Elementor Evaluation: Is It The Very Best WordPress Page Builder? – Blank WordPress Theme Elementor
Trying to choose if Elementor is the best page Builder for your WordPress website? In this hands-on Elementor evaluation, we’ll assist you comprehend:
- How Elementor can benefit you
- Who should use Elementor
- The distinct features that help Elementor stand apart from the competition
- Whether you should utilize the totally free version or open up your wallet for the premium version
Blank WordPress Theme Elementor
We have actually developed Astra, one of the most popular themes for Elementor, in addition to 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 favorable Elementor review. Blank WordPress Theme Elementor.
Understanding why we like Elementor and have actually developed items in the Elementor community is more important than simply the reality that we like it – that’s what we’re going to try and communicate in this review.
By the end of our Elementor review, you should have whatever that you require to make an educated choice about whether Elementor is the best tool for your WordPress website.
Blank WordPress Theme Elementor
What Does Elementor Offer?
Elementor is a visual, drag-and-drop page Builder. If you’re not familiar with these terms, this means that you can:
- See a sneak peek of exactly what your page will look like to visitors as you’re constructing it.
- Drag and drop various material and design elements to develop the perfect design.
Generally, it changes developing a beautiful, custom-made website design from something you require to be a designer to do, to something that anyone can do. Blank WordPress Theme Elementor.
Elementor is now actively used by over 4 million WordPress sites, that makes it the most popular WordPress page Builder. It’s likewise kept an excellent 4.7-star rating (out of 5) on over 5,900 evaluations, so most of those users are quite pleased with Elementor.
There are a lot of WordPress page home builders that offer a visual, drag-and-drop user interface, though, so what makes Elementor stand apart and why is it so effective?
Well, we’ll get into this in more depth in the future, however some of Elementor’s standout functions are:
- Great deals of content components – these are the building blocks of your page. They’re what you “drag-and-drop” to make your design.
- Responsive design – many people search the web on smart devices, so it is necessary that your designs look fantastic on all gadgets. Elementor’s styles are responsive by default and you get lots of choices to control how it works.
- Templates – staring at a blank page is scary! Elementor includes hundreds of expertly designed design templates so that you don’t have to go back to square one.
- Design choices – you get lots of comprehensive design choices to make your design pixel-perfect without resorting to custom CSS (though you can do that too).
- Convenience – you get lots of convenient tools like right-click assistance, a fast find tool, and more to help you build beautiful pages much faster.
- Theme Builder – with the Pro version, you can design your whole WordPress style utilizing Elementor (though we still recommend matching it with a quality theme).
- Dynamic content – you can include dynamic content from customized fields and plugins like ACF, Pods, and Toolset.
- Popup Builder – with the Pro variation, you can likewise develop all types of popups utilizing the same visual, drag-and-drop user interface.
- WooCommerce Builder – if you’re constructing an eCommerce shop, you can develop your WooCommerce shop utilizing Elementor and include products in your other designs. Blank WordPress Theme Elementor.
Who Is Elementor For?
Elementor is for … well, nearly anybody who’s utilizing WordPress.
A digital online marketer might like Elementor for its ability to help them rapidly produce landing pages and popups, while a casual user might simply be looking for a way to add some extra style to their blog site posts.
Let’s look at some specific situations:
Blank WordPress Theme Elementor
The Casual User
If you’re simply a casual user trying to find a way to include some style to your blog posts or develop a beautiful homepage, Elementor is ideal for you.
You’ll be able 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 free of charge! More on whether you need to use the free or paid version later. Blank WordPress Theme Elementor.
The Digital Marketer
Elementor is terrific for digital online marketers and groups because it consists of lots of marketing elements.
For example, the Type widget in Elementor Pro lets you develop all kinds of lead kinds and connect them to popular e-mail marketing services. It also has a Zapier combination, which lets you link 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 products or services, you can utilize WooCommerce Builder to develop your sales pages.
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 an ideal (and popular) option.
You can integrate Elementor with a versatile style like Astra to build 100% custom customer websites without any code needed. You can also utilize Style Builder when needed, like developing the design template for a customized post type and including dynamic information from ACF, Pods, or Toolset.
Blank 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 totally free to use. There is also a professional version with a lot more flexibility and a lot more functions.
Take a look at our article on Elementor Vs. Elementor Pro if you wish to get a comprehensive review of both.
Elementor is a feature-packed plugin that works for all websites. It is limited at certain points.
With Elementor Pro you can personalize your header, footer, posts page, single posts page, or item pages. Blank WordPress Theme Elementor.
