Elementor Review: Is It The Best WordPress Page Builder? – How To Set An Elementor Page As My Homepage
Trying to decide if Elementor is the best page Builder for your WordPress website? In this hands-on Elementor review, we’ll help you understand:
- How Elementor can benefit you
- Who need to utilize Elementor
- The distinct features that assist Elementor stand apart from the competition
- Whether you need to use the totally free version or open your wallet for the premium version
How To Set An Elementor Page As My Homepage
We have actually created Astra, one of the most popular themes for Elementor, in addition to a popular add-on for Elementor, so you can probably guess that we’re fans of Elementor. Let’s get that out of the way – this is a positive Elementor evaluation. How To Set An Elementor Page As My Homepage.
But comprehending why we like Elementor and have actually constructed items in the Elementor environment is more crucial than just the reality that we like it – that’s what we’re going to attempt and communicate in this evaluation.
By the end of our Elementor review, you should have whatever that you need to make an educated choice about whether Elementor is the right tool for your WordPress site.
How To Set An Elementor Page As My Homepage
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 preview of precisely what your page will appear like to visitors as you’re constructing it.
- Drag and drop various content and style aspects to create the ideal design.
Generally, it changes creating a beautiful, customized website design from something you require to be a designer to do, to something that anybody can do. How To Set An Elementor Page As My Homepage.
Elementor is now actively used by over four million WordPress websites, which makes it the most popular WordPress page Builder. It’s also kept a remarkable 4.7-star ranking (out of 5) on over 5,900 evaluations, so the majority of those users are quite delighted with Elementor.
There are a great deal of WordPress page home builders that provide a visual, drag-and-drop interface, though, so what makes Elementor stand apart and why is it so successful?
Well, we’ll get into this in more depth later on, but some of Elementor’s standout functions are:
- Lots of content aspects – these are the foundation of your page. They’re what you “drag-and-drop” to make your style.
- Responsive design – most people search the web on smart devices, so it is very important that your styles look great on all gadgets. Elementor’s designs are responsive by default and you get great deals of choices to control how it works.
- Templates – staring at a blank page is frightening! Elementor comes with hundreds of expertly developed design templates so that you don’t have to start from scratch.
- Design options – you get tons of in-depth style options to make your style pixel-perfect without turning to custom CSS (though you can do that too).
- Convenience – you get great deals of useful tools like right-click assistance, a quick find tool, and more to help you construct beautiful pages quicker.
- Style Builder – with the Pro version, you can create your whole WordPress style using Elementor (though we still recommend 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 also create all types of popups utilizing the very same visual, drag-and-drop user interface.
- WooCommerce Builder – if you’re building an eCommerce shop, you can design your WooCommerce shop utilizing Elementor and include products in your other styles. How To Set An Elementor Page As My Homepage.
Who Is Elementor For?
Elementor is for … well, practically anyone who’s utilizing WordPress.
For instance, a digital marketer might love Elementor for its ability to help them quickly create landing pages and popups, while a casual user may just be looking for a method to add some additional flair to their post.
Let’s take a look at some specific circumstances:
How To Set An Elementor Page As My Homepage
The Casual User
If you’re just a casual user searching for a way to include some style to your post or develop a beautiful homepage, Elementor is perfect for you.
You’ll be able to use the visual interface to spin up some beautiful designs without needing any technical knowledge … and you’ll most likely have the ability to do it for free! More on whether you should utilize the totally free or paid version in the future. How To Set An Elementor Page As My Homepage.
The Digital Online marketer
Elementor is fantastic for digital marketers and teams because it includes lots of marketing aspects.
The Type widget in Elementor Pro lets you develop all types of lead forms and connect them to popular e-mail marketing services. It likewise has a Zapier combination, which lets you link to your CRM, also.
You can likewise use the Popup Builder to create opt-in popups and target them anywhere on your site. And if you’re selling services or products, you can utilize WooCommerce Builder to design your sales pages.
Finally, the core Elementor plugin itself is also an outstanding solution for building WordPress landing pages.
The Site Builder
If you’re constructing sites for clients, Elementor is a perfect (and popular) option.
You can combine Elementor with a versatile theme like Astra to construct 100% custom customer sites with no code required. You can also utilize Theme Builder when required, like designing the design template for a customized post type and including vibrant data from ACF, Pods, or Toolset.
How To Set An Elementor Page As My Homepage
Elementor Pricing
Short answer: It’s Free.
The base version of Elementor that is available in the WordPress Plugin repository is entirely complimentary to use. There is likewise a pro variation with a lot more flexibility and a lot more features.
Take a look at 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 sites. It is limited at particular points.
With Elementor Pro you can personalize your header, footer, posts page, single posts page, or item pages. How To Set An Elementor Page As My Homepage.
