Elementor Evaluation: Is It The Best WordPress Page Builder? – Custom Elementor Templates
Trying to choose if Elementor is the best page Builder for your WordPress site? In this hands-on Elementor evaluation, we’ll assist you understand:
- How Elementor can benefit you
- Who must utilize Elementor
- The unique features that assist Elementor stand apart from the competitors
- Whether you should use the free version or open your wallet for the premium version
Custom Elementor Templates
We’ve created Astra, one of the most popular themes 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 review. Custom Elementor Templates.
But understanding why we like Elementor and have developed items in the Elementor environment is more vital 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 ought to have everything that you require to make an informed decision about whether Elementor is the ideal tool for your WordPress site.
Custom Elementor Templates
What Does Elementor Offer?
Elementor is a visual, drag-and-drop page Builder. If you’re not knowledgeable about these terms, this means that you can:
- See a sneak peek of exactly what your page will appear like to visitors as you’re building it.
- Drag and drop various content and style elements to develop the best design.
Generally, it changes creating a beautiful, custom website design from something you need to be a developer to do, to something that anybody can do. Custom Elementor Templates.
Elementor is now actively utilized by over four million WordPress sites, which makes it the most popular WordPress page Builder. It’s likewise preserved an excellent 4.7-star rating (out of 5) on over 5,900 reviews, so the majority of those users are quite happy with Elementor.
There are a lot of WordPress page home builders that offer a visual, drag-and-drop user interface, however, so what makes Elementor stand apart and why is it so successful?
Well, we’ll enter this in more depth later, however a few of Elementor’s standout functions 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 browse the web on mobile phones, so it is necessary that your styles look excellent on all devices. Elementor’s styles are responsive by default and you get lots of alternatives to manage how it works.
- Templates – staring at a blank page is frightening! Elementor features numerous expertly created design templates so that you do not need to go back to square one.
- Design options – you get lots of detailed design choices to make your design pixel-perfect without turning to custom-made CSS (though you can do that too).
- Benefit – you get great deals of useful tools like right-click support, a fast find tool, and more to help you build great-looking pages quicker.
- Style Builder – with the Pro variation, you can design your entire WordPress theme utilizing Elementor (though we still recommend matching it with a quality style).
- Dynamic material – you can consist of vibrant content from custom-made fields and plugins like ACF, Pods, and Toolset.
- Popup Builder – with the Pro version, you can likewise design all kinds of popups utilizing the exact same visual, drag-and-drop user interface.
- WooCommerce Builder – if you’re constructing an eCommerce shop, you can design your WooCommerce store utilizing Elementor and consist of products in your other styles. Custom Elementor Templates.
Who Is Elementor For?
Elementor is for … well, almost anyone who’s using WordPress.
A digital online marketer might like Elementor for its capability to assist them quickly produce landing pages and popups, while a casual user might simply be looking for a method to add some additional style to their blog posts.
Let’s look at some specific scenarios:
Custom Elementor Templates
The Casual User
If you’re simply a casual user trying to find a method to include some style to your article or build a great-looking homepage, Elementor is perfect for you.
You’ll be able to utilize the visual interface to spin up some great-looking styles without requiring any technical knowledge … and you’ll probably be able to do it free of charge! More on whether you ought to use the free or paid version later. Custom Elementor Templates.
The Digital Marketer
Elementor is great for digital marketers and teams since it consists of lots of marketing aspects.
The Kind widget in Elementor Pro lets you produce all types of lead forms and connect them to popular e-mail marketing services. It likewise has a Zapier integration, which lets you link to your CRM.
You can likewise use the Popup Builder to create 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.
The core Elementor plugin itself is also an excellent solution for structure WordPress landing pages.
The Website Builder
If you’re constructing websites for clients, Elementor is a best (and popular) choice.
You can integrate Elementor with a flexible style like Astra to build 100% customized client sites without any code required. You can likewise use Theme Builder when needed, like designing the design template for a custom-made post type and including dynamic data from ACF, Pods, or Toolset.
Custom Elementor Templates
Elementor Prices
Short answer: It’s Free.
The base version of Elementor that is readily available in the WordPress Plugin repository is entirely free to use. There is also a pro variation with a lot more flexibility and a lot more features.
Take a look at our post 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 restricted at certain points.
With Elementor Pro you can customize your header, footer, posts page, single posts page, or product pages. Custom Elementor Templates.
