Elementor Evaluation: Is It The Very Best WordPress Page Builder? – Elementor WordPress Documentation
Trying to choose if Elementor is the best page Builder for your WordPress site? In this hands-on Elementor evaluation, we’ll help you understand:
- How Elementor can benefit you
- Who must utilize Elementor
- The distinct features that assist Elementor stand out from the competitors
- Whether you must utilize the totally free variation or open up your wallet for the premium variation
Elementor WordPress Documentation
We have actually developed Astra, among the most popular styles for Elementor, along with 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 WordPress Documentation.
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However understanding why we like Elementor and have actually built products in the Elementor ecosystem is more important than simply the truth that we like it – that’s what we’re going to attempt and communicate in this evaluation.
By the end of our Elementor evaluation, you must have everything that you need to make an educated choice about whether or not Elementor is the best tool for your WordPress website.
Elementor WordPress Documentation
What Does Elementor Offer?
Elementor is a visual, drag-and-drop page Builder. If you’re not knowledgeable about these terms, this implies that you can:
- See a sneak peek of exactly what your page will look like to visitors as you’re constructing it.
- Drag and drop different content and style components to create the ideal design.
Essentially, it transforms creating a great-looking, custom web design from something you need to be a developer to do, to something that anyone can do. Elementor WordPress Documentation.
Elementor is now actively utilized by over four million WordPress websites, which 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 pretty pleased with Elementor.
There are a great deal of WordPress page contractors that offer a visual, drag-and-drop interface, though, so what makes Elementor stick out and why is it so successful?
Well, we’ll enter into this in more depth in the future, but some of Elementor’s standout features are:
- Great deals of content elements – these are the building blocks of your page. They’re what you “drag-and-drop” to make your style.
- Responsive design – the majority of people browse the web on mobile phones, so it is very important that your styles look great on all gadgets. Elementor’s styles are responsive by default and you get great deals of options to manage how it works.
- Design templates – staring at a blank page is scary! Elementor includes numerous professionally created templates so that you don’t have to go back to square one.
- Style choices – you get tons of detailed design choices to make your style pixel-perfect without resorting to custom CSS (though you can do that too).
- Benefit – you get lots of handy tools like right-click support, a quick find tool, and more to assist you construct beautiful pages faster.
- Style Builder – with the Pro variation, you can design your whole WordPress style utilizing Elementor (though we still suggest matching it with a quality theme).
- Dynamic material – you can consist of vibrant content from custom fields and plugins like ACF, Pods, and Toolset.
- Popup Builder – with the Pro variation, you can likewise develop all kinds of popups using the very same visual, drag-and-drop interface.
- WooCommerce Builder – if you’re developing an eCommerce store, you can design your WooCommerce store utilizing Elementor and include items in your other styles. Elementor WordPress Documentation.
Who Is Elementor For?
Elementor is for … well, practically anyone who’s using WordPress.
For example, a digital online marketer might like Elementor for its ability to help them rapidly develop landing pages and popups, while a casual user might simply be searching for a way to include some additional flair to their blog posts.
Let’s look at some particular circumstances:
Elementor WordPress Documentation
The Casual User
If you’re simply a casual user looking for a way to include some style to your blog posts or develop a beautiful homepage, Elementor is best for you.
You’ll be able to use the visual interface to spin up some beautiful styles without requiring any technical knowledge … and you’ll probably be able to do it free of charge! More on whether you need to use the free or paid variation in the future. Elementor WordPress Documentation.
The Digital Marketer
Elementor is fantastic for digital marketers and groups since it includes lots of marketing elements.
For example, the Type widget in Elementor Pro lets you produce all kinds of lead types and link them to popular email marketing services. It likewise has a Zapier integration, which lets you connect to your CRM, also.
You can likewise utilize the Popup Builder to develop opt-in popups and target them anywhere on your site. And if you’re selling products or services, you can use WooCommerce Builder to design your sales pages.
