Elementor Evaluation: Is It The Best WordPress Page Builder? – Can I Use Elementor With Any Theme
Trying to choose if Elementor is the ideal page Builder for your WordPress website? In this hands-on Elementor review, we’ll assist you understand:
- How Elementor can benefit you
- Who should utilize Elementor
- The distinct features that assist Elementor stick out from the competitors
- Whether you must utilize the free version or open your wallet for the premium version
Can I Use Elementor With Any Theme
We’ve created Astra, one of the most popular styles for Elementor, in addition to a popular add-on for Elementor, so you can most likely guess that we’re fans of Elementor. Let’s get that out of the way – this is a favorable Elementor evaluation. Can I Use Elementor With Any Theme.
However understanding why we like Elementor and have built products in the Elementor environment is more crucial than just the fact that we like it – that’s what we’re going to try and communicate in this evaluation.
By the end of our Elementor review, you must have whatever that you need to make an informed decision about whether or not Elementor is the ideal tool for your WordPress website.
Can I Use Elementor With Any Theme
What Does Elementor Offer?
Elementor is a visual, drag-and-drop page Builder. If you’re not knowledgeable about these terms, this suggests 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 various material and design components to develop the ideal style.
Basically, it transforms producing a great-looking, custom-made website design from something you need to be a developer to do, to something that anyone can do. Can I Use Elementor With Any Theme.
Elementor is now actively used by over 4 million WordPress sites, which makes it the most popular WordPress page Builder. It’s likewise preserved a remarkable 4.7-star ranking (out of 5) on over 5,900 evaluations, so the majority of those users are pretty pleased with Elementor.
There are a great deal of WordPress page builders that provide a visual, drag-and-drop interface, though, so what makes Elementor stand apart and why is it so effective?
Well, we’ll enter this in more depth later on, however a few of Elementor’s standout functions are:
- Lots of content components – these are the foundation of your page. They’re what you “drag-and-drop” to make your design.
- Responsive style – most people browse the web on smartphones, so it’s important that your styles look great on all gadgets. Elementor’s styles are responsive by default and you get great deals of choices to control how it works.
- Design templates – staring at a blank page is scary! Elementor features hundreds of professionally created templates so that you don’t have to start from scratch.
- Design alternatives – you get lots of comprehensive style options to make your design pixel-perfect without turning to custom-made CSS (though you can do that too).
- Benefit – you get great deals of helpful tools like right-click support, a fast discover tool, and more to help you build beautiful pages faster.
- Style Builder – with the Pro variation, you can develop your whole WordPress theme using Elementor (though we still advise matching it with a quality theme).
- Dynamic content – you can consist of vibrant material from custom-made fields and plugins like ACF, Pods, and Toolset.
- Popup Builder – with the Pro variation, you can likewise develop all types of popups utilizing the exact same visual, drag-and-drop interface.
- WooCommerce Builder – if you’re constructing an eCommerce shop, you can develop your WooCommerce shop using Elementor and consist of products in your other styles. Can I Use Elementor With Any Theme.
Who Is Elementor For?
Elementor is for … well, practically anyone who’s using WordPress.
For example, a digital online marketer might love Elementor for its capability to help them quickly produce landing pages and popups, while a casual user might simply be looking for a way to add some extra flair to their blog posts.
Let’s take a look at some particular scenarios:
Can I Use Elementor With Any Theme
The Casual User
If you’re simply a casual user searching for a method to add some style to your blog posts or develop a great-looking homepage, Elementor is ideal for you.
You’ll be able to utilize the visual user interface to spin up some beautiful designs without requiring any technical knowledge … and you’ll probably have the ability to do it totally free! More on whether you must use the totally free or paid version later. Can I Use Elementor With Any Theme.
The Digital Online marketer
Elementor is excellent for digital online marketers and teams since it consists of tons of marketing elements.
For instance, the Form widget in Elementor Pro lets you create all kinds of lead forms and link them to popular e-mail marketing services. It likewise has a Zapier combination, which lets you connect to your CRM.
You can also use the Popup Builder to produce opt-in popups and target them anywhere on your website. And if you’re offering service or products, you can use WooCommerce Builder to create your sales pages.
Lastly, the core Elementor plugin itself is likewise an outstanding solution for structure WordPress landing pages.
The Site Builder
If you’re building websites for customers, Elementor is a perfect (and popular) option.
You can combine Elementor with a versatile theme like Astra to build 100% custom-made client sites without any code required. You can likewise utilize Theme Builder when needed, like developing the template for a custom post type and integrating dynamic data from ACF, Pods, or Toolset.
Can I Use Elementor With Any Theme
Elementor Prices
Short answer: It’s Free.
The base variation of Elementor that is available in the WordPress Plugin repository is completely totally free to use. There is likewise a professional variation with a lot more flexibility and a lot more functions.
