Elementor Evaluation: Is It The Best WordPress Page Builder? – Elementor Best Themes
Trying to decide if Elementor is the right page Builder for your WordPress site? In this hands-on Elementor review, we’ll help you comprehend:
- How Elementor can benefit you
- Who ought to use Elementor
- The unique features that help Elementor stand apart from the competitors
- Whether you ought to use the complimentary version or open up your wallet for the premium version
Elementor Best Themes
We have actually developed Astra, among the most popular themes for Elementor, as well as 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. Elementor Best Themes.
Comprehending why we like Elementor and have actually constructed products in the Elementor environment is more essential than just the reality that we like it – that’s what we’re going to attempt and interact in this evaluation.
By the end of our Elementor review, you ought to have everything that you need to make an informed choice about whether Elementor is the ideal tool for your WordPress site.
Elementor Best Themes
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 exactly what your page will appear like to visitors as you’re developing it.
- Drag and drop various material and style components to develop the perfect design.
Basically, it changes creating a great-looking, custom-made website design from something you need to be a designer to do, to something that anybody can do. Elementor Best Themes.
Elementor is now actively used by over four million WordPress sites, that makes it the most popular WordPress page Builder. It’s also maintained an excellent 4.7-star ranking (out of 5) on over 5,900 reviews, so most of those users are quite delighted with Elementor.
There are a great deal of WordPress page home builders that use a visual, drag-and-drop interface, though, so what makes Elementor stand out and why is it so effective?
Well, we’ll get into this in more depth later on, but 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 – the majority of people search the web on smart devices, so it’s important that your styles look terrific on all gadgets. Elementor’s designs are responsive by default and you get lots of options to control how it works.
- Templates – staring at a blank page is frightening! Elementor features numerous professionally developed design templates so that you do not have to start from scratch.
- Design alternatives – you get tons of detailed style options to make your design pixel-perfect without turning to custom CSS (though you can do that too).
- Convenience – you get lots of convenient tools like right-click assistance, a quick discover tool, and more to assist you develop beautiful pages quicker.
- Style Builder – with the Pro version, you can create your entire WordPress theme utilizing Elementor (though we still suggest matching it with a quality theme).
- Dynamic material – you can consist of vibrant material from custom fields and plugins like ACF, Pods, and Toolset.
- Popup Builder – with the Pro variation, you can likewise create all kinds of popups using the same visual, drag-and-drop interface.
- WooCommerce Builder – if you’re constructing an eCommerce store, you can develop your WooCommerce shop utilizing Elementor and consist of items in your other styles. Elementor Best Themes.
Who Is Elementor For?
Elementor is for … well, practically anyone who’s utilizing WordPress.
A digital online marketer may love Elementor for its capability to help them rapidly produce landing pages and popups, while a casual user might simply be looking for a way to include some additional style to their blog posts.
Let’s look at some specific circumstances:
Elementor Best Themes
The Casual User
If you’re just a casual user looking for a way to include some style to your post or develop a great-looking homepage, Elementor is perfect for you.
You’ll have the ability to use the visual user interface to spin up some beautiful styles without requiring any technical knowledge … and you’ll most likely have the ability to do it for free! More on whether you need to use the totally free or paid version later on. Elementor Best Themes.
The Digital Online marketer
Elementor is terrific for digital online marketers and teams due to the fact that it consists of lots of marketing elements.
For instance, the Type widget in Elementor Pro lets you create all kinds of lead kinds and link them to popular email marketing services. It also has a Zapier integration, 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 selling services or products, you can utilize WooCommerce Builder to create your sales pages.
Lastly, the core Elementor plugin itself is likewise an outstanding option for building WordPress landing pages.
The Website Builder
If you’re building sites for clients, Elementor is an ideal (and popular) option.
You can combine Elementor with a flexible theme like Astra to construct 100% customized client sites with no code required. You can also use Theme Builder when required, like developing the template for a custom post type and including dynamic information from ACF, Pods, or Toolset.
Elementor Best Themes
Elementor Rates
Short answer: It’s Free.
The base version of Elementor that is offered in the WordPress Plugin repository is totally complimentary to use. There is also a pro version with a lot more flexibility and a lot more features.
Have a look at our article on Elementor Vs. Elementor Pro if you wish to get a comprehensive evaluation of both.
Elementor is a feature-packed plugin that works for all sites. Nevertheless, it is restricted at specific points.
For instance, with Elementor Pro you can tailor your header, footer, posts page, single posts page, or product pages. Elementor Best Themes.