The Elementor base version provides the bare minimum you require to develop and personalize your website. If you desire to have the flexibility of revamping the entire website, Elementor Pro is the best option.
With Elementor Pro you can also include pop-ups, contact kinds, membership kinds, international widgets, and customized CSS.
Here is a list of extra features that you get in Elementor Pro:
- 50+ additional widgets
- 300+ premium demonstration imports consisting of imports for header, footer, and pop-ups
- Total site modification through Theme Builder. This lets you change the header, footer, and posts pages
- WooCommerce Builder for editing item and classification pages in eCommerce websites
- Popup Builder with innovative functions like, exit intent, after scroll, and manages to display particular pop-ups on particular pages
- Visual Form Builder that can be integrated with popular e-mail marketing tools
- You can produce international widgets and utilize them site-wide
- Add custom-made CSS
- Deploy any Elementor widget pretty much anywhere you desire
Elementor Pro Pricing
Elementor Pro has a 5 tier pricing strategy based on the number of licenses you desire.
If you are working with a single website then the Necessary Strategy would be best for you. If you are dealing with several websites, the Advanced plan or above strategies would be better.
All the strategies include an annual subscription.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
How Elementor Works: Touring the Interface
Let’s see how Elementor works with this practical section.
Similar to any other plugin, you need to install and trigger Elementor through the WordPress repository.
Next, you can either pick to customize Elementor settings or dive directly into designing.
If you are just starting out, we recommend utilizing the default settings only. Head over to pages and open among the pages that you want to modify.
Click Edit With Elementor to begin editing.
For the sake of this presentation, we installed the Astra theme and imported among its demo websites developed with Elementor. How To Set An Elementor Page As My Homepage.
Now, let’s go through the Elementor dashboard using that demonstration site.
Here’s what the Elementor control panel appears like.
Here’s the label of different parts numbered.
- The working area or the primary canvas. This is where you modify and upgrade your site
- Elementor widgets area
- Elementor settings
- Open Elementor widgets
- International settings
- Modification history
- Change view (desktop, tablet, mobile).
- Sneak peek changes.
- Publish.
Elementor Structure Hierarchy
If you are entirely brand-new to developing websites, you need to comprehend the structure of the Elementor page Builder.
Every page developed with Elementor includes sections and columns.
Area. An area is essentially a row. You can add a background, change its sizing, and more. Columns and widgets go inside areas.
Column. A column divides a section into different columns. You can then manage each column separately. How To Set An Elementor Page As My Homepage.
A page can have any number of sections in it. Areas consist of columns and columns include the Elementor widgets.
Here is an illustration revealing what the structure in Elementor looks like.
How To Set An Elementor Page As My Homepage
How to Design a Page in Elementor from Scratch
When developing a websites, you can either begin with a blank screen or import a pre-existing design template. In this area, we will cover how you can develop a page from scratch utilizing Elementor. How To Set An Elementor Page As My Homepage.
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 new area.
Action 3: Pick a section with a single column or multiple ones depending upon your needs.
Step 4: Drag widgets from the Elementor panel into the columns that you wish to.
Once you enjoy with the placement, you can change the finer details in the Material, Style, and Advanced Sections.
You can experiment with the choices when finding out to find the best styles for you.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
How to Design a Pre-Existing Page in Elementor
In some cases you might require to modify a pre-existing page with Elementor. The process 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 brand-new widget, drag it from the sidebar on the.
To reorganize a widget on the visual sneak peek, you can also utilize drag and drop. If you want to modify text, just click and type on the visual preview:
To produce the designs for your widgets, use areas and columns.
To personalize a widget, click on it. That will open the widget’s settings in the sidebar, which are divided into three tabs:
Use a similar approach to personalize areas and columns:
As you change an aspect’s settings, you’ll immediately see those changes reviewed the visual sneak peek.
Eight Awesome Features That Help Elementor Stick Out
Next, let’s go through a few of the things that assist Elementor stick out from other visual, drag-and-drop page builders.
1. Convenient Editing Functions for Faster Design
Elementor features some convenient modifying functions that assist you develop designs more quickly.
For instance, Elementor features right-click assistance, which most other page builders don’t provide.
You can right-click on any element to duplicate it, copy and paste styles, and more:
It likewise features a helpful Navigator view that gives you a purchased list of all the material on your page, broken up by sections and columns. You can utilize this to quickly open the settings for any aspect on your page. You can also rename components to make them simpler to find: How To Set An Elementor Page As My Homepage.
And to assist you rapidly browse in between your styles, it likewise consists of a Finder tool that lets you leap to anything that you have actually developed with Elementor by looking for it by name:
2. Big Widget Choice for Design Flexibility
Throughout the core plugin and add-ons, Elementor has an absolutely huge selection of widgets, which provides you a ton of flexibility when building your designs.
It’s not almost the 60+ widgets that feature Elementor and Elementor Pro, though, there’s likewise a huge 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 everything from kind stylers to hotspots, content toggles, videos, and more.