The core Elementor plugin itself is likewise an outstanding service for structure WordPress landing pages.
The Website Builder
If you’re building websites for clients, Elementor is a best (and popular) choice.
You can combine Elementor with a flexible style like Astra to develop 100% custom-made client websites without any code required. You can also use Style Builder when needed, like developing the template for a custom-made post type and integrating dynamic information from ACF, Pods, or Toolset.
Elementor WordPress Documentation
Elementor Pricing
Short answer: It’s Free.
The base version of Elementor that is readily available in the WordPress Plugin repository is entirely totally free to utilize. There is likewise a professional variation with a lot more flexibility and a lot more functions.
Have a look at our article on Elementor Vs. Elementor Pro if you want to get a comprehensive review of both.
Elementor is a feature-packed plugin that works for all sites. However, it is restricted at specific points.
For instance, with Elementor Pro you can personalize your header, footer, posts page, single posts page, or product pages. Elementor WordPress Documentation.
The Elementor base version provides the bare minimum you need to create and tailor your site. However if you wish to have the flexibility of revamping the whole site, Elementor Pro is the very best choice.
With Elementor Pro you can also include pop-ups, contact forms, subscription types, international widgets, and custom CSS.
Here is a list of additional features that you get in Elementor Pro:
- 50+ additional widgets
- 300+ premium demo imports consisting of imports for header, footer, and pop-ups
- Total site personalization through Style Builder. This lets you alter the header, footer, and posts pages
- WooCommerce Builder for modifying product and category pages in eCommerce websites
- Popup Builder with sophisticated features like, exit intent, after scroll, and controls to show particular pop-ups on particular pages
- Visual Type Builder that can be incorporated with popular e-mail marketing tools
- You can produce international widgets and utilize them site-wide
- Add customized CSS
- Deploy any Elementor widget basically anywhere you desire
Elementor Pro Pricing
Elementor Pro has a 5 tier pricing plan based on the number of licenses you want.
If you are working with a single site then the Vital Plan would be best for you. If you are working on several sites, the Advanced strategy or above plans would be more suitable.
All the strategies include a yearly subscription.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
How Elementor Works: Visiting the User interface
Let’s see how Elementor works with this useful section.
Just like any other plugin, you have to install and activate Elementor through the WordPress repository.
Next, you can either select to personalize Elementor settings or dive directly into designing.
If you are just beginning, we advise using the default settings only. Head over to pages and open one of the pages that you want to modify.
Click Edit With Elementor to start modifying.
For the sake of this presentation, we set up the Astra theme and imported among its demonstration websites developed with Elementor. Elementor WordPress Documentation.
Now, let’s go through the Elementor dashboard using that demo site.
Here’s what the Elementor dashboard looks like.
Here’s the label of different parts numbered.
- The working area or the main canvas. This is where you edit and upgrade your site
- Elementor widgets area
- Elementor settings
- Open Elementor widgets
- Worldwide settings
- Revision history
- Change view (desktop, tablet, mobile).
- Preview changes.
- Release.
Elementor Structure Hierarchy
If you are entirely brand-new to developing websites, you need to understand the structure of the Elementor page Builder.
Every page constructed with Elementor includes areas and columns.
Area. An area is essentially a row. You can include a background, alter its sizing, and more. Columns and widgets go inside sections.
Column. A column divides an area into different columns. You can then manage each column separately. Elementor WordPress Documentation.
A page can have any variety of areas in it. Areas contain columns and columns consist of the Elementor widgets.
Here is an illustration showing what the structure in Elementor appears like.
Elementor WordPress Documentation
How to Design a Page in Elementor from Scratch
When creating a web page, you can either start with a blank screen or import a pre-existing design template. In this section, we will cover how you can produce a page from scratch utilizing Elementor. Elementor WordPress Documentation.
Here’s how you do it:
Action 1: Open a blank page and click “Edit With Elementor”.