The Elementor base version provides the bare minimum you require to develop and tailor your site. But if you wish to have the freedom of revamping the whole site, Elementor Pro is the best choice.
With Elementor Pro you can likewise add pop-ups, contact forms, membership kinds, global widgets, and custom 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
- Complete site personalization through Theme Builder. This lets you change the header, footer, and posts pages
- WooCommerce Builder for editing item and category pages in eCommerce websites
- Popup Builder with sophisticated features like, exit intent, after scroll, and manages to display particular pop-ups on specific pages
- Visual Form Builder that can be integrated with popular email marketing tools
- You can produce worldwide widgets and use them site-wide
- Add custom-made CSS
- Release any Elementor widget practically anywhere you want
Elementor Pro Rates
Elementor Pro has a 5 tier rates plan based upon the variety of licenses you desire.
If you are dealing with a single site then the Vital Plan would be best for you. If you are dealing with numerous websites, the Advanced plan or above plans would be better.
All the plans feature 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 activate Elementor through the WordPress repository.
Next, you can either pick to tailor Elementor settings or dive straight into developing.
If you are simply starting out, we recommend utilizing the default settings only. Head over to pages and open among the pages that you want to edit.
Click Edit With Elementor to start editing.
For the sake of this presentation, we installed the Astra theme and imported one of its demo sites developed with Elementor. Custom Elementor Templates.
Now, let’s go through the Elementor control panel utilizing that demo website.
Here’s what the Elementor control panel looks like.
Here’s the label of different parts numbered.
- The working area or the primary canvas. This is where you edit and redesign your website
- Elementor widgets location
- Elementor settings
- Open Elementor widgets
- International settings
- Modification history
- Change view (desktop, tablet, mobile).
- Sneak peek modifications.
- Release.
Elementor Structure Hierarchy
If you are totally new to constructing websites, you require to understand the structure of the Elementor page Builder.
Every page built with Elementor includes sections and columns.
Area. A section is essentially a row. You can include a background, change its sizing, and more. Columns and widgets go inside areas.
Column. A column divides a section into different columns. You can then manage each column separately. Custom Elementor Templates.
A page can have any variety of areas in it. Areas consist of columns and columns include the Elementor widgets.
Here is an illustration revealing what the structure in Elementor appears like.
Custom Elementor Templates
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 create a page from scratch using Elementor. Custom Elementor Templates.
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 brand-new section.
Action 3: Choose an area with a single column or numerous ones depending on your requirements.
Step 4: Drag widgets from the Elementor panel into the columns that you want 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 alternatives when finding out to find the right styles for you.
How to Style 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 edit 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 on the left.
To rearrange a widget on the visual preview, you can also utilize drag and drop. If you want to edit text, just click and type on the visual sneak peek:
To create the layouts for your widgets, utilize sections 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 a component’s settings, you’ll quickly see those modifications reflected on the visual preview.
Eight Awesome Functions That Help Elementor Stand Apart
Next, let’s go through some of the important things that assist Elementor stick out from other visual, drag-and-drop page home builders.
1. Hassle-free Modifying Functions for Faster Style
Elementor comes with some practical modifying features that assist you develop designs faster.
Elementor comes with right-click support, which most other page builders do not provide.
You can right-click on any component to replicate it, copy and paste designs, and more:
It likewise includes a beneficial Navigator view that provides you a purchased list of all the content on your page, separated by areas and columns. You can utilize this to quickly open the settings for any element on your page. You can also rename aspects to make them much easier to find: Custom Elementor Templates.
And to help you quickly navigate in between your styles, it likewise consists of a Finder tool that lets you leap to anything that you have actually developed with Elementor by searching for it by name:
2. Substantial Widget Choice for Design Flexibility
Throughout the core plugin and add-ons, Elementor has an absolutely massive choice of widgets, which offers you a lots of versatility when building your styles.
It’s not practically the 60+ widgets that include Elementor and Elementor Pro, though, there’s likewise a huge selection of widgets from third-party developers.
For instance, Ultimate Addons for Elementor adds another 36+ new widgets that you can utilize in your styles, covering whatever from form stylers to hotspots, content toggles, videos, and more.
With a lot of choices, you can generally find a widget that does exactly what you desire it to.
3. Comprehensive Style and Positioning Rules for Pixel-Perfect Designs
Another location where Elementor beats out a lot of the competition is its design options.
Elementor lets you do all the essentials – you can switch up colors, font styles, spacing, etc.