With numerous alternatives, you can often discover a widget that does precisely what you desire it to.
3. Detailed Style and Positioning Rules for Pixel-Perfect Styles
Another location where Elementor beats out a lot of the competitors is its style alternatives.
Elementor lets you do all the basics – you can switch up colors, fonts, spacing, and so on.
It also adds advanced options like:
Shape dividers
Customized positioning
Animations, consisting of parallax scrolling, mouse tracking, 3D tilt, and more
Custom-made CSS for private widgets
Simply put, Elementor gives you more choices to develop a distinct, reliable style.
4. Huge Template Selection to Conserve You Time
If you do not wish to build your designs from scratch, Elementor comes with a huge selection of design templates, divided into 2 categories:
Pages – full-page templates. All you do is personalize them to meet your needs. How To Set An Elementor Page As My Homepage.
Blocks – design templates for specific parts of a page, like a FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION. You can mix-and-match them like legos to develop complete designs.
Similar to widgets, you can likewise discover design templates from third-party sources.
If you use the Astra WordPress theme, it features heaps of pre-made starter templates developed with Elementor. Each starter website includes multiple Elementor templates that you can tailor as needed.
5. Versatile Kind Widget and Integrations
Above, I mentioned Elementor’s widget choice in general. I believe it’s worth singling out a specific widget:
The Form widget.
The Form widget lets you create custom forms, total with as numerous fields as needed. Where this widget gets really effective, specifically when it comes to marketing executions, is its built-in integrations.
You can hook it approximately popular email marketing services like ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Mailchimp, and more. There’s likewise a Webhook choice that lets you link to Zapier (and the thousands of apps available there), in addition to chat integrations for Slack and Discord.
6. Theme Builder With Dynamic Material for Customized WordPress Sites
With Elementor Pro, you gain the capability to exceed posts and pages and develop your whole WordPress style with Elementor. That is, you can develop:
Headers
Footers
Single templates
Archive templates
For example, you might create a customized post type and after that use Elementor to design the design template for that post type, rather than tampering style template files straight.
The truly effective thing here is that you have the ability to bring in vibrant content from customized fields that you produce with plugins like ACF, Toolset, and Pods.
With this dynamic feature, you can construct really custom sites and harness WordPress’ power as a versatile material management system. How To Set An Elementor Page As My Homepage.
Just one note – while this is definitely a powerful feature, there are still some reasons that you may want to pick a versatile Elementor theme like Astra even if you decide to utilize Elementor Style Builder.
7. WooCommerce Builder for Custom-made eCommerce Styles
If you’re creating an eCommerce store, you can also use Elementor Style Builder to your shop material with devoted WooCommerce Builder widgets.
You’ll be able to develop both your single item pages and shop pages.
To assist you develop your designs, you’ll get a variety of dedicated WooCommerce widgets for whatever from product images to upsells.
In one of our posts, we talked about how to produce an eCommerce website with Elementor.
8. Popup Builder for Marketing, Usability, and More
Lastly, Elementor Pro can do more than simply posts, pages, and style design – you can also use it to develop 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 up a lot of possibilities:
You could utilize the Kind widget to develop email opt-in popups and connect them directly to your e-mail marketing service of choice.
Or, you could utilize the Login widget to develop a popup login type for your website. How To Set An Elementor Page As My Homepage.
When you release a popup, you’ll get a variety of targeting and trigger guidelines to control precisely where and when your popup appears:
How To Set An Elementor Page As My Homepage
Should You Use Elementor Free vs Pro?
If you have actually made it this far, there’s a great chance that you believe Elementor is right for your requirements.
That causes the next question – can you utilize the complimentary version at WordPress.org or should you acquire Elementor Pro?
This is an essential decision, so we actually composed an entire post on how to pick in between Elementor free vs Pro.
In general, if you simply wish to create some posts/pages or fundamental landing pages, you can most likely get by with the free variation.
With that being stated, there’s a great deal of worth in Elementor Pro. It adds:
- 30+ brand-new widgets, including the Kind widget. The Type widget is especially effective for marketing pages.
- Style Builder. This lets you design your entire style and WooCommerce shop using Elementor.
- Popup Builder. This lets you develop popups using Elementor.
- More design templates. While the complimentary version consists of some templates, you need Pro for complete gain access to.
- More design options. For instance, you get access to custom-made positioning.
Purchasing Elementor Pro is not the only way to extend Elementor.
For example, if you desire more flexibility to personalize your theme, you do not need to acquire Elementor Pro. Rather, you might utilize a versatile theme like Astra. Through its many Customizer settings, you can adapt Astra to practically any usage, and it’s a lot simpler than trying to design your own style from scratch. How To Set An Elementor Page As My Homepage.