Check out our article on Elementor Vs. Elementor Pro if you want to get an in-depth review of both.
Elementor is a feature-packed plugin that works for all websites. However, it is restricted at particular points.
With Elementor Pro you can customize your header, footer, posts page, single posts page, or item pages. Can I Use Elementor With Any Theme.
The Elementor base variation provides the bare minimum you require to create and tailor your website. If you want to have the flexibility of revamping the whole website, Elementor Pro is the best choice.
With Elementor Pro you can also add pop-ups, contact kinds, subscription types, global widgets, and customized CSS.
Here is a list of additional functions that you get in Elementor Pro:
- 50+ extra widgets
- 300+ premium demonstration imports consisting of imports for header, footer, and pop-ups
- Total site modification through Style 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 sophisticated features like, exit intent, after scroll, and controls to display specific pop-ups on particular pages
- Visual Kind Builder that can be integrated with popular e-mail marketing tools
- You can produce worldwide widgets and use them site-wide
- Add customized CSS
- Deploy any Elementor widget pretty much anywhere you desire
Elementor Pro Rates
Elementor Pro has a 5 tier rates plan based on the number of licenses you desire.
If you are working with a single site then the Vital Strategy would be best for you. If you are dealing with several sites, the Advanced plan or above plans would be more suitable.
All the strategies come with an annual membership.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
How Elementor Works: Visiting the User interface
Let’s see how Elementor deals with this useful area.
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 creating.
If you are just starting out, we advise utilizing the default settings only. Head over to pages and open one of the pages that you want to edit.
Click Edit With Elementor to start modifying.
For the sake of this presentation, we set up the Astra theme and imported one of its demonstration websites developed with Elementor. Can I Use Elementor With Any Theme.
Now, let’s go through the Elementor dashboard utilizing that demo website.
Here’s what the Elementor dashboard looks like.
Here’s the label of different parts numbered.
- The working area or the main canvas. This is where you edit and revamp your website
- Elementor widgets area
- Elementor settings
- Open Elementor widgets
- Global settings
- Modification history
- Switch view (desktop, tablet, mobile).
- Sneak peek modifications.
- Publish.
Elementor Structure Hierarchy
If you are entirely new to building sites, you require to understand the structure of the Elementor page Builder.
Every page constructed with Elementor contains sections and columns.
Area. An area is basically a row. You can add a background, alter its sizing, and more. Columns and widgets go inside sections.
Column. A column divides an area into different columns. You can then control each column individually. Can I Use Elementor With Any Theme.
A page can have any number of areas in it. Areas include columns and columns include the Elementor widgets.
Here is an illustration revealing what the structure in Elementor looks like.
Can I Use Elementor With Any Theme
How to Design a Page in Elementor from Scratch
When developing a web page, you can either begin with a blank screen or import a pre-existing template. In this section, we will cover how you can create a page from scratch using Elementor. Can I Use Elementor With Any Theme.
Here’s how you do it:
Step 1: Open a blank page and click “Edit With Elementor”.
Action 2: Click on the “+” button to add a brand-new section.
Step 3: Select an area with a single column or multiple ones depending on your needs.
Step 4: Drag widgets from the Elementor panel into the columns that you wish to.
As soon as you more than happy with the placement, you can change the finer information in the Content, Design, and Advanced Sections.
You can play around with the options when discovering to discover the right designs for you.
How to Style a Pre-Existing Page in Elementor
In some cases you might require to modify a pre-existing page with Elementor. The process is not extremely various in this case either. In fact, it is much easier to modify an existing Elementor page than starting from scratch.
Here’s how you do it.
To include a new widget, drag it from the sidebar on the left.
To reorganize a widget on the visual preview, you can likewise use drag and drop. If you want to modify text, simply click and type on the visual sneak peek:
To create the designs for your widgets, use sections and columns.
To personalize a widget, click on it. That will open the widget’s settings in the sidebar, which are divided into 3 tabs:
Utilize a comparable technique to tailor sections and columns:
As you alter an element’s settings, you’ll quickly see those modifications reflected on the visual sneak peek.
8 Awesome Features That Help Elementor Stand Out
Next, let’s go through some of the important things that help Elementor stick out from other visual, drag-and-drop page home builders.
1. Hassle-free Modifying Features for Faster Design
Elementor features some convenient modifying features that help you build styles faster.
For example, Elementor comes with right-click assistance, which most other page builders do not offer.
You can right-click on any aspect to replicate it, copy and paste styles, and more:
It likewise includes an useful Navigator view that provides you a purchased list of all the material on your page, broken up by areas and columns. You can use this to rapidly open the settings for any aspect on your page. You can likewise relabel components to make them simpler to find: Can I Use Elementor With Any Theme.