The Elementor base variation provides the bare minimum you need to develop and personalize your site. But if you wish to have the flexibility of upgrading the entire site, Elementor Pro is the best option.
With Elementor Pro you can likewise include pop-ups, contact forms, subscription forms, international widgets, and custom-made CSS.
Here is a list of additional functions that you get in Elementor Pro:
- 50+ extra widgets
- 300+ premium demo imports including imports for header, footer, and pop-ups
- Total site modification through Style Builder. This lets you alter the header, footer, and posts pages
- WooCommerce Builder for editing item and classification pages in eCommerce sites
- Popup Builder with innovative features like, exit intent, after scroll, and manages to display particular pop-ups on particular pages
- Visual Form Builder that can be incorporated with popular email marketing tools
- You can create worldwide widgets and use them site-wide
- Add customized CSS
- Release any Elementor widget pretty much anywhere you want
Elementor Pro Rates
Elementor Pro has a 5 tier pricing strategy based upon the variety of licenses you want.
If you are dealing with a single site 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 feature an annual subscription.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
How Elementor Works: Exploring the User interface
Let’s see how Elementor deals with this useful area.
Much like any other plugin, you need to set up and activate Elementor through the WordPress repository.
Next, you can either choose to personalize Elementor settings or dive straight into developing.
If you are simply starting out, we recommend using the default settings just. Head over to pages and open among the pages that you wish to edit.
Click Edit With Elementor to start modifying.
For the sake of this demonstration, we set up the Astra style and imported among its demonstration sites developed with Elementor. Blank WordPress Theme Elementor.
Now, let’s go through the Elementor dashboard using that demonstration website.
Here’s what the Elementor dashboard looks like.
Here’s the label of different parts numbered.
- The working area or the primary canvas. This is where you edit and upgrade your website
- Elementor widgets location
- Elementor settings
- Open Elementor widgets
- Worldwide settings
- Revision history
- Switch view (desktop, tablet, mobile).
- Sneak peek changes.
- Release.
Elementor Structure Hierarchy
If you are totally new to developing websites, you need to understand the structure of the Elementor page Builder.
Every page built with Elementor contains areas and columns.
Section. A section is essentially a row. You can add a background, change its sizing, and more. Columns and widgets go inside sections.
Column. A column divides a section into different columns. You can then manage each column individually. Blank WordPress Theme Elementor.
A page can have any number of sections in it. Areas include columns and columns consist of the Elementor widgets.
Here is an illustration showing what the structure in Elementor looks like.
Blank WordPress Theme Elementor
How to Style a Page in Elementor from Scratch
When creating a web page, you can either begin with a blank screen or import a pre-existing template. In this area, we will cover how you can create a page from scratch using Elementor. Blank WordPress Theme Elementor.
Here’s how you do it:
Step 1: Open a blank page and click “Edit With Elementor”.
Action 2: Click the “+” button to add a brand-new section.
Step 3: Pick an area with a single column or numerous ones depending upon your needs.
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 information in the Material, Style, and Advanced Sections.
You can experiment with the alternatives when learning to discover the best designs for you.
How to Design a Pre-Existing Page in Elementor
Often you may need to edit 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 starting from scratch.
Here’s how you do it.
To include a brand-new widget, drag it from the sidebar left wing.
To rearrange 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 sneak peek:
To develop the layouts 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 3 tabs:
Utilize a similar technique to personalize areas and columns:
As you change an aspect’s settings, you’ll immediately see those modifications reflected on the visual sneak peek.
Eight Incredible Features That Help Elementor Stand Apart
Next, let’s go through some of the things that help Elementor stand out from other visual, drag-and-drop page contractors.
1. Practical Editing Features for Faster Design
Elementor includes some hassle-free modifying functions that assist you construct designs faster.
Elementor comes with right-click assistance, which most other page home builders do not offer.
You can right-click on any element to duplicate it, copy and paste styles, and more:
It also includes an useful Navigator view that offers you a purchased list of all the content on your page, broken up by areas and columns. You can utilize this to quickly open the settings for any aspect on your page. You can also rename elements to make them much easier to discover: Blank WordPress Theme Elementor.
And to help you quickly browse between your styles, it also consists of a Finder tool that lets you leap to anything that you’ve constructed with Elementor by searching for it by name:
2. Huge Widget Choice for Design Versatility
Across the core plugin and add-ons, Elementor has a definitely massive selection of widgets, which gives you a lots of flexibility when building your designs.
It’s not practically 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 includes another 36+ new widgets that you can use in your styles, covering whatever from type stylers to hotspots, content toggles, videos, and more.
