Elementor Evaluation: Is It The Very Best WordPress Page Builder? – Buddyboss Theme Elementor
Attempting to choose if Elementor is the best page Builder for your WordPress website? In this hands-on Elementor evaluation, we’ll assist you understand:
- How Elementor can benefit you
- Who need to utilize Elementor
- The unique functions that assist Elementor stand apart from the competitors
- Whether you ought to use the totally free version or open up your wallet for the premium variation
Buddyboss Theme Elementor
We’ve created Astra, among the most popular themes for Elementor, in addition to a popular add-on for Elementor, so you can most likely think that we’re fans of Elementor. Let’s get that out of the way – this is a positive Elementor review. Buddyboss Theme Elementor.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
However understanding why we like Elementor and have actually constructed items in the Elementor environment is more crucial than simply the fact that we like it – that’s what we’re going to attempt and communicate in this evaluation.
By the end of our Elementor review, you should have everything that you need to make an informed decision about whether or not Elementor is the right tool for your WordPress website.
Buddyboss 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 sneak peek of precisely what your page will look like to visitors as you’re constructing it.
- Drag and drop different material and style aspects to create the ideal design.
Essentially, it changes developing a great-looking, custom website design from something you require to be a designer to do, to something that anybody can do. Buddyboss Theme Elementor.
Elementor is now actively used by over four million WordPress sites, that makes it the most popular WordPress page Builder. It’s likewise maintained an impressive 4.7-star rating (out of 5) on over 5,900 evaluations, so the majority of those users are quite happy with Elementor.
There are a great deal of WordPress page home builders that provide a visual, drag-and-drop user interface, however, so what makes Elementor stick out and why is it so effective?
Well, we’ll enter this in more depth later on, however some of Elementor’s standout features are:
- Great deals of content components – these are the foundation of your page. They’re what you “drag-and-drop” to make your design.
- Responsive design – the majority of people search the web on mobile phones, so it is essential that your designs look excellent on all devices. Elementor’s designs are responsive by default and you get great deals of alternatives to manage how it works.
- Design templates – staring at a blank page is scary! Elementor comes with numerous expertly created design templates so that you don’t need to go back to square one.
- Style alternatives – you get lots of in-depth design options to make your design pixel-perfect without resorting to custom CSS (though you can do that too).
- Benefit – you get lots of helpful tools like right-click support, a quick discover tool, and more to assist you build beautiful pages faster.
- Style Builder – with the Pro version, you can create your entire WordPress style using Elementor (though we still advise combining it with a quality style).
- Dynamic material – you can include dynamic content from custom fields and plugins like ACF, Pods, and Toolset.
- Popup Builder – with the Pro variation, you can likewise create all kinds of popups utilizing the very same visual, drag-and-drop interface.
- WooCommerce Builder – if you’re constructing an eCommerce store, you can develop your WooCommerce shop using Elementor and consist of products in your other styles. Buddyboss Theme Elementor.
Who Is Elementor For?
Elementor is for … well, nearly anyone who’s utilizing WordPress.
A digital marketer might like Elementor for its capability to assist them quickly produce landing pages and popups, while a casual user may simply be looking for a way to add some extra flair to their blog site posts.
Let’s look at some particular situations:
Buddyboss Theme Elementor
The Casual User
If you’re just a casual user trying to find a method to include some style to your blog posts or build a great-looking homepage, Elementor is best for you.
You’ll be able to use the visual user interface to spin up some beautiful styles without needing any technical knowledge … and you’ll probably have the ability to do it totally free! More on whether you need to use the totally free or paid variation in the future. Buddyboss Theme Elementor.
The Digital Online marketer
Elementor is terrific for digital marketers and teams because it includes tons of marketing aspects.
For instance, the Form widget in Elementor Pro lets you produce all types of lead kinds and link them to popular e-mail marketing services. It also has a Zapier integration, which lets you connect to your CRM.
You can also utilize the Popup Builder to develop opt-in popups and target them anywhere on your website. And if you’re offering services or products, you can utilize WooCommerce Builder to develop your sales pages.
Finally, the core Elementor plugin itself is likewise an exceptional option for building WordPress landing pages.
The Site Builder
If you’re building sites for customers, Elementor is an ideal (and popular) option.
You can integrate Elementor with a flexible theme like Astra to construct 100% custom-made customer sites with no code required. You can likewise use Theme Builder when needed, like designing the template for a custom post type and integrating dynamic information from ACF, Pods, or Toolset.
Buddyboss Theme Elementor
Elementor Pricing
Short answer: It’s Free.
The base version of Elementor that is offered in the WordPress Plugin repository is entirely free to utilize. There is also a pro variation with a lot more flexibility and a lot more functions.