And to assist you quickly navigate in between your designs, it likewise consists of a Finder tool that lets you jump to anything that you’ve developed with Elementor by looking for it by name:
2. Big Widget Selection for Design Versatility
Throughout the core plugin and add-ons, Elementor has a definitely enormous choice of widgets, which offers you a lots of flexibility when constructing your styles.
It’s not practically the 60+ widgets that feature Elementor and Elementor Pro, however, there’s also a huge selection of widgets from third-party designers.
For instance, Ultimate Addons for Elementor includes another 36+ brand-new widgets that you can utilize in your designs, covering everything from form stylers to hotspots, content toggles, videos, and more.
With many options, you can generally find a widget that does exactly what you want it to.
3. Comprehensive Style and Positioning Rules for Pixel-Perfect Styles
Another area where Elementor vanquishes a great deal of the competitors is its design choices.
Elementor lets you do all the fundamentals – you can switch up colors, fonts, spacing, and so on.
But it also adds sophisticated alternatives like:
Shape 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 an unique, effective design.
4. Huge Template Selection to Save You Time
If you don’t want to develop your styles from scratch, Elementor comes with a substantial selection of design templates, divided into 2 classifications:
Pages – full-page design templates. All you do is customize them to meet your requirements. Can I Use Elementor With Any Theme.
Blocks – design templates for particular parts of a page, like a FAQ. You can mix-and-match them like legos to build total styles.
Similar to widgets, you can likewise discover design templates from third-party sources.
If you utilize the Astra WordPress theme, it features loads of pre-made starter design templates built with Elementor. Each starter website includes several Elementor design templates that you can tailor as needed.
5. Versatile Kind Widget and Integrations
Above, I pointed out Elementor’s widget selection in general. I think it’s worth singling out a particular widget:
The Type widget.
The Type widget lets you create custom types, total with as lots of fields as required. Where this widget gets truly powerful, especially when it comes to marketing executions, is its integrated combinations.
You can hook it up to popular e-mail marketing services like ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Mailchimp, and more. There’s likewise a Webhook choice that lets you connect to Zapier (and the thousands of apps available there), as well as chat integrations for Slack and Discord.
6. Theme Builder With Dynamic Material for Custom WordPress Sites
With Elementor Pro, you gain the capability to surpass posts and pages and design your entire WordPress theme with Elementor. That is, you can construct:
Headers
Footers
Single templates
Archive design templates
You could produce a custom-made post type and then use Elementor to create the template for that post type, rather than messing around with theme design template files straight.
The really powerful thing here is that you have the capability to generate vibrant material from customized fields that you develop with plugins like ACF, Toolset, and Pods.
With this vibrant function, you can develop really custom sites and harness WordPress’ power as a flexible content management system. Can I Use Elementor With Any Theme.
Just one note – while this is definitely a powerful feature, there are still some reasons why you might want to choose a flexible Elementor style like Astra even if you decide to use Elementor Theme Builder.
7. WooCommerce Builder for Customized eCommerce Styles
If you’re developing an eCommerce store, you can likewise use Elementor Style Builder to your shop content with devoted WooCommerce Builder widgets.
You’ll have the ability to create both your single item pages and shop pages.
To help you build your styles, you’ll get a range of devoted WooCommerce widgets for everything from product images to upsells.
In among our posts, we talked about how to create an eCommerce site with Elementor.
8. Popup Builder for Marketing, Functionality, and More
Lastly, Elementor Pro can do more than just posts, pages, and style design – you can likewise 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 a great deal of possibilities:
You could use the Kind widget to develop email opt-in popups and link them straight to your e-mail marketing service of option.
Or, you could use the Login widget to create a popup login type for your website. Can I Use Elementor With Any Theme.
When you release a popup, you’ll get an array of targeting and activate guidelines to manage exactly where and when your popup appears:
Can I Use Elementor With Any Theme
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 results in the next question – can you use the free variation at WordPress.org or should you acquire Elementor Pro?
This is an important choice, so we in fact composed a whole post on how to choose in between Elementor complimentary vs Pro.
In general, if you just want to design some posts/pages or basic landing pages, you can most likely get by with the totally free variation.
With that being stated, there’s a great deal of worth in Elementor Pro. It adds:
- 30+ brand-new widgets, consisting of the Kind widget. The Type widget is especially effective for marketing pages.
- Theme Builder. This lets you design your entire style and WooCommerce store using Elementor.
- Popup Builder. This lets you construct popups utilizing Elementor.
- More templates. While the free version includes some templates, you need Pro for full access.
- More design choices. You get access to custom positioning.
Nevertheless, buying Elementor Pro is not the only way to extend Elementor.
If you desire more versatility to personalize your style, you don’t need to purchase Elementor Pro. Instead, you might use a versatile theme like Astra. Through its lots of Customizer settings, you can adapt Astra to pretty much any use, and it’s a lot simpler than trying to develop your own style from scratch. Can I Use Elementor With Any Theme.