With so many options, you can almost always find a widget that does precisely what you desire it to.
3. Comprehensive Design and Positioning Guidelines for Pixel-Perfect Styles
Another area where Elementor vanquishes a great deal of the competitors is its design alternatives.
Elementor lets you do all the basics – you can change up colors, typefaces, spacing, and so on.
It also adds sophisticated options like:
Forming dividers
Custom placing
Animations, consisting of parallax scrolling, mouse tracking, 3D tilt, and more
Custom-made CSS for individual widgets
Simply put, Elementor offers you more choices to create an unique, efficient style.
4. Substantial Design Template Choice to Save You Time
If you don’t want to develop your styles from scratch, Elementor comes with a huge choice of design templates, divided into two classifications:
Pages – full-page design templates. All you do is personalize them to fulfill your needs. Blank WordPress Theme Elementor.
Blocks – design templates for specific parts of a page, like a FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION. You can mix-and-match them like legos to construct total styles.
Similar to widgets, you can also discover templates from third-party sources.
If you utilize the Astra WordPress theme, it comes with loads of pre-made starter design templates built with Elementor. Each starter site consists of numerous Elementor templates that you can customize as needed.
5. Flexible Form Widget and Integrations
Above, I mentioned Elementor’s widget selection in general. However I think it deserves singling out a particular widget:
The Form widget.
The Kind widget lets you develop custom kinds, complete with as numerous fields as required. Where this widget gets truly effective, particularly when it comes to marketing applications, is its integrated combinations.
You can hook it as much as popular e-mail marketing services like ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Mailchimp, and more. There’s also a Webhook choice that lets you link to Zapier (and the countless apps available there), as well as chat combinations for Slack and Discord.
6. Style Builder With Dynamic Material for Customized WordPress Sites
With Elementor Pro, you gain the ability to exceed posts and pages and develop your entire WordPress style with Elementor. That is, you can construct:
Headers
Footers
Single templates
Archive design templates
You might develop a customized post type and then utilize Elementor to develop the design template for that post type, rather than messing around with theme template files directly.
The really powerful thing here is that you have the ability to generate vibrant content from customized fields that you create with plugins like ACF, Toolset, and Pods.
With this dynamic feature, you can build truly custom sites and harness WordPress’ power as a versatile material management system. Blank WordPress Theme Elementor.
Just one note – while this is definitely a powerful feature, there are still some reasons that you might want to pick a flexible Elementor theme like Astra even if you decide to use Elementor Style Builder.
7. WooCommerce Builder for Custom eCommerce Designs
If you’re producing an eCommerce store, you can likewise apply Elementor Style Builder to your store content with devoted WooCommerce Builder widgets.
You’ll have the ability to create both your single product pages and go shopping pages.
To help you construct your styles, you’ll get a range of dedicated WooCommerce widgets for everything from item images to upsells.
In one of our short articles, we discussed how to develop an eCommerce website with Elementor.
8. Popup Builder for Marketing, Functionality, and More
Elementor Pro can do more than simply posts, pages, and style style – you can also utilize it to build 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:
For example, you might use the Form widget to create e-mail opt-in popups and link them straight to your e-mail marketing service of option.
Or, you could use the Login widget to develop a popup login type for your site. Blank WordPress Theme Elementor.
When you publish a popup, you’ll get an array of targeting and set off rules to control exactly where and when your popup appears:
Blank WordPress Theme Elementor
Should You Utilize Elementor Free vs Pro?
If you’ve made it this far, there’s a great chance that you believe Elementor is right for your needs.
That leads to the next concern – can you use the free version at WordPress.org or should you acquire Elementor Pro?
This is an essential decision, so we actually wrote an entire post on how to select between Elementor free vs Pro.
In general, if you just wish to design some posts/pages or basic landing pages, you can probably manage with the totally free variation.
With that being stated, there’s a great deal of worth in Elementor Pro. It adds:
- 30+ new widgets, consisting of the Type widget. The Form widget is particularly 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 utilizing Elementor.
- More templates. While the free version includes some templates, you need Pro for full gain access to.
- More style options. You get access to customized positioning.
Acquiring Elementor Pro is not the only way to extend Elementor.
For example, if you want more flexibility to tailor your style, you do not require to acquire Elementor Pro. Instead, you could use a versatile theme like Astra. Through its lots of Customizer settings, you can adjust Astra to basically any use, and it’s a lot simpler than trying to develop your own theme from scratch. Blank WordPress Theme Elementor.
