Elementor Evaluation: Is It The Best WordPress Page Builder? – Best Free WordPress Theme Elementor
Trying to decide if Elementor is the ideal page Builder for your WordPress website? In this hands-on Elementor evaluation, we’ll help you understand:
- How Elementor can benefit you
- Who ought to use Elementor
- The special functions that help Elementor stand apart from the competitors
- Whether you ought to utilize the totally free variation or open your wallet for the premium variation
Best Free WordPress Theme Elementor
We have actually developed Astra, among the most popular styles for Elementor, as well as a popular add-on for Elementor, so you can probably think that we’re fans of Elementor. Let’s get that out of the way – this is a positive Elementor review. Best Free WordPress Theme Elementor.
Comprehending why we like Elementor and have built items in the Elementor community is more essential than just the truth that we like it – that’s what we’re going to attempt and interact in this evaluation.
By the end of our Elementor evaluation, you ought to have whatever that you need to make an educated decision about whether or not Elementor is the right tool for your WordPress site.
Best Free WordPress Theme Elementor
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 building it.
- Drag and drop different content and style aspects to create the perfect style.
Basically, it changes creating a beautiful, custom website design from something you require to be a designer to do, to something that anybody can do. Best Free WordPress Theme Elementor.
Elementor is now actively utilized by over 4 million WordPress sites, which makes it the most popular WordPress page Builder. It’s also kept an outstanding 4.7-star score (out of 5) on over 5,900 evaluations, so the majority of those users are quite pleased with Elementor.
There are a lot of WordPress page builders that use a visual, drag-and-drop user interface, though, so what makes Elementor stand out and why is it so effective?
Well, we’ll enter this in more depth later on, but a few of Elementor’s standout features are:
- Lots of content elements – these are the foundation of your page. They’re what you “drag-and-drop” to make your style.
- Responsive design – many people search the web on smart devices, so it is necessary that your styles look fantastic on all devices. 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 features hundreds of professionally developed templates so that you do not need to go back to square one.
- Style options – you get lots of in-depth style choices to make your design pixel-perfect without resorting to custom-made CSS (though you can do that too).
- Benefit – you get great deals of handy tools like right-click assistance, a fast discover tool, and more to help you construct beautiful pages much faster.
- Theme Builder – with the Pro variation, you can design your entire WordPress style utilizing Elementor (though we still advise pairing it with a quality theme).
- Dynamic content – you can include vibrant material from custom fields and plugins like ACF, Pods, and Toolset.
- Popup Builder – with the Pro version, you can likewise develop all types of popups using the exact same visual, drag-and-drop user interface.
- WooCommerce Builder – if you’re constructing an eCommerce shop, you can develop your WooCommerce store using Elementor and include products in your other designs. Best Free WordPress Theme Elementor.
Who Is Elementor For?
Elementor is for … well, nearly anyone who’s using WordPress.
A digital online marketer may like Elementor for its ability to help them quickly develop landing pages and popups, while a casual user may simply be looking for a method to include some extra flair to their blog posts.
Let’s take a look at some particular scenarios:
Best Free WordPress Theme Elementor
The Casual User
If you’re just a casual user searching for a method to add some style to your blog posts or build a great-looking homepage, Elementor is ideal for you.
You’ll be able to utilize the visual user interface to spin up some beautiful styles without needing any technical knowledge … and you’ll most likely have the ability to do it totally free! More on whether you ought to utilize the complimentary or paid version later on. Best Free WordPress Theme Elementor.
The Digital Marketer
Elementor is excellent for digital marketers and groups because it includes lots of marketing elements.
For instance, the Form widget in Elementor Pro lets you develop all types of lead kinds and connect them to popular email marketing services. It also has a Zapier integration, which lets you connect to your CRM, as well.
You can likewise use the Popup Builder to develop opt-in popups and target them anywhere on your website. And if you’re selling product and services, you can use WooCommerce Builder to design your sales pages.
The core Elementor plugin itself is likewise an exceptional option for structure WordPress landing pages.
The Site Builder
If you’re developing sites for customers, Elementor is a perfect (and popular) option.
You can combine Elementor with a versatile theme like Astra to develop 100% custom-made client websites without any code required. You can likewise use Style Builder when needed, like designing the design template for a custom-made post type and incorporating dynamic information from ACF, Pods, or Toolset.
Best Free WordPress Theme Elementor
Elementor Prices
Short answer: It’s Free.
The base variation of Elementor that is available in the WordPress Plugin repository is entirely complimentary to utilize. There is likewise a pro variation with a lot more flexibility and a lot more features.
