Elementor Review: Is It The Very Best WordPress Page Builder? – Elementor Homepage Templates
Trying to decide if Elementor is the ideal page Builder for your WordPress website? In this hands-on Elementor review, we’ll help you comprehend:
- How Elementor can benefit you
- Who must utilize Elementor
- The special features that help Elementor stick out from the competitors
- Whether you must utilize the totally free version or open your wallet for the premium variation
Elementor Homepage Templates
We have actually developed Astra, among the most popular styles for Elementor, in addition to a popular add-on for Elementor, so you can probably think that we’re fans of Elementor. Let’s get that out of the way – this is a positive Elementor review. Elementor Homepage Templates.
However understanding why we like Elementor and have actually constructed products in the Elementor ecosystem is more crucial 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 evaluation, you need to have everything that you need to make an educated choice about whether Elementor is the best tool for your WordPress website.
Elementor Homepage Templates
What Does Elementor Offer?
Elementor is a visual, drag-and-drop page Builder. If you’re not familiar with these terms, this means that you can:
- See a preview of exactly what your page will appear like to visitors as you’re building it.
- Drag and drop different content and design components to produce the best style.
Basically, it changes developing a beautiful, customized website design from something you need to be a designer to do, to something that anybody can do. Elementor Homepage Templates.
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 score (out of 5) on over 5,900 evaluations, so most of those users are quite delighted with Elementor.
There are a lot of WordPress page builders that provide a visual, drag-and-drop interface, however, so what makes Elementor stick out and why is it so successful?
Well, we’ll get into this in more depth in the future, however a few of Elementor’s standout features are:
- Lots of content elements – these are the building blocks 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 is necessary that your designs look fantastic on all devices. Elementor’s designs are responsive by default and you get great deals of choices to control how it works.
- Design templates – staring at a blank page is frightening! Elementor features numerous expertly designed design templates so that you do not have to go back to square one.
- Style alternatives – you get lots of in-depth style alternatives to make your design pixel-perfect without turning to custom-made CSS (though you can do that too).
- Benefit – you get great deals of convenient tools like right-click assistance, a quick find tool, and more to help you construct great-looking pages much faster.
- Style Builder – with the Pro version, you can develop your entire WordPress style utilizing Elementor (though we still recommend pairing it with a quality style).
- Dynamic content – you can include 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 user interface.
- WooCommerce Builder – if you’re constructing an eCommerce store, you can create your WooCommerce store using Elementor and consist of products in your other designs. Elementor Homepage Templates.
Who Is Elementor For?
Elementor is for … well, practically anybody who’s using WordPress.
A digital online marketer may like Elementor for its ability to help them quickly create landing pages and popups, while a casual user might simply be looking for a way to add some extra style to their blog posts.
Let’s look at some particular circumstances:
Elementor Homepage Templates
The Casual User
If you’re just a casual user trying to find a method to add some design to your blog posts or build a great-looking homepage, Elementor is ideal for you.
You’ll have the ability to use the visual user interface to spin up some beautiful styles without needing any technical knowledge … and you’ll most likely be able to do it for free! More on whether you must use the free or paid variation in the future. Elementor Homepage Templates.
The Digital Marketer
Elementor is excellent for digital online marketers and teams because it consists of tons of marketing components.
The Kind widget in Elementor Pro lets you develop all types of lead kinds and connect them to popular e-mail marketing services. It likewise has a Zapier combination, which lets you connect to your CRM, too.
You can likewise use the Popup Builder to develop opt-in popups and target them anywhere on your website. And if you’re selling products or services, you can utilize WooCommerce Builder to create your sales pages.
Lastly, the core Elementor plugin itself is also an exceptional service for building WordPress landing pages.
The Website Builder
If you’re building sites for clients, Elementor is a best (and popular) option.
You can integrate Elementor with a flexible theme like Astra to construct 100% custom customer websites without any code required. You can likewise utilize Theme Builder when needed, like developing the design template for a custom-made post type and including vibrant information from ACF, Pods, or Toolset.
Elementor Homepage Templates
Elementor Pricing
Short answer: It’s Free.
The base variation of Elementor that is offered in the WordPress Plugin repository is totally complimentary to use. There is also a professional version with a lot more versatility and a lot more features.
Have 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 sites. It is limited at particular points.
For instance, with Elementor Pro you can personalize your header, footer, posts page, single posts page, or product pages. Elementor Homepage Templates.
The Elementor base variation delivers the bare minimum you require to design and personalize your site. If you desire to have the flexibility of revamping the entire site, Elementor Pro is the best option.