Step 2: Click on the “+” button to add a brand-new area.
Action 3: Select a section with a single column or several ones depending upon 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 details in the Content, Design, and Advanced Sections.
You can experiment with the choices when finding out to find the right designs for you.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
How to Design a Pre-Existing Page in Elementor
In some cases you might require to edit a pre-existing page with Elementor. The process is not really various in this case either. In fact, it is a lot easier to modify an existing Elementor page than going back to square one.
Here’s how you do it.
To include a new widget, drag it from the sidebar left wing.
To rearrange a widget on the visual sneak peek, you can also use drag and drop. If you want to edit text, just click and type on the visual preview:
To develop the layouts for your widgets, utilize areas and columns.
To tailor a widget, click it. That will open the widget’s settings in the sidebar, which are divided into 3 tabs:
Utilize a similar technique to customize sections and columns:
As you change a component’s settings, you’ll quickly see those modifications reviewed the visual preview.
Eight Remarkable Functions That Assist Elementor Stand Apart
Next, let’s go through a few of the things that help Elementor stand apart from other visual, drag-and-drop page builders.
1. Convenient Editing Functions for Faster Design
Elementor comes with some convenient editing functions that assist you construct designs more quickly.
Elementor comes with right-click support, which most other page contractors don’t provide.
You can right-click on any aspect to duplicate it, copy and paste styles, and more:
It also features a helpful Navigator view that provides you a purchased list of all the content on your page, separated by sections and columns. You can use this to quickly open the settings for any aspect on your page. You can also relabel elements to make them easier to find: Elementor WordPress Documentation.
And to help you rapidly navigate in between your designs, it also includes a Finder tool that lets you leap to anything that you have actually built with Elementor by looking for it by name:
2. Big Widget Selection for Style Flexibility
Throughout the core plugin and add-ons, Elementor has a definitely enormous choice of widgets, which provides you a lots of flexibility when developing your styles.
It’s not just about the 60+ widgets that include Elementor and Elementor Pro, however, there’s also a substantial choice of widgets from third-party designers.
For example, Ultimate Addons for Elementor includes another 36+ new widgets that you can utilize in your styles, covering whatever from type stylers to hotspots, content toggles, videos, and more.
With so many options, you can usually find a widget that does precisely what you want it to.
3. Comprehensive Design and Positioning Guidelines for Pixel-Perfect Designs
Another area where Elementor vanquishes a great deal of the competitors is its style options.
Elementor lets you do all the essentials – you can switch up colors, font styles, spacing, and so on.
It also includes innovative options like:
Forming dividers
Custom positioning
Animations, including parallax scrolling, mouse tracking, 3D tilt, and more
Custom CSS for private widgets
Simply put, Elementor gives you more alternatives to create a special, efficient style.
4. Big Design Template Selection to Save You Time
If you do not want to construct your designs from scratch, Elementor features a big choice of templates, divided into 2 categories:
Pages – full-page design templates. All you do is customize them to meet your needs. Elementor WordPress Documentation.
Blocks – design templates for specific parts of a page, like a FAQ. You can mix-and-match them like legos to build total styles.
Just like widgets, you can also discover design templates from third-party sources.
If you utilize the Astra WordPress style, it features heaps of pre-made starter design templates developed with Elementor. Each starter website consists of several Elementor design templates that you can personalize as required.
5. Flexible Type Widget and Integrations
Above, I mentioned Elementor’s widget choice in general. I believe it’s worth singling out a particular widget:
The Kind widget.
The Kind widget lets you produce customized kinds, complete with as lots of fields as needed. Where this widget gets actually powerful, specifically when it comes to marketing implementations, is its built-in combinations.
You can hook it up to popular email marketing services like ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Mailchimp, and more. There’s also a Webhook alternative that lets you connect to Zapier (and the countless apps readily available there), as well as chat integrations for Slack and Discord.