Check out our article 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 sites. It is restricted at certain points.
With Elementor Pro you can tailor your header, footer, posts page, single posts page, or product pages. Best Free WordPress Theme Elementor.
The Elementor base version delivers the bare minimum you need to create and personalize your site. If you want to have the freedom of revamping the whole site, Elementor Pro is the finest choice.
With Elementor Pro you can also add pop-ups, contact types, membership kinds, 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 including imports for header, footer, and pop-ups
- Total site customization through Theme Builder. This lets you change the header, footer, and posts pages
- WooCommerce Builder for editing product and classification pages in eCommerce websites
- Popup Builder with advanced functions like, exit intent, after scroll, and manages to display specific pop-ups on particular pages
- Visual Type Builder that can be integrated with popular email marketing tools
- You can produce international widgets and utilize them site-wide
- Include customized CSS
- Deploy any Elementor widget practically anywhere you desire
Elementor Pro Prices
Elementor Pro has a 5 tier prices strategy based on the number of licenses you want.
If you are working with a single website then the Essential Plan would be best for you. If you are working on multiple websites, the Advanced plan or above plans would be better.
All the strategies include a yearly subscription.
How Elementor Works: Touring the Interface
Let’s see how Elementor deals with this practical section.
Just like any other plugin, you need to set up and trigger Elementor through the WordPress repository.
Next, you can either select to tailor Elementor settings or dive straight into designing.
If you are simply starting, we recommend using the default settings just. Head over to pages and open one of the pages that you want to modify.
Click Edit With Elementor to start editing.
For the sake of this presentation, we set up the Astra theme and imported one of its demo sites built with Elementor. Best Free WordPress Theme Elementor.
Now, let’s go through the Elementor control panel using that demonstration site.
Here’s what the Elementor control panel appears like.
Here’s the label of various parts numbered.
- The working area or the primary canvas. This is where you edit and upgrade your site
- Elementor widgets location
- Elementor settings
- Open Elementor widgets
- Global settings
- Modification history
- Change view (desktop, tablet, mobile).
- Sneak peek changes.
- Release.
Elementor Structure Hierarchy
If you are completely new to constructing websites, you require to understand the structure of the Elementor page Builder.
Every page developed with Elementor consists of 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 individually. Best Free WordPress Theme Elementor.
A page can have any variety of sections in it. Sections contain columns and columns include the Elementor widgets.
Here is an illustration showing what the structure in Elementor appears like.
Best Free WordPress Theme Elementor
How to Style a Page in Elementor from Scratch
When developing a web page, you can either begin with a blank screen or import a pre-existing design template. In this area, we will cover how you can create a page from scratch using Elementor. Best Free WordPress Theme Elementor.
Here’s how you do it:
Step 1: Open a blank page and click “Edit With Elementor”.
Step 2: Click on the “+” button to include a new area.
Step 3: Pick an area 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.
Once you are happy with the positioning, you can change the finer details in the Content, Style, and Advanced Sections.
You can play around with the choices when finding out to discover the ideal styles for you.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
How to Design a Pre-Existing Page in Elementor
Often you might require to edit a pre-existing page with Elementor. The procedure is not extremely various in this case either. It is much simpler to modify an existing Elementor page than beginning from scratch.
Here’s how you do it.
To add a brand-new widget, drag it from the sidebar on the.
To rearrange a widget on the visual preview, you can likewise utilize drag and drop. If you want to edit text, simply click and type on the visual sneak peek:
To create the designs for your widgets, use areas and columns.
To customize a widget, click it. That will open the widget’s settings in the sidebar, which are divided into three tabs:
Utilize a comparable technique to tailor areas and columns:
As you alter a component’s settings, you’ll instantly see those modifications reviewed the visual sneak peek.
8 Remarkable Features That Assist 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 home builders.
1. Convenient Editing Features for Faster Design
Elementor includes some hassle-free modifying features that assist you construct styles quicker.
Elementor comes with right-click support, which most other page contractors don’t offer.
You can right-click on any element to replicate it, copy and paste designs, and more:
It also comes with a beneficial Navigator view that gives you a purchased list of all the content on your page, broken up by areas 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 simpler to discover: Best Free WordPress Theme Elementor.
And to help you quickly navigate between your designs, it also consists of a Finder tool that lets you jump to anything that you’ve constructed with Elementor by searching for it by name:
2. Huge Widget Selection for Design Versatility
Throughout the core plugin and add-ons, Elementor has an absolutely massive selection of widgets, which provides you a lots of versatility when developing your styles.
