Elementor Evaluation: Is It The Very Best WordPress Page Builder? – Best Free Theme WordPress Elementor
Attempting to choose if Elementor is the best page Builder for your WordPress site? In this hands-on Elementor review, we’ll help you understand:
- How Elementor can benefit you
- Who should use Elementor
- The unique features that assist Elementor stick out from the competition
- Whether you need to use the free variation or open up your wallet for the premium version
Best Free Theme WordPress Elementor
We’ve produced Astra, among the most popular styles for Elementor, along with 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. Best Free Theme WordPress Elementor.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
However comprehending why we like Elementor and have actually constructed products in the Elementor environment is more important than simply the fact that we like it – that’s what we’re going to attempt and communicate in this review.
By the end of our Elementor review, you ought to have whatever that you require to make an educated decision about whether Elementor is the best tool for your WordPress site.
Best Free Theme WordPress 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 precisely what your page will appear like to visitors as you’re constructing it.
- Drag and drop various content and design elements to create the ideal design.
Basically, it transforms producing a beautiful, customized website design from something you need to be a designer to do, to something that anybody can do. Best Free Theme WordPress Elementor.
Elementor is now actively utilized by over four million WordPress sites, which makes it the most popular WordPress page Builder. It’s also maintained a remarkable 4.7-star score (out of 5) on over 5,900 reviews, so most of those users are quite delighted with Elementor.
There are a great deal of WordPress page builders that provide a visual, drag-and-drop interface, however, so what makes Elementor stand apart and why is it so successful?
Well, we’ll enter this in more depth in the future, but some of Elementor’s standout features are:
- Great deals of content aspects – these are the foundation of your page. They’re what you “drag-and-drop” to make your style.
- Responsive design – the majority of people browse the web on smartphones, so it is very important that your designs look terrific on all gadgets. Elementor’s styles are responsive by default and you get lots of alternatives to control how it works.
- Templates – staring at a blank page is frightening! Elementor comes with numerous professionally developed templates so that you do not need to go back to square one.
- Style choices – you get lots of detailed style alternatives to make your design pixel-perfect without resorting to custom-made 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 assist you develop beautiful pages quicker.
- Style Builder – with the Pro variation, you can design your whole WordPress style using Elementor (though we still advise pairing it with a quality style).
- Dynamic content – you can consist of dynamic material from custom fields and plugins like ACF, Pods, and Toolset.
- Popup Builder – with the Pro variation, you can likewise develop all kinds of popups utilizing the exact same visual, drag-and-drop user interface.
- WooCommerce Builder – if you’re developing an eCommerce shop, you can design your WooCommerce store using Elementor and consist of items in your other styles. Best Free Theme WordPress Elementor.
Who Is Elementor For?
Elementor is for … well, practically anyone who’s using WordPress.
A digital marketer may like Elementor for its capability to help them quickly develop landing pages and popups, while a casual user might just be looking for a way to add some additional style to their blog posts.
Let’s take a look at some particular scenarios:
Best Free Theme WordPress Elementor
The Casual User
If you’re simply a casual user searching for a method to add some design to your post or develop a great-looking homepage, Elementor is perfect for you.
You’ll have the ability to utilize the visual interface to spin up some great-looking designs without needing any technical knowledge … and you’ll most likely be able to do it totally free! More on whether you ought to utilize the totally free or paid version later on. Best Free Theme WordPress Elementor.
The Digital Marketer
Elementor is fantastic for digital online marketers and teams due to the fact that it consists of lots of marketing elements.
For instance, the Form widget in Elementor Pro lets you develop all types of lead forms and link them to popular email marketing services. It likewise has a Zapier combination, which lets you connect to your CRM.
You can also use the Popup Builder to develop opt-in popups and target them anywhere on your website. And if you’re offering product and services, you can use WooCommerce Builder to design your sales pages.
Finally, the core Elementor plugin itself is also an exceptional service for building WordPress landing pages.
The Website Builder
If you’re building sites for clients, Elementor is a best (and popular) choice.
You can combine Elementor with a versatile style like Astra to develop 100% customized client websites without any code needed. You can also utilize Theme Builder when needed, like designing the template for a custom post type and integrating dynamic data from ACF, Pods, or Toolset.
Best Free Theme WordPress Elementor
Elementor Rates
Short answer: It’s Free.
The base version of Elementor that is available in the WordPress Plugin repository is entirely totally free to utilize. There is also a pro variation with a lot more flexibility and a lot more functions.
Have a look at our short article 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 restricted at specific points.
For instance, with Elementor Pro you can customize your header, footer, posts page, single posts page, or item pages. Best Free Theme WordPress Elementor.