However it likewise adds sophisticated alternatives like:
Forming dividers
Customized positioning
Animations, consisting of parallax scrolling, mouse tracking, 3D tilt, and more
Customized CSS for individual widgets
In other words, Elementor provides you more options to produce a special, effective design.
4. Substantial Template Selection to Conserve You Time
If you don’t want to develop your styles from scratch, Elementor comes with a huge choice of templates, divided into two classifications:
Pages – full-page design templates. All you do is tailor them to meet your requirements. Custom Elementor Templates.
Blocks – design templates for specific parts of a page, like a FAQ. You can mix-and-match them like legos to develop total designs.
Just like widgets, you can also discover templates from third-party sources.
If you use the Astra WordPress theme, it includes stacks of pre-made starter templates built with Elementor. Each starter website consists of numerous Elementor templates that you can personalize as required.
5. Versatile Kind Widget and Integrations
Above, I discussed Elementor’s widget choice in general. I believe it’s worth singling out a specific widget:
The Kind widget.
The Type widget lets you develop custom-made types, complete with as numerous fields as required. But where this widget gets really powerful, particularly when it concerns marketing executions, is its integrated integrations.
You can hook it as much as popular email marketing services like ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Mailchimp, and more. There’s also a Webhook alternative that lets you link to Zapier (and the thousands of apps readily available there), as well as chat combinations 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 develop your entire WordPress style with Elementor. That is, you can construct:
Headers
Footers
Single design templates
Archive design templates
You could create a custom-made post type and then use Elementor to create the design template for that post type, rather than messing around with theme template files directly.
The actually effective thing here is that you have the capability to generate dynamic content from customized fields that you produce with plugins like ACF, Toolset, and Pods.
With this vibrant function, you can build truly custom-made sites and harness WordPress’ power as a flexible material management system. Custom Elementor Templates.
Simply one note – while this is definitely an effective feature, there are still some reasons why you might want to pick a versatile Elementor theme like Astra even if you decide to utilize Elementor Style Builder.
7. WooCommerce Builder for Custom-made eCommerce Designs
If you’re producing an eCommerce store, you can likewise use Elementor Theme Builder to your store content with dedicated WooCommerce Builder widgets.
You’ll have the ability to create both your single product pages and go shopping pages.
To help you develop your designs, you’ll get a variety of devoted WooCommerce widgets for everything from product images to upsells.
In among our short articles, we talked about how to produce an eCommerce website with Elementor.
8. Popup Builder for Marketing, Usability, and More
Lastly, Elementor Pro can do more than just posts, pages, and theme design – you can likewise utilize it to construct popups with Elementor Popup Builder.
With Popup Builder, you get access to the exact same familiar Elementor user interface and all of the widgets.
This opens a great deal of possibilities:
You could use the Kind widget to create email opt-in popups and link them straight to your e-mail marketing service of option.
Or, you could utilize the Login widget to develop a popup login type for your website. Custom Elementor Templates.
When you publish a popup, you’ll get a variety of targeting and trigger guidelines to manage precisely where and when your popup appears:
Custom Elementor Templates
Should You Use Elementor Free vs Pro?
If you have actually made it this far, there’s a good chance that you think Elementor is right for your requirements.
That causes the next question – can you use the totally free variation at WordPress.org or should you acquire Elementor Pro?
This is an essential decision, so we in fact wrote an entire post on how to select between Elementor totally free vs Pro.
In general, if you simply want to create some posts/pages or standard landing pages, you can most likely manage with the complimentary version.
With that being stated, there’s a lot of worth in Elementor Pro. It adds:
- 30+ new widgets, consisting of the Type widget. The Form widget is particularly effective for marketing pages.
- Style Builder. This lets you design your whole theme and WooCommerce shop using Elementor.
- Popup Builder. This lets you develop popups using Elementor.
- More templates. While the free version consists of some templates, you require Pro for complete access.
- More style alternatives. For example, you get access to custom positioning.
Buying Elementor Pro is not the only way to extend Elementor.
For example, if you want more versatility to customize your theme, you don’t require to acquire Elementor Pro. Rather, you might use a flexible theme like Astra. Through its many Customizer settings, you can adapt Astra to practically any usage, and it’s a lot easier than attempting to design your own style from scratch. Custom Elementor Templates.
You can develop your header and footer using Astra. Since Astra is developed to pair with Elementor, you can still use Elementor to develop the material that goes “between” your header, footer, and other style aspects.