With Elementor Pro you can also include pop-ups, contact forms, subscription kinds, global widgets, and custom CSS.
Here is a list of extra functions that you get in Elementor Pro:
- 50+ extra widgets
- 300+ premium demonstration imports consisting of imports for header, footer, and pop-ups
- Complete website modification through Style Builder. This lets you change the header, footer, and posts pages
- WooCommerce Builder for modifying item and classification pages in eCommerce websites
- Popup Builder with innovative features like, exit intent, after scroll, and controls to display particular pop-ups on certain pages
- Visual Form Builder that can be incorporated with popular email marketing tools
- You can produce global widgets and utilize them site-wide
- Include custom CSS
- Release any Elementor widget basically anywhere you desire
Elementor Pro Rates
Elementor Pro has a 5 tier prices strategy based upon the variety of licenses you want.
If you are dealing with a single website then the Necessary Plan would be best for you. If you are working on several sites, the Advanced plan or above strategies would be more suitable.
All the plans come with a yearly subscription.
How Elementor Works: Exploring the Interface
Let’s see how Elementor deals with this practical area.
Much like any other plugin, you have to install and activate Elementor through the WordPress repository.
Next, you can either choose to tailor Elementor settings or dive directly into creating.
If you are just starting, we recommend utilizing the default settings just. Head over to pages and open one of the pages that you want to modify.
Click Edit With Elementor to begin modifying.
For the sake of this demonstration, we installed the Astra theme and imported among its demo websites built with Elementor. Elementor Homepage Templates.
Now, let’s go through the Elementor dashboard utilizing that demonstration site.
Here’s what the Elementor control panel looks like.
Here’s the label of various parts numbered.
- The working area or the primary canvas. This is where you edit and redesign your site
- Elementor widgets area
- Elementor settings
- Open Elementor widgets
- International settings
- Revision history
- Change view (desktop, tablet, mobile).
- Preview changes.
- Publish.
Elementor Structure Hierarchy
If you are entirely new to building websites, you require to understand the structure of the Elementor page Builder.
Every page developed with Elementor includes sections and columns.
Section. An area is basically a row. You can add a background, alter its sizing, and more. Columns and widgets go inside areas.
Column. A column divides a section into various columns. You can then manage each column separately. Elementor Homepage Templates.
A page can have any variety of sections in it. Sections contain columns and columns include the Elementor widgets.
Here is an illustration showing what the structure in Elementor looks like.
Elementor Homepage Templates
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 Homepage Templates.
Here’s how you do it:
Action 1: Open a blank page and click “Edit With Elementor”.
Action 2: Click on the “+” button to include a new area.
Action 3: Select a section with a single column or several ones depending upon your requirements.
Step 4: Drag widgets from the Elementor panel into the columns that you want to.
When you enjoy with the positioning, you can adjust the finer details in the Material, Design, and Advanced Sections.
You can experiment with the choices when finding out to find the ideal designs for you.
How to Design a Pre-Existing Page in Elementor
Often you may need to edit a pre-existing page with Elementor. The procedure is not really various 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 add a brand-new widget, drag it from the sidebar left wing.
To rearrange a widget on the visual sneak peek, you can also use drag and drop. If you want to modify text, just click and type on the visual preview:
To create the layouts for your widgets, use 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 approach to tailor sections and columns:
As you change a component’s settings, you’ll immediately see those changes assessed the visual preview.
8 Awesome Features That Help Elementor Stand Apart
Next, let’s go through a few of the important things that assist Elementor stick out from other visual, drag-and-drop page builders.
1. Practical Editing Functions for Faster Style
Elementor comes with some hassle-free modifying features that help you build styles quicker.
For example, Elementor includes right-click assistance, which most other page builders do not provide.
You can right-click on any component to replicate it, copy and paste styles, 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 rapidly open the settings for any component on your page. You can likewise rename components to make them much easier to discover: Elementor Homepage Templates.
And to help you quickly browse between your designs, it also consists of a Finder tool that lets you jump to anything that you have actually developed with Elementor by looking for it by name:
2. Substantial Widget Choice for Design Versatility
Across the core plugin and add-ons, Elementor has a definitely massive choice of widgets, which offers you a ton of flexibility when developing your designs.
It’s not practically the 60+ widgets that feature Elementor and Elementor Pro, however, there’s likewise a big selection of widgets from third-party developers.
For instance, Ultimate Addons for Elementor includes another 36+ brand-new widgets that you can utilize in your designs, covering everything from kind stylers to hotspots, content toggles, videos, and more.