6. Theme Builder With Dynamic Content for Custom-made WordPress Sites
With Elementor Pro, you get the ability to go beyond posts and pages and create your entire WordPress style with Elementor. That is, you can construct:
Headers
Footers
Single design templates
Archive design templates
For example, you could produce a custom post type and then use Elementor to design the template for that post type, instead of messing around with theme template files straight.
The actually powerful thing here is that you have the capability to bring in vibrant content from customized fields that you develop with plugins like ACF, Toolset, and Pods.
With this vibrant function, you can build truly customized websites and harness WordPress’ power as a flexible material management system. Elementor WordPress Documentation.
Simply one note – while this is definitely an effective feature, there are still some reasons you may wish to choose a versatile Elementor theme like Astra even if you choose to use Elementor Style Builder.
7. WooCommerce Builder for Custom-made eCommerce Styles
If you’re developing an eCommerce shop, you can also use Elementor Theme Builder to your shop content with devoted WooCommerce Builder widgets.
You’ll be able to create both your single product pages and shop pages.
To assist you develop your designs, you’ll get a selection of dedicated WooCommerce widgets for everything from product images to upsells.
In one of our articles, we talked about how to produce an eCommerce website with Elementor.
8. Popup Builder for Marketing, Usability, and More
Elementor Pro can do more than just posts, pages, and style design – you can likewise use it to build popups with Elementor Popup Builder.
With Popup Builder, you get access to the exact same familiar Elementor user interface and all of the widgets.
This opens a great deal of possibilities:
You might utilize the Type widget to produce e-mail opt-in popups and link them directly to your email marketing service of choice.
Or, you might utilize the Login widget to produce a popup login form for your website. Elementor WordPress Documentation.
When you publish a popup, you’ll get a selection of targeting and activate guidelines to control precisely where and when your popup appears:
Elementor WordPress Documentation
Should You Use Elementor Free vs Pro?
If you’ve made it this far, there’s a great chance that you believe Elementor is right for your needs.
That results in the next concern – can you utilize the totally free version at WordPress.org or should you acquire Elementor Pro?
This is a crucial choice, so we actually composed an entire post on how to pick in between Elementor complimentary vs Pro.
In general, if you simply wish to develop some posts/pages or fundamental landing pages, you can most likely manage with the totally free version.
With that being said, there’s a lot of value in Elementor Pro. It adds:
- 30+ new widgets, including the Type widget. The Kind widget is particularly powerful for marketing pages.
- Style Builder. This lets you create your entire style and WooCommerce store utilizing Elementor.
- Popup Builder. This lets you build popups using Elementor.
- More templates. While the totally free version includes some design templates, you need Pro for complete access.
- More design choices. For example, you get access to customized positioning.
Buying Elementor Pro is not the only way to extend Elementor.
For example, if you desire more flexibility to tailor your theme, you don’t need to buy Elementor Pro. Instead, you might use a flexible style like Astra. Through its many Customizer settings, you can adapt Astra to practically any use, and it’s a lot simpler than trying to develop your own style from scratch. Elementor WordPress Documentation.
You can construct your header and footer using Astra. Due to the fact that Astra is built to pair with Elementor, you can still use Elementor to develop the content that goes “in between” your header, footer, and other theme aspects.
Astra likewise consists of tons of pre-built website design templates constructed with Elementor. So you can import an already-finished site using Astra and after that just tweak it to match your needs using Elementor.
Or, if you wish to add brand-new widgets for design flexibility, you might acquire an extension like Ultimate Addons for Elementor, which adds 36+ new Elementor widgets.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
Does Elementor Slow Down Your Site?
Now, this has actually been a question that is just recently gaining appeal. And rightfully so.
Elementor is a plugin that can be helpful for including beautiful widgets and styles to your website. Its flexible and user friendly features have actually welcomed a variety of addon plugins that let you develop unbelievable sites without having to code.