You can develop your header and footer utilizing Astra. Due to the fact that Astra is constructed to pair with Elementor, you can still utilize Elementor to design the material that goes “in between” your header, footer, and other style components.
Astra also includes tons of pre-built site design templates developed with Elementor. You can import an already-finished site using Astra and then simply tweak it to match your needs utilizing Elementor.
Or, if you want to add new widgets for design versatility, you could acquire an extension like Ultimate Addons for Elementor, which includes 36+ new Elementor widgets.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
Does Elementor Decrease Your Site?
Now, this has been a concern that is recently gaining popularity. And rightfully so.
Elementor is a plugin that can be useful for including gorgeous widgets and designs to your site. Its flexible and user friendly features have invited a variety of addon plugins that let you produce extraordinary sites without needing to code.
If you use too lots of plugins or have too lots of animations then it might make your entire site slow.
The question occurs if Elementor slows your website down even without any of these addons. How To Set An Elementor Page As My Homepage.
To find out, we compare two 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, however by what degree?
Let’s find out.
Here are the websites for you to check out.
- Gutenberg site from Starter Templates
- Elementor site from Beginner Templates
We hosted both sites on the very same server and under various directory sites of the same domain and compared their efficiency 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 website made with Elementor took about 5.5 s to load entirely while the site made with Gutenberg took 2.2 s.
If you are optimizing for SEO, you understand how big of a distinction that is!
In fact, the exact same site developed with Beaver Builder likewise carries out slightly much better than the Elementor site.
Nevertheless, in terms of completely packed time, it takes a second longer than the Elementor site to load.
Elementor Alternatives
Although Elementor is a great tool, it does not indicate that it is the best tool for you all the time.
If you are constructing a focused 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. How To Set An Elementor Page As My Homepage.
In such a case you will require to upgrade to Elementor Pro.
For the SEOs out there, you might wish to think about a lighter plugin that loads faster without triggering any delays in page loading.
With all these and numerous other factors in mind, we have created this list of Elementor alternatives that can assist you out.
How To Set An Elementor Page As My Homepage
Gutenberg
Gutenberg is among the most light-weight and fast website builders since it is WordPress default editor. Gutenburg makes it much easier than ever to create websites with ease.
The blocks consist of everything you might anticipate, including 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 interface!
Building a site in Gutenberg resembles developing a house utilizing Lego blocks. You set up the blocks in the ideal order to come up with a gorgeous site. How To Set An Elementor Page As My Homepage.
In terms of performance. Gutenberg works way much better than any other page Builder. It is optimized for WordPress users and delivers what it guarantees. However, it likewise lacks the different style aspects that Elementor gives the table.
If you are somebody who chooses performance over style, then Gutenberg is the best choice for you.
Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder is not as fancy or feature-rich compared to Elementor (Elementor Vs Beaver Builder contrast). It does offer a steady and constant experience with its core plugin that only builds private pieces of material. There is the Beaver Builder Style readily available if you desire one too! How To Set An Elementor Page As My Homepage.
Beaver Builder is a complete page style bundle that supplies you with all the tools and components to develop any kind of website. It has elements such as headings, buttons, maps, sliders, contact forms, testimonials, and more all in one place.
It stands head to head in regards to style and efficiency with Elementor. Beaver Builder does not have as many addons developed for itself as Elementor does.
SeedProd
SeedProd is a premium drag-and-drop landing page Builder plugin for WordPress. It has been created to be as fast, easy-to-use with website speed in mind.
SeedProd’s wise style system makes reusing blocks of material quick and easy by defining color schemes which will save time when creating new designs. How To Set An Elementor Page As My Homepage.
It has all the blocks and features you ‘d anticipate from an effective page Builder such as opt-in kinds, social profiles, countdown timers. It likewise consists of contact pages with an alternative to easily reroute visitors on any website map or Google Maps listing for their company place!
You can utilize SeedProd’s custom domain mapping feature which will conserve time when handling several customer landing pages in WordPress while still keeping branding connection across platforms.
Any Lingering Questions?
As you can see, we believe that Elementor is one of the very best WordPress page builders out there, which is why we have actually usage Astra, among the most popular themes for Elementor, and Ultimate Addons for Elementor, one of the most popular Elementor widget collections.
We’re likewise not alone in our favorable Elementor evaluation – over 4 million WordPress websites utilize Elementor and Elementor has a remarkable 4.7-star ranking on over 5,900 evaluations.
If you want to experience what Elementor can offer free of charge:
Set up the complimentary Astra style to develop a versatile base for your Elementor designs.
Set up the totally free Elementor plugin from WordPress.org and start structure. How To Set An Elementor Page As My Homepage.
Then, if you like what you see, consider whether Elementor Pro is right for your needs.
Exists anything we missed out on in our Elementor evaluation that would assist you make your choice? Leave a remark and we’ll attempt to assist you decide.