The Elementor base version provides the bare minimum you require to develop and personalize your site. If you want to have the flexibility of upgrading the whole website, Elementor Pro is the finest choice.
With Elementor Pro you can also add pop-ups, contact forms, subscription forms, global widgets, and custom CSS.
Here is a list of additional functions that you get in Elementor Pro:
- 50+ additional widgets
- 300+ premium demonstration imports including imports for header, footer, and pop-ups
- Total website personalization through Theme Builder. This lets you change the header, footer, and posts pages
- WooCommerce Builder for editing item and classification pages in eCommerce sites
- Popup Builder with innovative functions like, exit intent, after scroll, and manages to display particular pop-ups on certain pages
- Visual Kind Builder that can be integrated with popular e-mail marketing tools
- You can develop international widgets and use them site-wide
- Include custom CSS
- Release any Elementor widget practically anywhere you want
Elementor Pro Prices
Elementor Pro has a 5 tier pricing plan based upon the number of licenses you want.
If you are dealing with a single website then the Vital Plan would be best for you. If you are working on numerous websites, the Advanced strategy or above strategies would be better.
All the strategies feature a yearly membership.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
How Elementor Works: Visiting the User interface
Let’s see how Elementor works with this practical section.
Just like any other plugin, you have to install and trigger Elementor through the WordPress repository.
Next, you can either select to personalize Elementor settings or dive directly into designing.
If you are simply starting out, we recommend utilizing the default settings only. Head over to pages and open one of the pages that you wish to edit.
Click Edit With Elementor to begin modifying.
For the sake of this demonstration, we set up the Astra style and imported one of its demo sites developed with Elementor. Best Free Theme WordPress Elementor.
Now, let’s go through the Elementor control panel using that demonstration website.
Here’s what the Elementor control panel looks like.
Here’s the label of different parts numbered.
- The workspace or the main canvas. This is where you edit and redesign your site
- Elementor widgets location
- Elementor settings
- Open Elementor widgets
- Global settings
- Modification history
- Change view (desktop, tablet, mobile).
- Sneak peek modifications.
- Release.
Elementor Structure Hierarchy
If you are totally brand-new to constructing websites, you need to understand the structure of the Elementor page Builder.
Every page constructed with Elementor includes sections and columns.
Section. An area is basically 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 various columns. You can then control each column separately. Best Free Theme WordPress Elementor.
A page can have any number of areas in it. Sections consist of columns and columns include the Elementor widgets.
Here is an illustration showing what the structure in Elementor looks like.
Best Free Theme WordPress Elementor
How to Style a Page in Elementor from Scratch
When designing a web page, you can either start with a blank screen or import a pre-existing template. In this section, we will cover how you can produce a page from scratch utilizing Elementor. Best Free Theme WordPress Elementor.
Here’s how you do it:
Step 1: Open a blank page and click “Edit With Elementor”.
Action 2: Click the “+” button to include a brand-new area.
Action 3: Choose a section with a single column or multiple ones depending on your requirements.
Step 4: Drag widgets from the Elementor panel into the columns that you wish to.
As soon as you more than happy with the positioning, you can change the finer details in the Content, Design, and Advanced Sections.
You can play around with the alternatives when learning to find the best styles for you.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
How to Style a Pre-Existing Page in Elementor
Sometimes you may require to modify a pre-existing page with Elementor. The process is not extremely 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 add a brand-new widget, drag it from the sidebar on the left.
To reorganize a widget on the visual preview, you can also use drag and drop. If you want to modify text, simply click and type on the visual preview:
To produce the designs for your widgets, utilize sections and columns.
To customize a widget, click it. That will open the widget’s settings in the sidebar, which are divided into three tabs:
Use a comparable technique to tailor areas and columns:
As you change an aspect’s settings, you’ll quickly see those changes assessed the visual preview.
Eight Remarkable Functions That Help Elementor Stand Apart
Next, let’s go through a few of the things that assist Elementor stand out from other visual, drag-and-drop page contractors.
1. Convenient Modifying Features for Faster Design
Elementor features some hassle-free modifying functions that assist you develop styles more quickly.
For instance, Elementor features right-click support, which most other page builders don’t use.
You can right-click on any element to replicate it, copy and paste styles, and more:
It likewise includes a helpful Navigator view that gives you a bought list of all the content on your page, separated by areas and columns. You can use this to rapidly open the settings for any aspect on your page. You can likewise relabel elements to make them easier to find: Best Free Theme WordPress Elementor.
And to help you rapidly navigate between your designs, it likewise consists of a Finder tool that lets you jump to anything that you’ve constructed with Elementor by searching for it by name:
2. Big Widget Selection for Style 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 practically the 60+ widgets that include Elementor and Elementor Pro, though, there’s likewise a big choice of widgets from third-party designers.