Take a look at our post on Elementor Vs. Elementor Pro if you want to get a comprehensive review of both.
Elementor is a feature-packed plugin that works for all sites. It is limited at particular points.
With Elementor Pro you can tailor your header, footer, posts page, single posts page, or item pages. Buddyboss Theme Elementor.
The Elementor base version provides the bare minimum you need to design and tailor your website. But if you want to have the liberty of revamping the whole site, Elementor Pro is the very best option.
With Elementor Pro you can likewise include pop-ups, contact types, membership kinds, worldwide widgets, and custom-made CSS.
Here is a list of extra features that you get in Elementor Pro:
- 50+ extra widgets
- 300+ premium demo imports consisting of imports for header, footer, and pop-ups
- Complete site modification through Style Builder. This lets you change the header, footer, and posts pages
- WooCommerce Builder for modifying item and category pages in eCommerce sites
- Popup Builder with sophisticated features like, exit intent, after scroll, and manages to show certain pop-ups on certain pages
- Visual Type Builder that can be incorporated with popular e-mail marketing tools
- You can produce global widgets and utilize them site-wide
- Include customized CSS
- Release any Elementor widget basically anywhere you want
Elementor Pro Prices
Elementor Pro has a 5 tier prices strategy based on the variety of licenses you want.
If you are dealing with a single website then the Essential Strategy would be best for you. If you are working on several sites, the Advanced plan or above strategies would be more suitable.
All the strategies come with a yearly membership.
How Elementor Works: Visiting the Interface
Let’s see how Elementor deals with this practical section.
Similar to any other plugin, you need to set up and trigger Elementor through the WordPress repository.
Next, you can either select to customize Elementor settings or dive straight into designing.
If you are just starting, we advise utilizing the default settings just. Head over to pages and open one of the pages that you want to edit.
Click Edit With Elementor to begin editing.
For the sake of this presentation, we set up the Astra theme and imported one of its demonstration websites developed with Elementor. Buddyboss Theme Elementor.
Now, let’s go through the Elementor control panel using that demo website.
Here’s what the Elementor control panel looks like.
Here’s the label of various parts numbered.
- The workspace or the main canvas. This is where you edit and upgrade your website
- Elementor widgets area
- Elementor settings
- Open Elementor widgets
- International settings
- Revision history
- Switch view (desktop, tablet, mobile).
- Sneak peek modifications.
- Publish.
Elementor Structure Hierarchy
If you are completely brand-new to developing websites, you require to comprehend the structure of the Elementor page Builder.
Every page developed with Elementor includes sections and columns.
Section. A section is basically a row. You can add a background, alter its sizing, and more. Columns and widgets go inside areas.
Column. A column divides an area into various columns. You can then control each column separately. Buddyboss Theme Elementor.
A page can have any variety of areas in it. Areas include columns and columns include the Elementor widgets.
Here is an illustration revealing what the structure in Elementor appears like.
Buddyboss Theme Elementor
How to Design a Page in Elementor from Scratch
When creating a web page, you can either start with a blank screen or import a pre-existing design template. In this section, we will cover how you can develop a page from scratch using Elementor. Buddyboss Theme Elementor.
Here’s how you do it:
Action 1: Open a blank page and click “Edit With Elementor”.
Step 2: Click the “+” button to add a brand-new area.
Action 3: Pick 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 want to.
As soon as you more than happy with the positioning, you can adjust the finer information in the Material, Style, and Advanced Sections.
You can play around with the choices when finding out to find the best designs for you.
How to Design a Pre-Existing Page in Elementor
Sometimes you may require to edit a pre-existing page with Elementor. The procedure is not extremely different in this case either. In fact, it is a lot easier to modify an existing Elementor page than going back to square one.
Here’s how you do it.
To include a brand-new widget, drag it from the sidebar left wing.
To reorganize a widget on the visual preview, you can likewise use drag and drop. If you want to modify text, just click and type on the visual preview:
To develop the designs for your widgets, utilize sections and columns.
To tailor a widget, click on it. That will open the widget’s settings in the sidebar, which are divided into 3 tabs:
Utilize a similar method to personalize sections and columns:
As you alter an aspect’s settings, you’ll quickly see those changes reviewed the visual sneak peek.
Eight Amazing Functions That Help Elementor Stand Out
Next, let’s go through some of the things that assist Elementor stand out from other visual, drag-and-drop page contractors.
1. Practical Editing Features for Faster Style
Elementor includes some hassle-free editing features that help you build designs quicker.
Elementor comes with right-click assistance, which most other page home builders do not provide.
You can right-click on any aspect to duplicate it, copy and paste designs, and more:
It likewise features a beneficial Navigator view that provides you a bought list of all the material on your page, separated by sections and columns. You can utilize this to quickly open the settings for any element on your page. You can also relabel elements to make them simpler to discover: Buddyboss Theme Elementor.