The Elementor base version delivers the bare minimum you require to design and customize your website. If you want to have the liberty of redesigning the whole site, Elementor Pro is the best choice.
With Elementor Pro you can also include pop-ups, contact kinds, subscription forms, worldwide widgets, and customized 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 Theme Builder. This lets you alter the header, footer, and posts pages
- WooCommerce Builder for editing product and category pages in eCommerce sites
- Popup Builder with advanced functions like, exit intent, after scroll, and manages to display specific pop-ups on certain pages
- Visual Kind Builder that can be incorporated with popular email marketing tools
- You can develop global widgets and utilize them site-wide
- Include customized CSS
- Deploy any Elementor widget practically anywhere you want
Elementor Pro Pricing
Elementor Pro has a 5 tier rates strategy based upon the number of licenses you desire.
If you are working with a single website then the Necessary Strategy would be best for you. If you are dealing with several sites, the Advanced strategy or above strategies would be better.
All the strategies come with a yearly subscription.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
How Elementor Works: Exploring the User interface
Let’s see how Elementor deals with this practical section.
Similar to any other plugin, you need to install and activate Elementor through the WordPress repository.
Next, you can either choose to tailor Elementor settings or dive straight into developing.
If you are just starting, we recommend utilizing the default settings only. Head over to pages and open among the pages that you wish to edit.
Click Edit With Elementor to begin modifying.
For the sake of this presentation, we installed the Astra theme and imported one of its demonstration websites constructed with Elementor. Elementor Best Themes.
Now, let’s go through the Elementor control panel utilizing that demo website.
Here’s what the Elementor dashboard appears like.
Here’s the label of various parts numbered.
- The workspace or the primary canvas. This is where you modify and revamp your site
- Elementor widgets area
- Elementor settings
- Open Elementor widgets
- International settings
- Revision history
- Switch view (desktop, tablet, mobile).
- Sneak peek changes.
- Release.
Elementor Structure Hierarchy
If you are entirely brand-new to building websites, you require to comprehend the structure of the Elementor page Builder.
Every page built with Elementor contains areas and columns.
Area. A section is essentially a row. You can include a background, change 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 separately. Elementor Best Themes.
A page can have any number of areas in it. Sections contain columns and columns include the Elementor widgets.
Here is an illustration showing what the structure in Elementor looks like.
Elementor Best Themes
How to Style a Page in Elementor from Scratch
When developing a websites, 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. Elementor Best Themes.
Here’s how you do it:
Step 1: Open a blank page and click “Edit With Elementor”.
Action 2: Click the “+” button to include a new section.
Action 3: Choose a section with a single column or multiple ones depending upon your needs.
Step 4: Drag widgets from the Elementor panel into the columns that you wish to.
When you enjoy with the placement, you can adjust the finer details in the Material, Design, and Advanced Sections.
You can experiment with the choices when discovering to find the best designs for you.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
How to Design a Pre-Existing Page in Elementor
Sometimes you might need to edit 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 going back to square one.
Here’s how you do it.
To add a new widget, drag it from the sidebar on the left.
To rearrange a widget on the visual preview, you can likewise utilize drag and drop. If you want to modify text, simply click and type on the visual preview:
To produce the layouts for your widgets, use areas and columns.
To tailor a widget, click it. That will open the widget’s settings in the sidebar, which are divided into 3 tabs:
Use a comparable technique to customize sections and columns:
As you alter an element’s settings, you’ll instantly see those modifications assessed the visual preview.
Eight Awesome Features That Assist Elementor Stand Out
Next, let’s go through some of the important things that assist Elementor stand apart from other visual, drag-and-drop page home builders.
1. Convenient Modifying Features for Faster Design
Elementor comes with some hassle-free modifying functions that assist you build designs quicker.
Elementor comes with right-click support, which most other page contractors don’t use.
You can right-click on any element to replicate it, copy and paste designs, and more:
It also comes with a helpful Navigator view that offers you an ordered list of all the material on your page, separated by areas and columns. You can use this to quickly open the settings for any component on your page. You can also rename elements to make them much easier to discover: Elementor Best Themes.
And to help you rapidly browse between your styles, it likewise consists of a Finder tool that lets you leap to anything that you’ve built with Elementor by searching for it by name:
2. Huge Widget Selection for Style Flexibility
Throughout the core plugin and add-ons, Elementor has a definitely massive selection of widgets, which provides you a lots of flexibility when developing your styles.
It’s not practically the 60+ widgets that include Elementor and Elementor Pro, though, there’s likewise a big choice of widgets from third-party developers.
