Combinations
Above, I discussed Elementor’s widget choice in general. I think it’s worth singling out a particular widget:
The Type widget.
The Kind widget lets you develop customized forms, total with as lots of fields as required. Where this widget gets actually powerful, specifically when it comes to marketing applications, is its built-in combinations.
You can hook it approximately popular email marketing services like ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Mailchimp, and more. There’s likewise a Webhook alternative that lets you link to Zapier (and the thousands of apps offered there), in addition to chat integrations for Slack and Discord.
6. Theme Builder With Dynamic Content for Custom WordPress Sites
With Elementor Pro, you gain the capability to surpass posts and pages and create your whole WordPress theme with Elementor. That is, you can build:
Headers
Footers
Single design templates
Archive templates
For instance, you could produce a custom-made post type and after that use Elementor to create the template for that post type, rather than tampering theme template files straight.
The really powerful thing here is that you have the ability to generate vibrant content from custom fields that you produce with plugins like ACF, Toolset, and Pods.
With this vibrant feature, you can construct really custom-made sites and harness WordPress’ power as a versatile material management system. Elementor Category Page Template.
Simply one note – while this is definitely an effective function, there are still some reasons why you might wish to pick a flexible Elementor style like Astra even if you choose to use Elementor Style Builder.
7. WooCommerce Builder for Custom-made eCommerce Designs
If you’re producing an eCommerce shop, you can likewise apply Elementor Style Builder to your shop content with dedicated WooCommerce Builder widgets.
You’ll be able to develop both your single product pages and shop pages.
To help you construct your designs, you’ll get a variety of dedicated WooCommerce widgets for everything from item images to upsells.
In one of our posts, we talked about how to develop an eCommerce website with Elementor.
8. Popup Builder for Marketing, Use, and More
Elementor Pro can do more than simply posts, pages, and style design – you can likewise use it to construct popups with Elementor Popup Builder.
With Popup Builder, you get access to the exact same familiar Elementor interface and all of the widgets.
This opens a lot of possibilities:
For instance, you could utilize the Form widget to create email opt-in popups and connect them directly to your email marketing service of choice.
Or, you could utilize the Login widget to develop a popup login type for your website. Elementor Category Page Template.
When you publish a popup, you’ll get a variety of targeting and trigger rules to control exactly where and when your popup appears:
Elementor Category Page Template
Should You Utilize Elementor Free vs Pro?
If you’ve made it this far, there’s a good chance that you believe Elementor is right for your needs.
That causes the next concern – can you utilize the free variation at WordPress.org or should you acquire Elementor Pro?
This is an essential choice, so we actually wrote an entire post on how to choose in between Elementor complimentary vs Pro.
In general, if you just wish to design some posts/pages or basic landing pages, you can probably get by with the totally free version.
With that being stated, there’s a lot of value in Elementor Pro. It adds:
- 30+ brand-new widgets, including the Type widget. The Form widget is particularly effective for marketing pages.
- Style Builder. This lets you create your entire theme and WooCommerce shop utilizing Elementor.
- Popup Builder. This lets you build popups using Elementor.
- More design templates. While the complimentary version includes some design templates, you require Pro for full gain access to.
- More style options. You get access to custom-made positioning.
Nevertheless, buying Elementor Pro is not the only way to extend Elementor.
For instance, if you want more flexibility to personalize your theme, you don’t require to acquire Elementor Pro. Instead, you might utilize a versatile style like Astra. Through its lots of Customizer settings, you can adapt Astra to practically any use, and it’s a lot easier than trying to design your own style from scratch. Elementor Category Page Template.
You can build your header and footer using Astra. Because Astra is developed to match with Elementor, you can still utilize Elementor to design the material that goes “between” your header, footer, and other style components.
Astra likewise consists of lots of pre-built site templates constructed with Elementor. You can import an already-finished site utilizing Astra and then simply fine-tune it to match your requirements utilizing Elementor.
Or, if you want to include brand-new widgets for style flexibility, you could acquire an extension like Ultimate Addons for Elementor, which adds 36+ brand-new Elementor widgets.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
Does Elementor Decrease Your Website?
Now, this has been a concern that is recently gaining popularity. And rightfully so.
Elementor is a plugin that can be beneficial for including beautiful widgets and designs to your website. Its versatile and user friendly functions have actually invited a number of addon plugins that let you create extraordinary sites without needing to code.