It’s not just about the 60+ widgets that come with Elementor and Elementor Pro, though, there’s likewise a huge choice of widgets from third-party developers.
For instance, Ultimate Addons for Elementor adds another 36+ brand-new widgets that you can utilize in your designs, covering whatever from form stylers to hotspots, content toggles, videos, and more.
With a lot of options, you can often discover a widget that does precisely what you want it to.
3. Comprehensive Design and Positioning Guidelines for Pixel-Perfect Designs
Another area where Elementor beats out a lot of the competitors is its style alternatives.
Elementor lets you do all the fundamentals – you can switch up colors, fonts, spacing, and so on.
It likewise adds innovative options like:
Forming dividers
Customized placing
Animations, consisting of parallax scrolling, mouse tracking, 3D tilt, and more
Customized CSS for private widgets
Simply put, Elementor offers you more alternatives to develop a special, reliable style.
4. Substantial Template Choice to Save You Time
If you don’t want to develop your styles from scratch, Elementor includes a huge choice of design templates, divided into two classifications:
Pages – full-page design templates. All you do is customize them to fulfill your needs. Best Free WordPress Theme Elementor.
Blocks – design templates for particular parts of a page, like a FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION. You can mix-and-match them like legos to develop total styles.
Similar to widgets, you can also discover design templates from third-party sources.
If you use the Astra WordPress style, it includes stacks of pre-made starter design templates built with Elementor. Each starter site includes numerous Elementor design templates that you can personalize as required.
5. Versatile Kind Widget and Combinations
Above, I mentioned Elementor’s widget choice in general. However I think it deserves singling out a specific widget:
The Kind widget.
The Kind widget lets you create customized types, complete with as many fields as required. Where this widget gets actually powerful, particularly when it comes to marketing applications, is its built-in integrations.
You can hook it as much as popular e-mail marketing services like ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Mailchimp, and more. There’s likewise a Webhook alternative that lets you connect to Zapier (and the thousands of apps readily available there), along with chat combinations for Slack and Discord.
6. Style Builder With Dynamic Content for Customized WordPress Sites
With Elementor Pro, you acquire the capability to surpass posts and pages and design your whole WordPress style with Elementor. That is, you can build:
Headers
Footers
Single design templates
Archive design templates
You might produce a customized post type and then utilize Elementor to design the 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 create with plugins like ACF, Toolset, and Pods.
With this vibrant function, you can build really custom sites and harness WordPress’ power as a versatile content management system. Best Free WordPress Theme Elementor.
Just one note – while this is certainly a powerful function, there are still some reasons you may wish to select a flexible Elementor style like Astra even if you decide to utilize Elementor Style Builder.
7. WooCommerce Builder for Customized eCommerce Styles
If you’re developing an eCommerce shop, you can likewise use Elementor Style Builder to your shop material with dedicated WooCommerce Builder widgets.
You’ll have the ability to develop both your single product pages and go shopping pages.
To assist you construct your styles, you’ll get a selection of dedicated WooCommerce widgets for everything from item images to upsells.
In one of our short articles, we talked about how to develop an eCommerce site with Elementor.
8. Popup Builder for Marketing, Functionality, and More
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:
For instance, you might utilize the Form widget to develop e-mail opt-in popups and link them directly to your e-mail marketing service of option.
Or, you could use the Login widget to develop a popup login form for your site. Best Free WordPress Theme Elementor.
When you release a popup, you’ll get a variety of targeting and activate guidelines to manage exactly where and when your popup appears:
Best Free WordPress Theme Elementor
Should You Utilize Elementor Free vs Pro?
If you’ve made it this far, there’s a good chance that you believe Elementor is right for your requirements.
That results in the next question – can you use the free version at WordPress.org or should you acquire Elementor Pro?
This is a crucial choice, so we in fact wrote a whole post on how to pick in between Elementor complimentary vs Pro.
In general, if you simply wish to develop some posts/pages or basic landing pages, you can probably get by with the totally free variation.
With that being said, there’s a great deal of worth in Elementor Pro. It adds:
- 30+ brand-new widgets, consisting of the Kind widget. The Kind widget is especially powerful for marketing pages.
- Theme Builder. This lets you create your entire style and WooCommerce store utilizing Elementor.
- Popup Builder. This lets you develop popups using Elementor.
- More templates. While the totally free version consists of some design templates, you require Pro for complete access.
- More design options. For example, you get access to customized positioning.
Purchasing Elementor Pro is not the only method to extend Elementor.