You can construct your header and footer utilizing Astra. Since Astra is constructed to combine with Elementor, you can still utilize Elementor to develop the material that goes “between” your header, footer, and other theme aspects.
Astra also consists of tons of pre-built site templates developed with Elementor. You can import an already-finished website utilizing Astra and then simply tweak it to match your requirements 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 adds 36+ new Elementor widgets.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
Does Elementor Decrease Your Website?
Now, this has been a question that is just recently gaining popularity. And rightfully so.
Elementor is a plugin that can be helpful for including beautiful widgets and styles to your website. Its flexible and easy-to-use features have actually invited a number of addon plugins that let you produce unbelievable sites without needing to code.
However, if you use a lot of plugins or have a lot of animations then it might make your entire website sluggish.
So the question arises if Elementor slows your site down even without any of these addons. Blank WordPress Theme Elementor.
To find out, we compare two 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, but by what degree?
Let’s find out.
Here are the websites for you to take a look at.
- Gutenberg website from Beginner Templates
- Elementor site from Starter Templates
We hosted both websites on the same server and under different directory sites of the exact same domain name and compared their performance 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 exact 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 optimizing for SEO, you know how big of a difference that is!
The same website built with Beaver Builder also performs somewhat much better than the Elementor site.
In terms of completely packed time, it takes a second longer than the Elementor website to load.
Elementor Alternatives
Although Elementor is an excellent tool, it does not suggest that it is the ideal tool for you all the time.
For example, if you are constructing a concentrated landing page with the Elementor base version, you might not be able to do it directly without integrating another contact form plugin or a payment gateway. Blank WordPress Theme Elementor.
In such a case you will require to update to Elementor Pro.
For the SEOs out there, you might wish to think about a lighter plugin that loads faster without causing any hold-ups in page loading.
With all these and numerous other factors in mind, we have actually created this list of Elementor alternatives that can help you out.
Blank WordPress Theme Elementor
Gutenberg
Gutenberg is one of the most lightweight and quick site builders due to the fact that it is WordPress default editor. Gutenburg makes it much easier than ever to create web pages with ease.
The blocks include whatever you might expect, including headings and subheadings as well as lists of items like images or videos within the content location on each private website page – all from one easy user interface!
Building a website in Gutenberg is like developing a home utilizing Lego blocks. You organize the blocks in the ideal order to come up with a beautiful website. Blank WordPress Theme Elementor.
In regards to performance. Gutenberg works way much better than any other page Builder. It is optimized for WordPress users and delivers what it promises. However, it likewise does not have the different design elements that Elementor brings to the table.
If you are somebody who chooses performance over design, then Gutenberg is the right option for you.
Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder is not as fancy or feature-rich compared to Elementor (Elementor Vs Beaver Builder contrast). But it does supply a steady and constant experience with its core plugin that only constructs specific pieces of content. There is the Beaver Builder Theme readily available if you desire one too! Blank WordPress Theme Elementor.
Beaver Builder is a complete page design bundle that provides you with all the tools and components to build any kind of site. It has components such as headings, buttons, maps, sliders, contact forms, reviews, and more all in one location.
It stands head to head in regards to design and efficiency with Elementor. Beaver Builder does not have as many addons constructed for itself as Elementor does.
SeedProd
SeedProd is a premium drag-and-drop landing page Builder plugin for WordPress. It has actually been developed to be as quickly, easy-to-use with website speed in mind.
SeedProd’s clever style system makes reusing blocks of material fast and easy by specifying color pattern which will save time when creating brand-new layouts. Blank WordPress Theme Elementor.
It has all the blocks and features you ‘d anticipate from an effective page Builder such as opt-in forms, social profiles, countdown timers. It likewise includes contact pages with an alternative to easily redirect visitors on any site map or Google Maps listing for their company area!
You can utilize SeedProd’s customized domain mapping feature which will conserve time when handling multiple client landing pages in WordPress while still preserving branding continuity throughout platforms.
Any Lingering Questions?
As you can see, our company believe that Elementor is one of the very best WordPress page home builders out there, which is why we have actually use Astra, one of the most popular styles for Elementor, and Ultimate Addons for Elementor, among the most popular Elementor widget collections.
We’re also not alone in our positive Elementor review – over four million WordPress websites use 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 produce a versatile base for your Elementor designs.
Set up the totally free Elementor plugin from WordPress.org and begin building. Blank WordPress Theme Elementor.
If you like what you see, think about whether Elementor Pro is best for your needs.
Is there anything we missed in our Elementor review that would assist you make your decision? Leave a remark and we’ll attempt to help you choose.