Elementor Review: Is It The Very Best WordPress Page Builder? – How To Use Theme Builder Elementor
Trying to decide if Elementor is the ideal page Builder for your WordPress website? In this hands-on Elementor review, we’ll help you understand:
- How Elementor can benefit you
- Who ought to use Elementor
- The special functions that assist Elementor stand out from the competition
- Whether you need to use the free version or open up your wallet for the premium variation
How To Use Theme Builder Elementor
We’ve created Astra, one of the most popular styles 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 favorable Elementor review. How To Use Theme Builder Elementor.
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But comprehending why we like Elementor and have actually constructed products in the Elementor ecosystem is more vital than simply the fact that we like it – that’s what we’re going to try and interact in this review.
By the end of our Elementor review, you must have whatever that you require to make an educated decision about whether or not Elementor is the best tool for your WordPress site.
How To Use Theme Builder Elementor
What Does Elementor Offer?
Elementor is a visual, drag-and-drop page Builder. If you’re not acquainted with these terms, this indicates that you can:
- See a preview of exactly what your page will appear like to visitors as you’re constructing it.
- Drag and drop various content and style aspects to produce the ideal style.
Basically, it changes creating a beautiful, custom web design from something you need to be a developer to do, to something that anyone can do. How To Use Theme Builder Elementor.
Elementor is now actively utilized by over four million WordPress websites, which makes it the most popular WordPress page Builder. It’s likewise maintained an impressive 4.7-star score (out of 5) on over 5,900 reviews, so the majority of those users are pretty happy with Elementor.
There are a lot of WordPress page builders that use a visual, drag-and-drop interface, however, so what makes Elementor stick out and why is it so effective?
Well, we’ll get into this in more depth later on, but a few of Elementor’s standout functions are:
- Great deals 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 browse the web on smartphones, so it is necessary that your styles look excellent on all gadgets. Elementor’s styles are responsive by default and you get lots of alternatives to manage 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 go back to square one.
- Style options – you get tons of comprehensive design options to make your design pixel-perfect without resorting to custom CSS (though you can do that too).
- Benefit – you get great deals of helpful tools like right-click support, a quick find tool, and more to help you develop great-looking pages much faster.
- Style Builder – with the Pro variation, you can develop your entire WordPress theme utilizing Elementor (though we still suggest matching it with a quality style).
- Dynamic content – you can include vibrant material from customized 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 store, you can design your WooCommerce store using Elementor and include items in your other designs. How To Use Theme Builder Elementor.
Who Is Elementor For?
Elementor is for … well, practically anybody who’s using WordPress.
For instance, a digital marketer may like Elementor for its capability to help them rapidly develop landing pages and popups, while a casual user may simply be trying to find a way to add some additional flair to their article.
Let’s take a look at some specific scenarios:
How To Use Theme Builder Elementor
The Casual User
If you’re simply a casual user searching for a way to include some style to your article or construct a great-looking homepage, Elementor is perfect for you.
You’ll have the ability to use the visual interface to spin up some great-looking styles without needing any technical knowledge … and you’ll most likely be able to do it for free! More on whether you ought to utilize the complimentary or paid variation later on. How To Use Theme Builder Elementor.
The Digital Online marketer
Elementor is great for digital online marketers and groups due to the fact that it consists of lots of marketing components.
For instance, the Type widget in Elementor Pro lets you produce all types of lead kinds and connect them to popular email marketing services. It likewise has a Zapier integration, which lets you connect to your CRM.
You can also utilize the Popup Builder to produce opt-in popups and target them anywhere on your website. And if you’re offering service or products, you can use WooCommerce Builder to design your sales pages.
Finally, the core Elementor plugin itself is also an excellent option for structure WordPress landing pages.
The Site Builder
If you’re building websites for clients, Elementor is a perfect (and popular) option.
You can integrate Elementor with a flexible style like Astra to develop 100% custom-made client websites without any code required. You can also utilize Style Builder when needed, like designing the design template for a custom-made post type and integrating dynamic information from ACF, Pods, or Toolset.
How To Use Theme Builder Elementor
Elementor Pricing
Short answer: It’s Free.
The base version of Elementor that is available in the WordPress Plugin repository is entirely totally free to use. There is likewise a pro version with a lot more versatility and a lot more functions.
Take a look at our post on Elementor Vs. Elementor Pro if you wish to get an in-depth evaluation of both.
Elementor is a feature-packed plugin that works for all websites. It is limited at specific points.
With Elementor Pro you can tailor your header, footer, posts page, single posts page, or product pages. How To Use Theme Builder Elementor.
The Elementor base variation delivers the bare minimum you need to design and customize your website. If you desire to have the liberty of redesigning the entire website, Elementor Pro is the finest choice.