However, if you use a lot of plugins or have a lot of animations then it may make your entire site sluggish.
So the concern occurs if Elementor slows your website down even with no of these addons. Elementor Category Page Template.
To discover, we compare two of our starter template sites. Among them was developed with Gutenberg and the other with Elementor. Gutenberg is the default editor for WordPress and should have greater speeds in general, but by what degree?
Let’s learn.
Here are the sites for you to take a look at.
- Gutenberg site from Starter Templates
- Elementor website from Starter Templates
We hosted both sites on the very same server and under various directory sites of the very same domain and compared their efficiency in GT Metrix.
Here are the outcomes.
As you can see, the performance of the Gutenberg website is much faster than the Elementor site.
In regards to exact loading time, the website made with Elementor took about 5.5 s to load totally while the website made with Gutenberg took 2.2 s.
If you are optimizing for SEO, you know how big of a distinction that is!
The same site constructed with Beaver Builder likewise carries out a little much better than the Elementor site.
Nevertheless, in regards to totally packed time, it takes a second longer than the Elementor site to load.
Elementor Alternatives
Although Elementor is a terrific tool, it does not mean that it is the best tool for you all the time.
For example, if you are building a concentrated landing page with the Elementor base variation, you may not be able to do it straight without incorporating another contact form plugin or a payment entrance. Elementor Category Page Template.
In such a case you will need to update to Elementor Pro.
For the SEOs out there, you may want to think about a lighter plugin that loads quicker without causing any delays in page loading.
With all these and numerous other factors in mind, we have created this list of Elementor options that can help you out.
Elementor Category Page Template
Gutenberg
Gutenberg is one of the most lightweight and fast site home builders due to the fact that it is WordPress default editor. Gutenburg makes it much easier than ever to produce web pages with ease.
The blocks include everything you might expect, consisting of headings and subheadings in addition to lists of items like images or videos within the content area on each specific website page – all from one easy user interface!
Constructing a website in Gutenberg resembles constructing a home utilizing Lego blocks. You organize the blocks in the best order to come up with a stunning site. Elementor Category Page Template.
In terms of performance. Gutenberg works way better than any other page Builder. It is enhanced for WordPress users and provides what it guarantees. However, it likewise lacks the different design components that Elementor brings to the table.
If you are somebody who prefers performance over style, then Gutenberg is the best choice for you.
Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder is not as flashy or feature-rich compared to Elementor (Elementor Vs Beaver Builder contrast). It does supply a stable and constant experience with its core plugin that just builds individual pieces of material. There is the Beaver Builder Style readily available if you want one too! Elementor Category Page Template.
Beaver Builder is a total page style plan that offers you with all the tools and elements to construct any kind of site. It has components such as headings, buttons, maps, sliders, contact forms, reviews, and more all in one place.
It stands head to head in regards to style and performance with Elementor. Beaver Builder does not have as numerous addons developed for itself as Elementor does.
SeedProd
SeedProd is a premium drag-and-drop landing page Builder plugin for WordPress. It has been designed to be as fast, easy-to-use with website speed in mind.
SeedProd’s smart style system makes reusing blocks of material quick and easy by defining color design which will conserve time when developing brand-new layouts. Elementor Category Page Template.
It has all the blocks and features you ‘d anticipate from an effective page Builder such as opt-in types, social profiles, countdown timers. It likewise includes contact pages with an option to easily reroute visitors on any website map or Google Maps noting for their company area!
You can use SeedProd’s customized domain mapping function which will conserve time when handling multiple client landing pages in WordPress while still preserving branding connection throughout platforms.
Any Lingering Questions?
As you can see, we believe that Elementor is one of the very best WordPress page contractors out there, which is why we’ve use Astra, one of the most popular themes for Elementor, and Ultimate Addons for Elementor, among the most popular Elementor widget collections.
We’re likewise not alone in our positive Elementor evaluation – over four million WordPress sites use Elementor and Elementor has an amazing 4.7-star score on over 5,900 reviews.
If you want to experience what Elementor can offer free of charge:
Set up the totally free Astra theme to develop a flexible base for your Elementor designs.
Install the complimentary Elementor plugin from WordPress.org and begin building. Elementor Category Page Template.
If you like what you see, think about whether Elementor Pro is best for your needs.
Is there anything we missed in our Elementor review that would help you make your decision? Leave a comment and we’ll attempt to help you decide.