If you use too many plugins or have too numerous animations then it might make your entire site slow.
The question emerges if Elementor slows your site down even without any of these addons. Elementor WordPress Documentation.
To find out, we compare 2 of our starter design template websites. Among them was constructed 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 discover.
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 same server and under various directory sites of the exact same domain name and compared their performance in GT Metrix.
Here are the results.
As you can see, the performance of the Gutenberg website is much faster than the Elementor website.
In terms of exact loading time, the site made with Elementor took about 5.5 s to load totally while the site made with Gutenberg took 2.2 s.
If you are optimizing for SEO, you know how big of a distinction that is!
The same website constructed with Beaver Builder likewise carries out somewhat better than the Elementor website.
Nevertheless, in regards to fully loaded time, it takes a 2nd longer than the Elementor site to load.
Elementor Alternatives
Although Elementor is a great tool, it does not suggest that it is the ideal tool for you all the time.
For example, if you are building a concentrated landing page with the Elementor base variation, you may not have the ability to do it straight without incorporating another contact type plugin or a payment gateway. Elementor WordPress Documentation.
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 much faster without causing any hold-ups in page loading.
With all these and lots of other factors in mind, we have produced this list of Elementor options that can assist you out.
Elementor WordPress Documentation
Gutenberg
Gutenberg is one of the most light-weight and fast website contractors since it is WordPress default editor. Gutenburg makes it simpler than ever to produce websites with ease.
The blocks include whatever you might expect, including headings and subheadings as well as lists of items like images or videos within the content area on each individual site page – all from one simple user interface!
Constructing a website in Gutenberg is like constructing a house using Lego blocks. You organize the blocks in the ideal order to come up with a lovely website. Elementor WordPress Documentation.
In terms of performance. Gutenberg works way better than any other page Builder. It is enhanced for WordPress users and delivers what it assures. However, it likewise does not have the various design aspects that Elementor brings to the table.
If you are somebody who prefers performance over design, then Gutenberg is the ideal choice for you.
Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder is not as fancy or feature-rich compared to Elementor (Elementor Vs Beaver Builder comparison). However it does offer a stable and consistent experience with its core plugin that only constructs private pieces of content. There is the Beaver Builder Style readily available if you want one too! Elementor WordPress Documentation.
Beaver Builder is a complete page style bundle that provides you with all the tools and elements to construct any sort of website. It has aspects such as headings, buttons, maps, sliders, contact types, reviews, and more all in one place.
It stands head to head in terms of design and efficiency with Elementor. Beaver Builder does not have as numerous addons built for itself as Elementor does.
SeedProd
SeedProd is a premium drag-and-drop landing page Builder plugin for WordPress. It has actually been developed to be as quickly, easy-to-use with website speed in mind.
SeedProd’s clever style system makes recycling blocks of material fast and simple by defining color schemes which will conserve time when creating new designs. Elementor WordPress Documentation.
It has all the blocks and functions you ‘d get out of a powerful page Builder such as opt-in types, social profiles, countdown timers. It also consists of contact pages with an option to easily redirect visitors on any site map or Google Maps listing for their business location!
You can use SeedProd’s customized domain mapping feature which will conserve time when handling numerous client landing pages in WordPress while still keeping branding continuity across platforms.
Any Lingering Questions?
As you can see, our company believe that Elementor is among the very best WordPress page builders out there, which is why we have actually 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 4 million WordPress sites utilize Elementor and Elementor has a remarkable 4.7-star ranking on over 5,900 reviews.
If you wish to experience what Elementor can use totally free:
Set up the complimentary Astra theme to develop a versatile base for your Elementor designs.
Set up the complimentary Elementor plugin from WordPress.org and start building. Elementor WordPress Documentation.
Then, if you like what you see, consider whether Elementor Pro is right for your requirements.
Exists anything we missed in our Elementor evaluation that would help you make your choice? Leave a remark and we’ll attempt to assist you choose.