With Elementor Pro you can likewise add pop-ups, contact types, subscription kinds, worldwide widgets, and custom CSS.
Here is a list of extra functions that you get in Elementor Pro:
- 50+ extra widgets
- 300+ premium demo imports consisting of imports for header, footer, and pop-ups
- Complete website modification through Style Builder. This lets you alter the header, footer, and posts pages
- WooCommerce Builder for modifying product and category pages in eCommerce sites
- Popup Builder with advanced features like, exit intent, after scroll, and manages to display certain pop-ups on specific pages
- Visual Type Builder that can be integrated with popular e-mail marketing tools
- You can produce worldwide widgets and utilize them site-wide
- Add custom-made CSS
- Release any Elementor widget basically anywhere you want
Elementor Pro Prices
Elementor Pro has a 5 tier pricing strategy based upon the number of licenses you desire.
If you are working with a single website then the Important Strategy would be best for you. If you are dealing with multiple websites, the Advanced plan or above strategies would be better.
All the strategies come with an annual subscription.
How Elementor Works: Touring the User interface
Let’s see how Elementor works with this practical area.
Similar to any other plugin, you have to set up and trigger Elementor through the WordPress repository.
Next, you can either select to tailor Elementor settings or dive directly into developing.
If you are simply beginning, we suggest 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 begin modifying.
For the sake of this demonstration, we set up the Astra theme and imported among its demonstration websites constructed with Elementor. How To Use Theme Builder Elementor.
Now, let’s go through the Elementor control panel utilizing that demonstration website.
Here’s what the Elementor dashboard looks like.
Here’s the label of various parts numbered.
- The workspace or the main canvas. This is where you modify and upgrade your site
- Elementor widgets area
- Elementor settings
- Open Elementor widgets
- Worldwide settings
- Revision history
- Change view (desktop, tablet, mobile).
- Preview modifications.
- Publish.
Elementor Structure Hierarchy
If you are totally brand-new to building sites, you require to understand the structure of the Elementor page Builder.
Every page built with Elementor consists of areas and columns.
Area. A section is essentially a row. You can include a background, alter its sizing, and more. Columns and widgets go inside sections.
Column. A column divides a section into different columns. You can then control each column separately. How To Use Theme Builder Elementor.
A page can have any number of areas in it. Sections contain columns and columns include the Elementor widgets.
Here is an illustration revealing what the structure in Elementor looks like.
How To Use Theme Builder Elementor
How to Design a Page in Elementor from Scratch
When designing 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 using Elementor. How To Use Theme Builder Elementor.
Here’s how you do it:
Step 1: Open a blank page and click “Edit With Elementor”.
Action 2: Click on the “+” button to add a new area.
Step 3: Choose an area with a single column or numerous ones depending on your requirements.
Step 4: Drag widgets from the Elementor panel into the columns that you want to.
When you enjoy with the positioning, you can change the finer details in the Content, Design, and Advanced Sections.
You can play around with the options when learning to find the ideal designs for you.
How to Style a Pre-Existing Page in Elementor
In some cases you might need to edit a pre-existing page with Elementor. The procedure is not very different in this case either. In fact, it is a lot easier to modify an existing Elementor page than starting from scratch.
Here’s how you do it.
To include a new widget, drag it from the sidebar left wing.
To reorganize a widget on the visual sneak peek, you can likewise utilize drag and drop. If you wish to modify text, just click and type on the visual sneak peek:
To create the designs for your widgets, use areas and columns.
To personalize a widget, click it. That will open the widget’s settings in the sidebar, which are divided into three tabs:
Utilize a similar method to personalize areas and columns:
As you alter an element’s settings, you’ll immediately see those modifications reflected on the visual preview.
8 Amazing Functions That Assist Elementor Stand Apart
Next, let’s go through a few of the important things that help Elementor stand apart from other visual, drag-and-drop page home builders.
1. Hassle-free Editing Features for Faster Design
Elementor includes some practical modifying functions that help you develop styles more quickly.
For instance, Elementor includes right-click support, which most other page builders don’t offer.
You can right-click on any aspect to replicate it, copy and paste styles, and more:
It likewise features an useful Navigator view that gives you a purchased list of all the content on your page, separated by sections and columns. You can use this to rapidly open the settings for any component on your page. You can also rename elements to make them much easier to find: How To Use Theme Builder Elementor.
And to help you quickly navigate between your designs, it likewise includes a Finder tool that lets you leap to anything that you’ve built with Elementor by looking for it by name:
2. Huge Widget Choice for Design Versatility
Throughout the core plugin and add-ons, Elementor has an absolutely enormous selection of widgets, which offers you a lots of flexibility when building your designs.