And to help you quickly browse between your designs, it likewise includes a Finder tool that lets you jump to anything that you have actually developed with Elementor by searching for it by name:
2. Huge Widget Selection for Design Flexibility
Across the core plugin and add-ons, Elementor has a definitely huge choice of widgets, which gives you a ton of versatility when developing your styles.
It’s not just about the 60+ widgets that feature Elementor and Elementor Pro, though, there’s also a huge 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 form stylers to hotspots, content toggles, videos, and more.
With so many options, you can generally find a widget that does exactly what you desire it to.
3. In-depth Design and Positioning Rules for Pixel-Perfect Styles
Another area where Elementor vanquishes a great deal of the competitors is its style options.
Elementor lets you do all the fundamentals – you can change up colors, fonts, spacing, etc.
However it also adds innovative options like:
Forming dividers
Customized placing
Animations, consisting of parallax scrolling, mouse tracking, 3D tilt, and more
Custom CSS for private widgets
Simply put, Elementor provides you more alternatives to create a distinct, effective design.
4. Big Design Template Choice to Save You Time
If you don’t want to develop your designs from scratch, Elementor features a big choice of design templates, divided into two classifications:
Pages – full-page templates. All you do is personalize them to fulfill your requirements. Buddyboss 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 develop complete styles.
As with widgets, you can likewise find templates from third-party sources.
If you use the Astra WordPress theme, it features heaps of pre-made starter design templates constructed with Elementor. Each starter site includes numerous Elementor design templates that you can customize as required.
5. Versatile Kind Widget and Integrations
Above, I discussed Elementor’s widget selection in general. But I believe it deserves singling out a particular widget:
The Type widget.
The Type widget lets you produce customized forms, complete with as many fields as required. However where this widget gets actually effective, especially when it pertains to marketing implementations, is its built-in integrations.
You can hook it as much as popular email marketing services like ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Mailchimp, and more. There’s likewise a Webhook choice that lets you link to Zapier (and the countless apps readily available there), in addition to chat integrations for Slack and Discord.
6. Style Builder With Dynamic Material for Custom-made WordPress Sites
With Elementor Pro, you acquire the ability to exceed posts and pages and design your whole WordPress theme with Elementor. That is, you can construct:
Headers
Footers
Single templates
Archive templates
For instance, you might produce a custom-made post type and then use Elementor to develop the design template for that post type, rather than tampering theme template files directly.
The truly powerful thing here is that you have the ability to bring in vibrant material from custom fields that you create with plugins like ACF, Toolset, and Pods.
With this dynamic function, you can build truly custom-made sites and harness WordPress’ power as a flexible material management system. Buddyboss Theme Elementor.
Just one note – while this is certainly a powerful function, there are still some reasons that you might wish to select a versatile Elementor style like Astra even if you decide to use Elementor Style Builder.
7. WooCommerce Builder for Custom eCommerce Designs
If you’re creating an eCommerce store, you can also use Elementor Style Builder to your store material with dedicated WooCommerce Builder widgets.
You’ll be able to design both your single item pages and shop pages.
To assist you build your designs, you’ll get an array of dedicated WooCommerce widgets for whatever from product images to upsells.
In among our posts, we talked about how to develop an eCommerce website with Elementor.
8. Popup Builder for Marketing, Functionality, and More
Finally, Elementor Pro can do more than just posts, pages, and style design – you can also utilize it to build popups with Elementor Popup Builder.
With Popup Builder, you get access to the same familiar Elementor interface and all of the widgets.
This opens up a great deal of possibilities:
For example, you could utilize the Form widget to produce e-mail opt-in popups and link them straight to your email marketing service of option.
Or, you could use the Login widget to produce a popup login kind for your site. Buddyboss Theme Elementor.
When you publish a popup, you’ll get a range of targeting and activate guidelines to manage exactly where and when your popup appears:
Buddyboss Theme Elementor
Should You Use Elementor Free vs Pro?
If you’ve made it this far, there’s a likelihood that you believe Elementor is right for your requirements.
That results in the next question – can you utilize the totally free version at WordPress.org or should you acquire Elementor Pro?
This is a crucial decision, so we really wrote a whole post on how to pick in between Elementor complimentary vs Pro.
In general, if you just wish to develop some posts/pages or standard landing pages, you can probably get by with the free version.
With that being said, there’s a great deal of value in Elementor Pro. It adds:
- 30+ new widgets, including the Form widget. The Form widget is especially powerful for marketing pages.
- Theme Builder. This lets you develop your entire style and WooCommerce shop using Elementor.
- Popup Builder. This lets you build popups utilizing Elementor.
- More templates. While the totally free version consists of some templates, you need Pro for complete access.