You can develop your header and footer using Astra. Due to the fact that Astra is developed to combine with Elementor, you can still use Elementor to design the content that goes “between” your header, footer, and other style components.
Astra likewise includes tons of pre-built website 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 brand-new widgets for design flexibility, you might acquire an extension like Ultimate Addons for Elementor, which adds 36+ new Elementor widgets.
Does Elementor Slow Down Your Website?
Now, this has 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 website. Its flexible and user friendly functions have welcomed a variety of addon plugins that let you create unbelievable websites without needing to code.
However, if you utilize too many plugins or have too many animations then it might make your entire website slow.
So the question occurs if Elementor slows your site down even with no of these addons. Can I Use Elementor With Any Theme.
To learn, we compare 2 of our starter template websites. Among them was developed with Gutenberg and the other with Elementor. Gutenberg is the default editor for WordPress and should have greater speeds in general, however by what degree?
Let’s find out.
Here are the sites for you to take a look at.
- Gutenberg site from Beginner Templates
- Elementor site from Starter Templates
We hosted both sites on the exact same server and under different directories of the very same domain name and compared their efficiency in GT Metrix.
Here are the results.
As you can see, the performance of the Gutenberg website is much faster than the Elementor website.
In regards to precise loading time, the site made with Elementor took about 5.5 s to load entirely while the website made with Gutenberg took 2.2 s.
If you are enhancing for SEO, you understand how big of a difference that is!
The same website constructed with Beaver Builder likewise performs a little better than the Elementor website.
In terms of completely packed time, it takes a second longer than the Elementor site to load.
Elementor Alternatives
Elementor is a great tool, it does not mean that it is the right tool for you all the time.
For instance, if you are constructing a focused landing page with the Elementor base variation, you might not have the ability to do it directly without incorporating another contact type plugin or a payment gateway. Can I Use Elementor With Any Theme.
In such a case you will require to upgrade to Elementor Pro.
For the SEOs out there, you might want to think about a lighter plugin that loads much faster without causing any hold-ups in page loading.
With all these and many other consider mind, we have actually developed this list of Elementor alternatives that can assist you out.
Can I Use Elementor With Any Theme
Gutenberg
Gutenberg is among the most lightweight and quick site builders because it is WordPress default editor. Gutenburg makes it easier than ever to produce websites with ease.
The blocks include everything you might anticipate, including headings and subheadings in addition to lists of items like images or videos within the content area on each private website page – all from one simple interface!
Building a site in Gutenberg resembles developing a house using Lego blocks. You arrange the blocks in the ideal order to come up with a lovely website. Can I Use Elementor With Any Theme.
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 also does not have the various style components that Elementor brings to the table.
If you are somebody who prefers performance over style, then Gutenberg is the best choice for you.
Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder is not as fancy or feature-rich compared to Elementor (Elementor Vs Beaver Builder contrast). However it does offer a steady and consistent experience with its core plugin that just builds specific pieces of content. There is the Beaver Builder Theme readily available if you desire one too! Can I Use Elementor With Any Theme.
Beaver Builder is a total page style plan that provides you with all the tools and parts to develop any sort of site. It has components such as headings, buttons, maps, sliders, contact types, testimonials, and more all in one location.
It stands head to head in regards to design and performance with Elementor. Nevertheless, 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 developed to be as fast, easy-to-use with website speed in mind.
SeedProd’s smart design system makes reusing blocks of material fast and easy by defining color design which will conserve time when developing new designs. Can I Use Elementor With Any Theme.
It has all the blocks and functions you ‘d anticipate from a powerful page Builder such as opt-in forms, social profiles, countdown timers. It also consists of contact pages with an alternative to easily redirect visitors on any site map or Google Maps listing for their organization location!
You can use SeedProd’s custom-made domain mapping feature which will conserve time when handling numerous client landing pages in WordPress while still preserving branding continuity across platforms.
Any Lingering Questions?
As you can see, our company believe that Elementor is one of the best WordPress page builders out there, which is why we’ve use Astra, among the most popular themes for Elementor, and Ultimate Addons for Elementor, one of the most popular Elementor widget collections.
We’re also not alone in our positive Elementor evaluation – over four million WordPress sites utilize Elementor and Elementor has a fantastic 4.7-star rating on over 5,900 reviews.
If you wish to experience what Elementor can provide totally free:
Install the complimentary Astra style to create a flexible base for your Elementor styles.
Install the complimentary Elementor plugin from WordPress.org and begin building. Can I Use Elementor With Any Theme.
Then, if you like what you see, consider whether Elementor Pro is right for your requirements.
Is there anything we missed out on in our Elementor evaluation that would assist you make your decision? Leave a comment and we’ll attempt to assist you decide.