For example, if you desire more flexibility to customize your style, you do not require to buy Elementor Pro. Instead, you could utilize a flexible theme like Astra. Through its many Customizer settings, you can adjust Astra to pretty much any usage, and it’s a lot simpler than attempting to design your own theme from scratch. Best Free WordPress Theme Elementor.
You can build your header and footer using Astra. Then, since Astra is constructed to pair with Elementor, you can still use Elementor to create the content that goes “between” your header, footer, and other style elements.
Astra also includes tons of pre-built website design templates constructed with Elementor. You can import an already-finished site using Astra and then just modify it to match your needs utilizing Elementor.
Or, if you want to add new widgets for style flexibility, you could buy 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 been a concern that is just recently gaining appeal. And truly so.
Elementor is a plugin that can be helpful for including lovely widgets and styles to your website. Its flexible and user friendly functions have invited a number of addon plugins that let you produce incredible sites without having to code.
If you use too numerous plugins or have too lots of animations then it may make your entire site sluggish.
So the question occurs if Elementor slows your site down even without any of these addons. Best Free WordPress Theme Elementor.
To discover, we compare 2 of our starter design template sites. 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 discover.
Here are the websites for you to take a look at.
- Gutenberg website from Starter Templates
- Elementor website from Starter Templates
We hosted both sites on the very same server and under different directory sites of the same domain and compared their efficiency in GT Metrix.
Here are the results.
As you can see, the efficiency of the Gutenberg site is much faster than the Elementor site.
In terms of 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 big of a distinction that is!
The exact same website built with Beaver Builder also performs slightly better than the Elementor website.
In terms of fully packed time, it takes a 2nd longer than the Elementor site to load.
Elementor Alternatives
Elementor is a terrific tool, it does not suggest that it is the ideal tool for you all the time.
For instance, if you are building a focused landing page with the Elementor base version, you may not be able to do it straight without incorporating another contact kind plugin or a payment gateway. Best Free WordPress Theme Elementor.
In such a case you will require to update to Elementor Pro.
For the SEOs out there, you might want to consider a lighter plugin that loads much faster without triggering any delays in page loading.
With all these and lots of other factors in mind, we have created this list of Elementor alternatives that can assist you out.
Best Free WordPress Theme Elementor
Gutenberg
Gutenberg is among the most lightweight and fast site contractors due to the fact that it is WordPress default editor. Gutenburg makes it simpler than ever to develop web pages with ease.
The blocks consist of whatever you may expect, including headings and subheadings along with lists of products like images or videos within the content location on each private site page – all from one easy interface!
Developing a website in Gutenberg resembles building a home using Lego blocks. You organize the blocks in the ideal order to come up with a gorgeous website. Best Free WordPress Theme Elementor.
In terms of performance. Gutenberg works way better than any other page Builder. It is enhanced for WordPress users and provides what it promises. Nevertheless, it likewise lacks the different style components that Elementor brings to the table.
If you are someone who prefers efficiency over design, then Gutenberg is the right choice for you.
Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder is not as flashy or feature-rich compared to Elementor (Elementor Vs Beaver Builder contrast). However it does offer a stable and constant experience with its core plugin that just constructs private pieces of material. There is the Beaver Builder Style available if you want one too! Best Free WordPress Theme Elementor.
Beaver Builder is a total page design package that offers you with all the tools and parts to build any type of website. It has elements such as headings, buttons, maps, sliders, contact kinds, reviews, and more all in one place.
It stands head to head in terms of style and performance with Elementor. However, 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 been developed to be as quick, user friendly with site speed in mind.
SeedProd’s smart design system makes reusing blocks of content quick and simple by defining color pattern which will save time when developing new designs. Best Free WordPress Theme Elementor.
It has all the blocks and functions you ‘d get out of an effective page Builder such as opt-in kinds, social profiles, countdown timers. It also includes contact pages with an option to easily reroute visitors on any site map or Google Maps noting for their business area!
You can utilize SeedProd’s customized domain mapping function which will conserve time when managing multiple client landing pages in WordPress while still preserving branding continuity across platforms.
Any Lingering Questions?
As you can see, we believe that Elementor is among the very best WordPress page contractors out there, which is why we have actually usage 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 four million WordPress sites utilize Elementor and Elementor has a fantastic 4.7-star rating on over 5,900 evaluations.
If you want to experience what Elementor can use free of charge:
Install the free Astra style to develop a versatile base for your Elementor styles.
Set up the free Elementor plugin from WordPress.org and start building. Best Free WordPress Theme Elementor.
Then, if you like what you see, consider whether Elementor Pro is right for your needs.
Exists anything we missed in our Elementor review that would help you make your decision? Leave a comment and we’ll attempt to assist you decide.