For example, Ultimate Addons for Elementor adds another 36+ brand-new widgets that you can utilize in your styles, covering whatever from kind stylers to hotspots, content toggles, videos, and more.
With numerous choices, you can almost always discover a widget that does precisely what you desire it to.
3. Detailed Design and Positioning Guidelines for Pixel-Perfect Styles
Another location where Elementor beats out a lot of the competition is its design alternatives.
Elementor lets you do all the fundamentals – you can change up colors, font styles, spacing, etc.
It likewise includes sophisticated alternatives like:
Shape dividers
Custom positioning
Animations, including parallax scrolling, mouse tracking, 3D tilt, and more
Customized CSS for specific widgets
Simply put, Elementor offers you more choices to produce an unique, effective style.
4. Big Template Choice to Save You Time
If you do not wish to build your styles from scratch, Elementor includes a big choice of templates, divided into 2 classifications:
Pages – full-page templates. All you do is personalize them to satisfy your requirements. Elementor Best Themes.
Blocks – templates for particular 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 also find design templates from third-party sources.
If you use the Astra WordPress theme, it comes with heaps of pre-made starter templates constructed with Elementor. Each starter site consists of numerous Elementor templates that you can customize as needed.
5. Versatile Form Widget and Integrations
Above, I pointed out Elementor’s widget choice in general. I think it’s worth singling out a specific widget:
The Form widget.
The Type widget lets you produce customized kinds, complete with as numerous fields as needed. Where this widget gets actually powerful, especially when it comes to marketing implementations, is its built-in integrations.
You can hook it up to popular e-mail marketing services like ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Mailchimp, and more. There’s also a Webhook choice that lets you connect to Zapier (and the thousands of apps readily available there), along with chat integrations for Slack and Discord.
6. Theme Builder With Dynamic Material for Customized WordPress Sites
With Elementor Pro, you get the ability to exceed posts and pages and design your whole WordPress style with Elementor. That is, you can build:
Headers
Footers
Single design templates
Archive design templates
You might produce a custom post type and then utilize Elementor to develop the design template for that post type, rather than messing around with theme template files straight.
The actually effective thing here is that you have the capability to generate vibrant material from customized fields that you create with plugins like ACF, Toolset, and Pods.
With this vibrant feature, you can construct truly custom websites and harness WordPress’ power as a versatile content management system. Elementor Best Themes.
Simply one note – while this is definitely an effective feature, there are still some reasons why you may wish to select a flexible Elementor style like Astra even if you choose to use Elementor Theme Builder.
7. WooCommerce Builder for Custom-made eCommerce Designs
If you’re creating an eCommerce shop, you can also apply Elementor Style Builder to your store material with dedicated WooCommerce Builder widgets.
You’ll have the ability to develop both your single product pages and shop pages.
To help you construct your styles, you’ll get an array of devoted WooCommerce widgets for whatever from item images to upsells.
In among our articles, we talked about how to develop an eCommerce website with Elementor.
8. Popup Builder for Marketing, Usability, and More
Finally, Elementor Pro can do more than simply posts, pages, and style style – you can also use it to construct popups with Elementor Popup Builder.
With Popup Builder, you get access to the very same familiar Elementor user interface and all of the widgets.
This opens up a great deal of possibilities:
You could utilize the Type widget to produce email opt-in popups and link them directly to your email marketing service of option.
Or, you might utilize the Login widget to produce a popup login kind for your website. Elementor Best Themes.
When you release a popup, you’ll get an array of targeting and trigger guidelines to manage exactly where and when your popup appears:
Elementor Best Themes
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 requirements.
That causes the next question – can you use the totally free version at WordPress.org or should you buy Elementor Pro?
This is an essential choice, so we really composed a whole post on how to choose in between Elementor complimentary vs Pro.
In general, if you simply wish to create some posts/pages or basic 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 includes:
- 30+ brand-new widgets, including the Kind widget. The Kind widget is specifically powerful for marketing pages.
- Theme Builder. This lets you develop your whole theme and WooCommerce shop utilizing Elementor.
- Popup Builder. This lets you construct popups utilizing Elementor.
- More design templates. While the totally free variation includes some design templates, you need Pro for full gain access to.
- More design alternatives. For example, you get access to custom positioning.
Purchasing Elementor Pro is not the only way to extend Elementor.
If you want more flexibility to personalize your style, you do not need to purchase Elementor Pro. Rather, you could use a versatile style like Astra. Through its lots of Customizer settings, you can adjust Astra to pretty much any use, and it’s a lot easier than trying to develop your own theme from scratch. Elementor Best Themes.