For example, Ultimate Addons for Elementor adds another 36+ brand-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 almost always find a widget that does exactly what you want it to.
3. In-depth Design and Positioning Guidelines for Pixel-Perfect Designs
Another area where Elementor vanquishes a great deal of the competition is its design choices.
Elementor lets you do all the essentials – you can switch up colors, fonts, spacing, etc.
However it likewise includes innovative alternatives like:
Forming dividers
Customized positioning
Animations, including parallax scrolling, mouse tracking, 3D tilt, and more
Customized CSS for specific widgets
In other words, Elementor provides you more choices to develop a special, effective style.
4. Big Design Template Selection to Conserve You Time
If you do not want to develop your styles from scratch, Elementor comes with a huge selection of design templates, divided into two classifications:
Pages – full-page templates. All you do is tailor them to meet your requirements. Best Free Theme WordPress Elementor.
Blocks – design templates for particular parts of a page, like a FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION. You can mix-and-match them like legos to build complete designs.
As with widgets, you can likewise find design templates from third-party sources.
If you use the Astra WordPress style, it features loads of pre-made starter design templates developed with Elementor. Each starter website includes numerous Elementor design templates that you can personalize as needed.
5. Versatile Form Widget and Integrations
Above, I pointed out Elementor’s widget selection in general. But I think it deserves singling out a specific widget:
The Type widget.
The Form widget lets you produce custom-made kinds, complete with as numerous fields as needed. Where this widget gets truly powerful, specifically when it comes to marketing applications, is its built-in integrations.
You can hook it approximately popular email marketing services like ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Mailchimp, and more. There’s also a Webhook alternative that lets you link to Zapier (and the countless apps 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 gain the capability to exceed posts and pages and develop your whole WordPress theme with Elementor. That is, you can construct:
Headers
Footers
Single design templates
Archive templates
For instance, you might create a custom-made post type and then utilize Elementor to design the design template for that post type, rather than messing around with style template files directly.
The truly effective thing here is that you have the ability to bring in dynamic content from custom-made fields that you produce with plugins like ACF, Toolset, and Pods.
With this dynamic function, you can build truly custom-made websites and harness WordPress’ power as a versatile content management system. Best Free Theme WordPress Elementor.
Simply one note – while this is certainly an effective feature, there are still some reasons why you might wish to select a flexible Elementor style like Astra even if you choose to utilize Elementor Theme Builder.
7. WooCommerce Builder for Custom eCommerce Designs
If you’re producing an eCommerce shop, you can also use Elementor Style Builder to your store content with dedicated WooCommerce Builder widgets.
You’ll have the ability to design both your single item pages and go shopping pages.
To help you build your styles, you’ll get a variety of dedicated WooCommerce widgets for whatever from item images to upsells.
In one of our short articles, we discussed how to produce an eCommerce site with Elementor.
8. Popup Builder for Marketing, Functionality, and More
Lastly, Elementor Pro can do more than simply posts, pages, and theme style – you can also use it to develop popups with Elementor Popup Builder.
With Popup Builder, you get access to the same familiar Elementor user interface and all of the widgets.
This opens up a great deal of possibilities:
You might utilize the Form widget to create e-mail opt-in popups and connect them straight to your e-mail marketing service of choice.
Or, you could use the Login widget to develop a popup login type for your website. Best Free Theme WordPress Elementor.
When you release a popup, you’ll get a selection of targeting and activate rules to control exactly where and when your popup appears:
Best Free Theme WordPress Elementor
Should You Use Elementor Free vs Pro?
If you have actually made it this far, there’s a great chance that you think Elementor is right for your requirements.
That results in the next concern – can you use the totally free variation at WordPress.org or should you acquire Elementor Pro?
This is an important decision, so we in fact wrote an entire post on how to select between Elementor complimentary vs Pro.
In general, if you simply wish to design some posts/pages or standard landing pages, you can most likely get by with the free variation.
With that being stated, there’s a lot of value in Elementor Pro. It adds:
- 30+ new widgets, consisting of the Form widget. The Kind widget is particularly powerful for marketing pages.
- Style Builder. This lets you design your entire theme and WooCommerce shop utilizing Elementor.
- Popup Builder. This lets you develop popups utilizing Elementor.
- More templates. While the free variation includes some templates, you require Pro for complete gain access to.
- More design alternatives. You get access to customized positioning.
Buying Elementor Pro is not the only method to extend Elementor.
If you desire more versatility to customize your theme, you do not need to acquire Elementor Pro. Instead, you could use a flexible theme like Astra. Through its numerous 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. Best Free Theme WordPress Elementor.