With numerous alternatives, you can often discover a widget that does precisely what you want it to.
3. Comprehensive Style and Positioning Rules for Pixel-Perfect Styles
Another location where Elementor vanquishes a great deal of the competition is its design options.
Elementor lets you do all the basics – you can change up colors, font styles, spacing, etc.
However it likewise adds innovative choices like:
Shape dividers
Custom positioning
Animations, including parallax scrolling, mouse tracking, 3D tilt, and more
Custom-made CSS for private widgets
Simply put, Elementor provides you more alternatives to create a distinct, efficient style.
4. Substantial Design Template Choice to Save You Time
If you don’t wish to construct your designs from scratch, Elementor includes a huge choice of templates, divided into 2 categories:
Pages – full-page templates. All you do is customize them to fulfill your needs. Elementor Homepage Templates.
Blocks – templates for specific parts of a page, like a FAQ. You can mix-and-match them like legos to build complete styles.
Just like widgets, you can likewise find templates from third-party sources.
If you utilize the Astra WordPress style, it includes stacks of pre-made starter templates constructed with Elementor. Each starter site consists of several Elementor design templates that you can tailor as needed.
5. Flexible Form Widget and Integrations
Above, I pointed out Elementor’s widget selection in general. I believe it’s worth singling out a particular widget:
The Kind widget.
The Type widget lets you produce custom-made kinds, complete with as numerous fields as required. Where this widget gets really effective, specifically when it comes to marketing applications, 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 connect to Zapier (and the countless apps available there), along with chat integrations for Slack and Discord.
6. Style Builder With Dynamic Material for Custom-made WordPress Sites
With Elementor Pro, you get the ability to exceed posts and pages and develop your whole WordPress theme with Elementor. That is, you can develop:
Headers
Footers
Single design templates
Archive design templates
For example, you could produce a customized post type and then use Elementor to create the design template for that post type, rather than messing around with theme design template files directly.
The really effective thing here is that you have the capability to generate vibrant content from customized fields that you produce with plugins like ACF, Toolset, and Pods.
With this dynamic function, you can construct really custom-made websites and harness WordPress’ power as a flexible material management system. Elementor Homepage Templates.
Just one note – while this is certainly a powerful feature, there are still some reasons why you might want to choose a versatile Elementor style like Astra even if you decide to use Elementor Theme Builder.
7. WooCommerce Builder for Custom-made eCommerce Styles
If you’re creating an eCommerce store, you can also apply Elementor Style Builder to your store material with dedicated WooCommerce Builder widgets.
You’ll have the ability to create both your single product pages and shop pages.
To help you construct your designs, you’ll get a range of dedicated WooCommerce widgets for whatever from item images to upsells.
In one of our articles, we talked about how to create an eCommerce site with Elementor.
8. Popup Builder for Marketing, Functionality, and More
Finally, Elementor Pro can do more than just posts, pages, and style style – you can also utilize it to build popups with Elementor Popup Builder.
With Popup Builder, you get access to the exact same familiar Elementor interface and all of the widgets.
This opens up a lot of possibilities:
You could utilize the Kind widget to create e-mail opt-in popups and connect them straight to your email marketing service of choice.
Or, you might use the Login widget to produce a popup login kind for your site. Elementor Homepage Templates.
When you release a popup, you’ll get an array of targeting and activate rules to manage precisely where and when your popup appears:
Elementor Homepage Templates
Should You Use Elementor Free vs Pro?
If you have actually made it this far, there’s a great chance that you think Elementor is right for your requirements.
That results in the next question – can you use the complimentary variation at WordPress.org or should you acquire Elementor Pro?
This is an important decision, so we in fact composed a whole post on how to select between Elementor free vs Pro.
In general, if you simply wish to develop some posts/pages or fundamental landing pages, you can probably manage with the complimentary version.
With that being said, there’s a great deal of worth in Elementor Pro. It adds:
- 30+ brand-new widgets, including the Kind widget. The Type widget is especially powerful for marketing pages.
- Theme Builder. This lets you create your entire style and WooCommerce shop using Elementor.
- Popup Builder. This lets you develop popups using Elementor.
- More templates. While the free variation consists of some design templates, you need Pro for complete gain access to.
- More design choices. For instance, you get access to custom positioning.
Acquiring Elementor Pro is not the only method to extend Elementor.
For instance, if you want more flexibility to tailor your style, you don’t need to buy Elementor Pro. Rather, you could utilize a flexible style like Astra. Through its many Customizer settings, you can adjust Astra to pretty much any usage, and it’s a lot easier than attempting to create your own style from scratch. Elementor Homepage Templates.