It’s not almost the 60+ widgets that come with Elementor and Elementor Pro, however, there’s also a substantial choice of widgets from third-party developers.
Ultimate Addons for Elementor adds another 36+ new widgets that you can utilize in your styles, covering whatever from kind stylers to hotspots, content toggles, videos, and more.
With numerous alternatives, you can generally find a widget that does precisely what you want it to.
3. Detailed Design and Positioning Guidelines for Pixel-Perfect Designs
Another location where Elementor vanquishes a great deal of the competition is its style choices.
Elementor lets you do all the essentials – you can switch up colors, font styles, spacing, and so on.
However it also adds advanced options like:
Forming dividers
Customized placing
Animations, consisting of parallax scrolling, mouse tracking, 3D tilt, and more
Customized CSS for individual widgets
Simply put, Elementor gives you more options to produce a special, effective style.
4. Substantial Template Selection to Save You Time
If you don’t want to construct your designs from scratch, Elementor includes a big selection of design templates, divided into two classifications:
Pages – full-page design templates. All you do is tailor them to meet your requirements. How To Use Theme Builder Elementor.
Blocks – design templates for specific parts of a page, like a FAQ. You can mix-and-match them like legos to develop total styles.
As with widgets, you can also discover templates from third-party sources.
If you use the Astra WordPress style, it comes with stacks of pre-made starter design templates developed with Elementor. Each starter site includes multiple Elementor templates that you can customize as needed.
5. Versatile Type Widget and Integrations
Above, I mentioned Elementor’s widget selection in general. But I think it deserves singling out a specific widget:
The Type widget.
The Kind widget lets you create customized types, total with as lots of fields as needed. However where this widget gets really effective, specifically when it pertains to marketing applications, is its built-in integrations.
You can hook it up to 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), along with chat combinations for Slack and Discord.
6. Theme Builder With Dynamic Content for Custom-made WordPress Sites
With Elementor Pro, you get the capability to go beyond posts and pages and develop your whole WordPress style with Elementor. That is, you can build:
Headers
Footers
Single design templates
Archive design templates
For example, you could create a custom post type and after that utilize Elementor to develop the design template for that post type, rather than messing around with theme design template files directly.
The actually effective thing here is that you have the ability to generate vibrant content from custom-made fields that you produce with plugins like ACF, Toolset, and Pods.
With this dynamic feature, you can build truly customized websites and harness WordPress’ power as a flexible content management system. How To Use Theme Builder Elementor.
Just one note – while this is certainly a powerful feature, there are still some reasons that you may want to choose a flexible Elementor style like Astra even if you choose to utilize Elementor Style Builder.
7. WooCommerce Builder for Customized eCommerce Designs
If you’re producing an eCommerce store, you can likewise use Elementor Style Builder to your store content with devoted WooCommerce Builder widgets.
You’ll have the ability to design both your single product pages and go shopping 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 articles, we spoke about how to produce an eCommerce website with Elementor.
8. Popup Builder for Marketing, Use, and More
Lastly, Elementor Pro can do more than simply posts, pages, and theme design – you can likewise use it to build popups with Elementor Popup Builder.
With Popup Builder, you get access to the very same familiar Elementor user interface and all of the widgets.
This opens a great deal of possibilities:
You could use the Type widget to develop e-mail opt-in popups and connect them straight to your e-mail marketing service of choice.
Or, you might use the Login widget to develop a popup login type for your site. How To Use Theme Builder Elementor.
When you release a popup, you’ll get a selection of targeting and activate guidelines to manage precisely where and when your popup appears:
How To Use Theme Builder Elementor
Should You Utilize 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 needs.
That results in the next question – can you utilize the complimentary version at WordPress.org or should you buy Elementor Pro?
This is an essential choice, so we in fact wrote an entire post on how to pick in between Elementor totally free vs Pro.
In general, if you simply want to develop some posts/pages or standard landing pages, you can most likely manage with the totally free version.
With that being stated, there’s a great deal of worth in Elementor Pro. It includes:
- 30+ brand-new widgets, including the Type widget. The Kind widget is specifically effective for marketing pages.
- Theme Builder. This lets you create your whole style and WooCommerce store utilizing Elementor.
- Popup Builder. This lets you build popups utilizing Elementor.
- More templates. While the free version consists of some design templates, you require Pro for complete gain access to.
- More design options. For instance, you get access to customized positioning.
Acquiring Elementor Pro is not the only way to extend Elementor.
If you want more versatility to tailor your style, you don’t need to acquire Elementor Pro. Instead, you might utilize a versatile style like Astra. Through its numerous Customizer settings, you can adjust Astra to pretty much any usage, and it’s a lot simpler than attempting to develop your own style from scratch. How To Use Theme Builder Elementor.