You can construct your header and footer using Astra. Since Astra is constructed to pair with Elementor, you can still utilize Elementor to develop the content that goes “between” your header, footer, and other style aspects.
Astra likewise includes tons of pre-built site templates developed with Elementor. You can import an already-finished site utilizing Astra and then just fine-tune it to match your needs using Elementor.
Or, if you wish to include new widgets for style versatility, you might purchase 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 concern that is recently acquiring appeal. And truly so.
Elementor is a plugin that can be beneficial for including gorgeous widgets and designs to your site. Its versatile and easy-to-use functions have invited a number of addon plugins that let you produce unbelievable sites without needing to code.
However, if you utilize a lot of plugins or have a lot of animations then it might make your whole site slow.
The question occurs if Elementor slows your site down even without any of these addons. Best Free Theme WordPress Elementor.
To discover, we compare 2 of our starter design template websites. Among them was built 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 have a look at.
- Gutenberg website from Beginner Templates
- Elementor website from Starter Templates
We hosted both sites on the exact same server and under different directory sites of the same domain name and compared their performance in GT Metrix.
Here are the results.
As you can see, the efficiency of the Gutenberg website is much faster than the Elementor site.
In regards to precise loading time, the website made with Elementor took about 5.5 s to load completely while the site made with Gutenberg took 2.2 s.
If you are enhancing for SEO, you understand how huge of a distinction that is!
In fact, the exact same site built with Beaver Builder also carries out a little much better than the Elementor site.
In terms of completely filled time, it takes a second longer than the Elementor site to load.
Elementor Alternatives
Elementor is a great tool, it does not indicate that it is the ideal tool for you all the time.
For instance, if you are constructing a concentrated landing page with the Elementor base variation, you may not be able to do it directly without incorporating another contact form plugin or a payment gateway. Best Free Theme WordPress Elementor.
In such a case you will require to update to Elementor Pro.
For the SEOs out there, you might wish to consider a lighter plugin that loads faster without triggering any hold-ups in page loading.
With all these and lots of other consider mind, we have actually developed this list of Elementor options that can help you out.
Best Free Theme WordPress Elementor
Gutenberg
Gutenberg is among the most light-weight and fast site contractors since it is WordPress default editor. Gutenburg makes it simpler than ever to create websites with ease.
The blocks consist of whatever you might expect, consisting of headings and subheadings in addition to lists of products like images or videos within the content location on each private site page – all from one simple interface!
Developing a site in Gutenberg resembles constructing a house using Lego blocks. You set up the blocks in the best order to come up with a stunning site. Best Free Theme WordPress Elementor.
In terms of efficiency. Gutenberg works way much better than any other page Builder. It is optimized for WordPress users and delivers what it promises. It likewise does not have the various style components that Elementor brings to the table.
If you are someone who prefers performance over style, 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). It does offer a stable and consistent experience with its core plugin that only builds individual pieces of material. There is the Beaver Builder Theme readily available if you desire one too! Best Free Theme WordPress Elementor.
Beaver Builder is a complete page design package that offers you with all the tools and elements to develop any kind of website. It has components such as headings, buttons, maps, sliders, contact kinds, reviews, and more all in one place.
It stands head to head in regards to design and performance with Elementor. However, Beaver Builder does not have as lots of addons built 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 quickly, user friendly with website speed in mind.
SeedProd’s wise style system makes recycling blocks of material fast and simple by specifying color pattern which will conserve time when creating new layouts. Best Free Theme WordPress Elementor.
It has all the blocks and features you ‘d anticipate from a powerful page Builder such as opt-in kinds, social profiles, countdown timers. It likewise consists of contact pages with an alternative to quickly reroute visitors on any website map or Google Maps listing for their company place!
You can utilize SeedProd’s custom-made domain mapping function which will save time when handling numerous customer landing pages in WordPress while still maintaining branding connection throughout platforms.
Any Lingering Questions?
As you can see, we believe that Elementor is among the best WordPress page builders out there, which is why we’ve use Astra, one of the most popular styles for Elementor, and Ultimate Addons for Elementor, one of the most popular Elementor widget collections.
We’re likewise not alone in our positive Elementor review – over 4 million WordPress sites use Elementor and Elementor has a remarkable 4.7-star rating on over 5,900 evaluations.
If you wish to experience what Elementor can offer free of charge:
Set up the complimentary Astra style to create a versatile base for your Elementor styles.
Set up the complimentary Elementor plugin from WordPress.org and begin structure. Best Free Theme WordPress Elementor.
If you like what you see, think about whether Elementor Pro is right for your requirements.
Is there anything we missed in our Elementor review that would assist you make your choice? Leave a comment and we’ll try to help you decide.