You can build your header and footer using Astra. Then, due to the fact that Astra is built to couple with Elementor, you can still use Elementor to develop the material that goes “in between” your header, footer, and other theme components.
Astra likewise includes lots of pre-built site design templates built with Elementor. You can import an already-finished site utilizing Astra and then just modify it to match your needs using Elementor.
Or, if you want to add new widgets for design flexibility, you could purchase an extension like Ultimate Addons for Elementor, which adds 36+ brand-new Elementor widgets.
Does Elementor Slow Down Your Site?
Now, this has actually been a concern that is just recently acquiring popularity. And truly so.
Elementor is a plugin that can be helpful for adding gorgeous widgets and designs to your website. Its flexible and user friendly features have actually invited a number of addon plugins that let you create unbelievable websites without needing to code.
However, if you use a lot of plugins or have too many animations then it might make your entire site sluggish.
So the concern develops if Elementor slows your website down even with no of these addons. Elementor Homepage Templates.
To find out, we compare two of our starter design template websites. One of them was built with Gutenberg and the other with Elementor. Gutenberg is the default editor for WordPress and should have higher speeds in general, however by what degree?
Let’s learn.
Here are the sites for you to have a look at.
- Gutenberg site from Beginner Templates
- Elementor site from Beginner Templates
We hosted both sites on the same server and under various directories of the very same domain 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 website.
In terms of 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 optimizing for SEO, you know how huge of a difference that is!
The exact same site built with Beaver Builder likewise performs somewhat better than the Elementor site.
However, in terms of completely filled time, it takes a second longer than the Elementor site to load.
Elementor Alternatives
Elementor is a fantastic tool, it does not mean that it is the best tool for you all the time.
If you are building a concentrated landing page with the Elementor base version, you may not be able to do it directly without incorporating another contact form plugin or a payment gateway. Elementor Homepage Templates.
In such a case you will need to update to Elementor Pro.
For the SEOs out there, you may wish to consider a lighter plugin that loads much faster without causing any delays in page loading.
With all these and numerous other consider mind, we have produced this list of Elementor options that can assist you out.
Elementor Homepage Templates
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 everything you may expect, consisting of headings and subheadings as well as lists of products like images or videos within the content location on each specific site page – all from one easy interface!
Constructing a site in Gutenberg resembles developing a house using Lego blocks. You organize the blocks in the best order to come up with a lovely site. Elementor Homepage Templates.
In regards to performance. Gutenberg works way better than any other page Builder. It is optimized for WordPress users and delivers what it guarantees. It likewise does not have the different style elements that Elementor brings to the table.
If you are someone who prefers performance over style, then Gutenberg is the right choice for you.
Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder is not as flashy or feature-rich compared to Elementor (Elementor Vs Beaver Builder contrast). However it does supply a stable and constant experience with its core plugin that just develops private pieces of content. There is the Beaver Builder Theme readily available if you want one too! Elementor Homepage Templates.
Beaver Builder is a complete page style bundle that supplies you with all the tools and elements to develop any type of site. It has aspects such as headings, buttons, maps, sliders, contact kinds, testimonials, and more all in one location.
It stands head to head in terms of style and efficiency with Elementor. 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 actually been created to be as quick, user friendly with site speed in mind.
SeedProd’s wise design system makes recycling blocks of content quick and simple by defining color schemes which will save time when developing brand-new layouts. Elementor Homepage Templates.
It has all the blocks and functions you ‘d anticipate from an effective page Builder such as opt-in kinds, social profiles, countdown timers. It also includes contact pages with a choice to quickly redirect visitors on any website map or Google Maps noting for their business location!
You can utilize SeedProd’s custom domain mapping function which will conserve time when handling multiple client landing pages in WordPress while still preserving branding continuity throughout platforms.
Any Lingering Questions?
As you can see, we believe that Elementor is one of the best WordPress page contractors out there, which is why we have actually use Astra, one of the most popular styles for Elementor, and Ultimate Addons for Elementor, among the most popular Elementor widget collections.
We’re also not alone in our favorable Elementor review – over four million WordPress sites use Elementor and Elementor has a remarkable 4.7-star rating on over 5,900 reviews.
If you want to experience what Elementor can use totally free:
Set up the free Astra theme to develop a flexible base for your Elementor styles.
Install the free Elementor plugin from WordPress.org and begin building. Elementor Homepage Templates.
If you like what you see, believe about whether Elementor Pro is best for your requirements.
Is there anything we missed in our Elementor review that would assist you make your choice? Leave a remark and we’ll try to help you decide.