- More design choices. You get access to customized positioning.
Purchasing Elementor Pro is not the only method to extend Elementor.
For instance, if you want more versatility to tailor your style, you don’t require to buy Elementor Pro. Rather, you could utilize a versatile style like Astra. Through its numerous Customizer settings, you can adjust Astra to practically any use, and it’s a lot simpler than attempting to develop your own theme from scratch. Buddyboss Theme Elementor.
You can build your header and footer using Astra. Due to the fact that Astra is built to match with Elementor, you can still utilize Elementor to design the content that goes “in between” your header, footer, and other theme components.
Astra likewise includes tons of pre-built site design templates built with Elementor. So you can import an already-finished website using Astra and then simply tweak it to match your needs utilizing Elementor.
Or, if you want to add new widgets for style flexibility, you might acquire an extension like Ultimate Addons for Elementor, which adds 36+ new Elementor widgets.
Does Elementor Decrease Your Website?
Now, this has been a concern that is recently acquiring appeal. And truly so.
Elementor is a plugin that can be useful for including gorgeous widgets and designs to your site. Its versatile and easy-to-use features have actually welcomed a variety of addon plugins that let you create extraordinary sites without needing to code.
If you utilize too many plugins or have too many animations then it might make your entire website sluggish.
So the concern emerges if Elementor slows your site down even without any of these addons. Buddyboss Theme 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, but by what degree?
Let’s find out.
Here are the websites for you to check out.
- Gutenberg website from Starter Templates
- Elementor site from Beginner Templates
We hosted both websites on the very same server and under different directories of the very same domain name and compared their performance 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 exact 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 enhancing for SEO, you understand how big of a difference that is!
In fact, the very same website built with Beaver Builder also performs somewhat better than the Elementor site.
In terms of fully loaded time, it takes a 2nd longer than the Elementor site to load.
Elementor Alternatives
Elementor is a great tool, it does not imply that it is the right tool for you all the time.
For instance, if you are developing a focused landing page with the Elementor base version, you might not have the ability to do it straight without incorporating another contact kind plugin or a payment entrance. Buddyboss Theme Elementor.
In such a case you will need to upgrade to Elementor Pro.
For the SEOs out there, you might wish to think about a lighter plugin that loads faster without triggering any hold-ups in page loading.
With all these and lots of other factors in mind, we have developed this list of Elementor options that can assist you out.
Buddyboss Theme Elementor
Gutenberg
Gutenberg is one of the most light-weight and quick website builders because it is WordPress default editor. Gutenburg makes it simpler than ever to produce websites with ease.
The blocks include whatever you might anticipate, consisting of 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!
Constructing a site in Gutenberg resembles constructing a house utilizing Lego blocks. You set up the blocks in the right order to come up with a lovely site. Buddyboss Theme Elementor.
In terms of performance. Gutenberg works way better than any other page Builder. It is enhanced for WordPress users and delivers what it guarantees. Nevertheless, it likewise lacks the different style elements that Elementor gives the table.
If you are someone who chooses efficiency over design, then Gutenberg is the ideal option for you.
Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder is not as flashy or feature-rich compared to Elementor (Elementor Vs Beaver Builder comparison). It does supply a stable and consistent experience with its core plugin that just builds private pieces of content. There is the Beaver Builder Theme readily available if you desire one too! Buddyboss Theme Elementor.
Beaver Builder is a total page design plan that supplies you with all the tools and elements to build any kind of site. It has elements such as headings, buttons, maps, sliders, contact kinds, reviews, and more all in one place.
It stands head to head in regards to style and efficiency with Elementor. Nevertheless, Beaver Builder does not have as numerous addons developed for itself as Elementor does.
SeedProd
SeedProd is a premium drag-and-drop landing page Builder plugin for WordPress. It has been created to be as fast, user friendly with site speed in mind.
SeedProd’s smart style system makes recycling blocks of content fast and basic by specifying color design which will conserve time when developing new designs. Buddyboss Theme Elementor.
It has all the blocks and functions you ‘d expect from a powerful page Builder such as opt-in types, social profiles, countdown timers. It likewise consists of contact pages with an alternative to easily reroute visitors on any site map or Google Maps listing for their organization place!
You can utilize SeedProd’s custom domain mapping feature which will conserve time when handling numerous customer landing pages in WordPress while still maintaining branding connection across 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’ve use Astra, among 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 use Elementor and Elementor has an amazing 4.7-star ranking on over 5,900 reviews.
If you wish to experience what Elementor can offer totally free:
Set up the complimentary Astra theme to create a versatile base for your Elementor designs.
Set up the totally free Elementor plugin from WordPress.org and begin structure. Buddyboss 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 assist you make your choice? Leave a remark and we’ll try to assist you choose.