You can develop your header and footer utilizing Astra. Since Astra is constructed to match with Elementor, you can still utilize Elementor to create the material that goes “between” your header, footer, and other theme aspects.
Astra likewise consists of lots of pre-built site design templates built with Elementor. You can import an already-finished website utilizing Astra and then just modify it to match your needs using Elementor.
Or, if you wish to add brand-new widgets for design flexibility, you could acquire an extension like Ultimate Addons for Elementor, which includes 36+ brand-new Elementor widgets.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
Does Elementor Slow Down Your Website?
Now, this has actually been a question that is just recently acquiring popularity. And rightfully so.
Elementor is a plugin that can be helpful for adding lovely widgets and designs to your site. Its flexible and easy-to-use functions have invited a variety of addon plugins that let you produce amazing websites without having to code.
However, if you use a lot of plugins or have too many animations then it might make your entire website sluggish.
So the question arises if Elementor slows your website down even without any of these addons. How To Use Theme Builder Elementor.
To find out, we compare two of our starter design template sites. One of them was developed 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 discover.
Here are the sites for you to take a look at.
- Gutenberg site from Beginner Templates
- Elementor website from Starter Templates
We hosted both websites on the very same server and under various directory sites of the exact same domain name 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 terms of specific loading time, the site 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 know how big of a distinction that is!
The very same site constructed with Beaver Builder likewise performs slightly better than the Elementor website.
In terms of fully loaded time, it takes a second longer than the Elementor site to load.
Elementor Alternatives
Elementor is an excellent tool, it does not imply that it is the best tool for you all the time.
If you are constructing a concentrated landing page with the Elementor base version, you may not be able to do it straight without incorporating another contact type plugin or a payment gateway. How To Use Theme Builder Elementor.
In such a case you will require to update to Elementor Pro.
For the SEOs out there, you may want to consider a lighter plugin that loads quicker without causing any delays in page loading.
With all these and lots of other factors in mind, we have produced this list of Elementor alternatives that can help you out.
How To Use Theme Builder Elementor
Gutenberg
Gutenberg is one of the most light-weight and fast site home builders because it is WordPress default editor. Gutenburg makes it much easier than ever to create websites with ease.
The blocks include everything you may anticipate, consisting of headings and subheadings in addition to lists of items like images or videos within the content location on each specific site page – all from one simple user interface!
Constructing a website in Gutenberg resembles developing a house using Lego blocks. You arrange the blocks in the best order to come up with a gorgeous site. How To Use Theme Builder Elementor.
In terms of efficiency. Gutenberg works way better than any other page Builder. It is optimized for WordPress users and delivers what it assures. However, it also lacks the different style elements that Elementor gives the table.
If you are someone who prefers efficiency 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). However it does offer a stable and consistent experience with its core plugin that just builds specific pieces of material. There is the Beaver Builder Theme available if you desire one too! How To Use Theme Builder Elementor.
Beaver Builder is a complete page design bundle that supplies you with all the tools and elements to construct any sort of site. It has components such as headings, buttons, maps, sliders, contact types, testimonials, and more all in one place.
It stands head to head in regards to design and performance with Elementor. Beaver Builder does not have as lots of addons developed for itself as Elementor does.
SeedProd
SeedProd is a premium drag-and-drop landing page Builder plugin for WordPress. It has actually been created to be as fast, user friendly with website speed in mind.
SeedProd’s smart style system makes reusing blocks of material fast and simple by specifying color design which will save time when designing new layouts. How To Use Theme Builder Elementor.
It has all the blocks and features you ‘d get out of a powerful page Builder such as opt-in forms, social profiles, countdown timers. It also includes contact pages with an option to quickly redirect visitors on any website map or Google Maps listing for their service area!
You can utilize SeedProd’s custom domain mapping feature which will conserve time when managing multiple client landing pages in WordPress while still preserving branding connection throughout platforms.
Any Lingering Questions?
As you can see, our company believe that Elementor is among the best WordPress page home builders out there, which is why we have actually usage Astra, among the most popular styles for Elementor, and Ultimate Addons for Elementor, one of the most popular Elementor widget collections.
We’re also not alone in our positive Elementor evaluation – over 4 million WordPress websites utilize Elementor and Elementor has a fantastic 4.7-star ranking on over 5,900 reviews.
If you want to experience what Elementor can use totally free:
Set up the free Astra theme to create a flexible base for your Elementor styles.
Install the totally free Elementor plugin from WordPress.org and start structure. How To Use Theme Builder Elementor.
Then, if you like what you see, think about whether Elementor Pro is right for your needs.
Is there anything we missed in our Elementor evaluation that would assist you make your choice? Leave a remark and we’ll try to help you choose.
Get Started with Elementor Pro