You can construct your header and footer using Astra. Because Astra is developed to combine with Elementor, you can still use Elementor to create the material that goes “between” your header, footer, and other style aspects.
Astra likewise consists of tons of pre-built site design templates constructed with Elementor. So you can import an already-finished site using Astra and then just modify it to match your requirements utilizing Elementor.
Or, if you wish to add new widgets for design versatility, you might purchase an extension like Ultimate Addons for Elementor, which adds 36+ brand-new Elementor widgets.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
Does Elementor Decrease Your Website?
Now, this has been a concern that is recently acquiring popularity. And truly so.
Elementor is a plugin that can be helpful for adding lovely widgets and styles to your website. Its flexible and easy-to-use features have actually invited a variety of addon plugins that let you create incredible sites without having to code.
Nevertheless, if you utilize a lot of plugins or have too many animations then it may make your whole site sluggish.
So the question arises if Elementor slows your website down even with no of these addons. Elementor Best Themes.
To find out, we compare two of our starter template sites. One of them was constructed 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 have a look at.
- Gutenberg site from Beginner Templates
- Elementor website from Beginner Templates
We hosted both sites on the exact same server and under different directories of the exact same domain and compared their efficiency in GT Metrix.
Here are the outcomes.
As you can see, the efficiency of the Gutenberg website 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 website made with Gutenberg took 2.2 s.
If you are optimizing for SEO, you understand how big of a distinction that is!
In fact, the very same site developed with Beaver Builder also carries out slightly much better than the Elementor site.
Nevertheless, in terms of fully filled time, it takes a second longer than the Elementor site to load.
Elementor Alternatives
Although Elementor is a fantastic tool, it does not suggest that it is the ideal tool for you all the time.
For instance, if you are constructing a concentrated landing page with the Elementor base version, you may not have the ability to do it directly without integrating another contact form plugin or a payment entrance. Elementor Best Themes.
In such a case you will require to upgrade to Elementor Pro.
For the SEOs out there, you might wish to think about a lighter plugin that loads much faster without causing any delays in page loading.
With all these and many other factors in mind, we have produced this list of Elementor options that can assist you out.
Elementor Best Themes
Gutenberg
Gutenberg is one of the most light-weight and fast site home builders due to the fact that it is WordPress default editor. Gutenburg makes it easier than ever to create websites with ease.
The blocks include whatever you might expect, including headings and subheadings in addition to lists of products like images or videos within the content location on each private site page – all from one easy user interface!
Constructing a website in Gutenberg is like constructing a house utilizing Lego blocks. You set up the blocks in the right order to come up with a stunning website. Elementor Best Themes.
In terms of performance. Gutenberg works way better than any other page Builder. It is enhanced for WordPress users and provides what it guarantees. Nevertheless, it likewise does not have the various style elements that Elementor gives the table.
If you are somebody who prefers efficiency over style, 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 offer a stable and consistent experience with its core plugin that only develops individual pieces of material. There is the Beaver Builder Style available if you desire one too! Elementor Best Themes.
Beaver Builder is a complete page style bundle that offers you with all the tools and parts to construct any kind of site. It has elements such as headings, buttons, maps, sliders, contact kinds, reviews, and more all in one location.
It stands head to head in regards to design and efficiency 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 designed to be as fast, user friendly with site speed in mind.
SeedProd’s wise design system makes recycling blocks of content fast and simple by defining color pattern which will save time when developing brand-new layouts. Elementor Best Themes.
It has all the blocks and functions you ‘d expect from a powerful page Builder such as opt-in kinds, social profiles, countdown timers. It likewise consists of contact pages with a choice to quickly reroute visitors on any website map or Google Maps listing for their service place!
You can use SeedProd’s customized domain mapping feature which will save time when handling several client landing pages in WordPress while still preserving branding connection across platforms.
Any Lingering Questions?
As you can see, we believe that Elementor is one of the best WordPress page contractors out there, which is why we have actually usage Astra, among the most popular styles for Elementor, and Ultimate Addons for Elementor, among the most popular Elementor widget collections.
We’re likewise not alone in our positive Elementor review – over four million WordPress sites utilize Elementor and Elementor has an incredible 4.7-star rating on over 5,900 reviews.
If you wish to experience what Elementor can use for free:
Install the complimentary Astra style to produce a versatile base for your Elementor styles.
Set up the complimentary Elementor plugin from WordPress.org and start building. Elementor Best Themes.
Then, if you like what you see, think about whether Elementor Pro is right for your needs.
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 help you decide.