Astra likewise includes lots of pre-built website templates constructed with Elementor. You can import an already-finished website using Astra and then just fine-tune it to match your requirements using Elementor.
Or, if you wish to add brand-new widgets for design versatility, you could purchase an extension like Ultimate Addons for Elementor, which includes 36+ brand-new Elementor widgets.
Does Elementor Slow Down Your Site?
Now, this has been a question that is recently acquiring appeal. And rightfully so.
Elementor is a plugin that can be useful for adding stunning widgets and styles to your site. Its flexible and user friendly functions have actually welcomed a variety of addon plugins that let you produce amazing sites without needing to code.
However, if you use a lot of plugins or have too many animations then it might make your whole website sluggish.
The question emerges if Elementor slows your site down even without any of these addons. Custom Elementor Templates.
To learn, we compare two of our starter design template sites. Among them was constructed 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 discover.
Here are the websites for you to check out.
- Gutenberg site from Starter Templates
- Elementor website from Beginner Templates
We hosted both sites on the same server and under various directories of the exact 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 website.
In terms of exact loading time, the website made with Elementor took about 5.5 s to load totally while the site made with Gutenberg took 2.2 s.
If you are optimizing for SEO, you understand how huge of a distinction that is!
The very same site built with Beaver Builder also carries out somewhat better than the Elementor site.
In terms of totally loaded time, it takes a second longer than the Elementor website to load.
Elementor Alternatives
Although Elementor is a great tool, it does not indicate that it is the right tool for you all the time.
For example, if you are developing a concentrated landing page with the Elementor base variation, you may not have the ability to do it straight without incorporating another contact form plugin or a payment gateway. Custom Elementor Templates.
In such a case you will need to upgrade to Elementor Pro.
For the SEOs out there, you may want to consider a lighter plugin that loads much faster without causing any delays in page loading.
With all these and lots of other consider mind, we have developed this list of Elementor options that can help you out.
Custom Elementor Templates
Gutenberg
Gutenberg is one of the most lightweight and quick site contractors because it is WordPress default editor. Gutenburg makes it much easier than ever to produce web pages with ease.
The blocks consist of whatever you might expect, including headings and subheadings along with lists of products like images or videos within the content location on each individual website page – all from one simple interface!
Constructing a website in Gutenberg resembles constructing a house using Lego blocks. You arrange the blocks in the right order to come up with a gorgeous site. Custom Elementor Templates.
In regards to efficiency. Gutenberg works way much better than any other page Builder. It is enhanced for WordPress users and delivers what it guarantees. Nevertheless, it also does not have the various design components that Elementor gives the table.
If you are somebody who chooses efficiency over style, then Gutenberg is the ideal option for you.
Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder is not as fancy or feature-rich compared to Elementor (Elementor Vs Beaver Builder comparison). But it does provide a stable and consistent experience with its core plugin that just builds private pieces of material. There is the Beaver Builder Style available if you want one too! Custom Elementor Templates.
Beaver Builder is a complete page style bundle that offers you with all the tools and elements to develop any sort of website. It has aspects 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 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 developed to be as quickly, easy-to-use with website speed in mind.
SeedProd’s clever style system makes recycling blocks of content fast and simple by defining color pattern which will conserve time when developing new layouts. Custom Elementor Templates.
It has all the blocks and functions you ‘d expect from an effective page Builder such as opt-in forms, social profiles, countdown timers. It likewise consists of contact pages with a choice to easily redirect visitors on any site map or Google Maps listing for their business area!
You can utilize SeedProd’s custom domain mapping function which will conserve time when managing several customer 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 builders out there, which is why we have actually use Astra, one of the most popular styles for Elementor, and Ultimate Addons for Elementor, one of the most popular Elementor widget collections.
We’re also not alone in our favorable Elementor review – over 4 million WordPress sites utilize Elementor and Elementor has an amazing 4.7-star ranking on over 5,900 reviews.
If you wish to experience what Elementor can use totally free:
Set up the totally free Astra theme to create a versatile base for your Elementor styles.
Set up the totally free Elementor plugin from WordPress.org and begin building. Custom Elementor Templates.
If you like what you see, believe about whether Elementor Pro is ideal for your requirements.
Exists anything we missed out on in our Elementor evaluation that would assist you make your choice? Leave a remark and we’ll try to assist you decide.
Get Started with Elementor Pro