Elementor Review: Is It The Best WordPress Page Builder? – Elementor Portfolio Template Free
Trying to choose if Elementor is the right page Builder for your WordPress website? In this hands-on Elementor review, we’ll help you understand:
- How Elementor can benefit you
- Who should use Elementor
- The special functions that help Elementor stand out from the competition
- Whether you ought to utilize the free variation or open up your wallet for the premium version
Elementor Portfolio Template Free
We have actually produced Astra, one of the most popular themes for Elementor, in addition to a popular add-on for Elementor, so you can most likely think that we’re fans of Elementor. Let’s get that out of the way – this is a positive Elementor evaluation. Elementor Portfolio Template Free.
But understanding why we like Elementor and have constructed items in the Elementor ecosystem is more vital than just 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 need to have everything that you require to make an informed decision about whether or not Elementor is the right tool for your WordPress website.
Elementor Portfolio Template Free
What Does Elementor Offer?
Elementor is a visual, drag-and-drop page Builder. If you’re not familiar with these terms, this implies that you can:
- See a sneak peek of precisely what your page will look like to visitors as you’re building it.
- Drag and drop various content and design components to develop the ideal design.
Essentially, it transforms producing a beautiful, custom-made web design from something you require to be a designer to do, to something that anyone can do. Elementor Portfolio Template Free.
Elementor is now actively utilized by over four million WordPress websites, which makes it the most popular WordPress page Builder. It’s also kept a remarkable 4.7-star score (out of 5) on over 5,900 evaluations, so the majority of those users are pretty pleased with Elementor.
There are a lot of WordPress page contractors that offer a visual, drag-and-drop user interface, though, so what makes Elementor stand out and why is it so successful?
Well, we’ll enter into this in more depth later, but a few of Elementor’s standout functions are:
- Lots of content elements – these are the building blocks of your page. They’re what you “drag-and-drop” to make your design.
- Responsive style – many people search the web on smart devices, so it’s important that your styles look great on all devices. Elementor’s styles are responsive by default and you get great deals of choices to manage how it works.
- Templates – staring at a blank page is frightening! Elementor includes numerous professionally developed templates so that you don’t need to go back to square one.
- Design alternatives – you get lots of comprehensive design alternatives to make your design pixel-perfect without resorting to custom CSS (though you can do that too).
- Convenience – you get great deals of handy tools like right-click support, a quick find tool, and more to assist you develop great-looking pages much faster.
- Theme Builder – with the Pro variation, you can create your whole WordPress theme utilizing Elementor (though we still advise pairing it with a quality theme).
- Dynamic content – you can consist of dynamic content from customized fields and plugins like ACF, Pods, and Toolset.
- Popup Builder – with the Pro version, you can also create all types 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 shop using Elementor and consist of products in your other designs. Elementor Portfolio Template Free.
Who Is Elementor For?
Elementor is for … well, practically anybody who’s utilizing WordPress.
A digital online marketer may enjoy Elementor for its ability to help them rapidly produce landing pages and popups, while a casual user may simply be looking for a method to include some extra flair to their blog posts.
Let’s take a look at some specific situations:
Elementor Portfolio Template Free
The Casual User
If you’re simply a casual user searching for a way to add some design to your blog posts or develop a beautiful homepage, Elementor is perfect for you.
You’ll be able to utilize the visual interface to spin up some beautiful designs without needing any technical knowledge … and you’ll most likely be able to do it totally free! More on whether you ought to utilize the free or paid version later. Elementor Portfolio Template Free.
The Digital Marketer
Elementor is excellent for digital marketers and groups since it includes lots of marketing aspects.
The Type widget in Elementor Pro lets you create all types of lead kinds and link them to popular email marketing services. It likewise has a Zapier integration, which lets you link to your CRM.
You can also utilize the Popup Builder to create opt-in popups and target them anywhere on your site. And if you’re selling services or products, you can use WooCommerce Builder to develop your sales pages.
Finally, the core Elementor plugin itself is also an outstanding option for building WordPress landing pages.
The Site Builder
If you’re developing sites for customers, Elementor is a best (and popular) option.
You can combine Elementor with a versatile style like Astra to develop 100% custom client websites without any code required. You can also use Style Builder when needed, like designing the template for a custom-made post type and integrating dynamic information from ACF, Pods, or Toolset.
Elementor Portfolio Template Free
Elementor Pricing
Short answer: It’s Free.
The base version of Elementor that is available in the WordPress Plugin repository is entirely totally free to utilize. There is likewise a pro variation with a lot more versatility and a lot more functions.
Have a look at our article on Elementor Vs. Elementor Pro if you want to get a comprehensive review of both.
Elementor is a feature-packed plugin that works for all sites. Nevertheless, it is limited at particular points.
For example, with Elementor Pro you can customize your header, footer, posts page, single posts page, or product pages. Elementor Portfolio Template Free.
The Elementor base variation provides the bare minimum you require to design and tailor your website. If you desire to have the freedom of upgrading the whole site, Elementor Pro is the finest choice.
With Elementor Pro you can also include pop-ups, contact forms, subscription types, international widgets, and customized CSS.
Here is a list of extra functions that you get in Elementor Pro:
- 50+ additional widgets
- 300+ premium demo imports including imports for header, footer, and pop-ups
- Total site personalization through Theme Builder. This lets you alter the header, footer, and posts pages
- WooCommerce Builder for editing item and classification pages in eCommerce websites
- Popup Builder with innovative functions like, exit intent, after scroll, and manages to show particular pop-ups on certain pages
- Visual Form Builder that can be integrated with popular e-mail marketing tools
- You can create international widgets and use them site-wide
- Include customized CSS
- Release any Elementor widget basically anywhere you want
Elementor Pro Prices
Elementor Pro has a 5 tier pricing plan based on the variety of licenses you want.
If you are dealing with a single website then the Important Plan would be best for you. If you are dealing with several sites, the Advanced plan or above strategies would be more suitable.
All the strategies come with an annual subscription.
How Elementor Works: Exploring the Interface
Let’s see how Elementor deals with this useful section.
Much like any other plugin, you need to install and activate Elementor through the WordPress repository.
Next, you can either choose to personalize Elementor settings or dive directly into designing.
If you are simply starting out, we advise using the default settings just. Head over to pages and open among the pages that you want to edit.
Click Edit With Elementor to begin modifying.
For the sake of this demonstration, we set up the Astra style and imported among its demo sites developed with Elementor. Elementor Portfolio Template Free.
Now, let’s go through the Elementor control panel using that demo site.
Here’s what the Elementor dashboard appears like.
Here’s the label of various parts numbered.
- The working area or the primary canvas. This is where you modify and upgrade your website
- Elementor widgets area
- Elementor settings
- Open Elementor widgets
- Global settings
- Modification history
- Switch view (desktop, tablet, mobile).
- Preview modifications.
- Release.
Elementor Structure Hierarchy
If you are totally brand-new to constructing websites, you require to comprehend the structure of the Elementor page Builder.
Every page developed with Elementor consists of areas and columns.
Section. An area is basically a row. You can add a background, change its sizing, and more. Columns and widgets go inside sections.
Column. A column divides a section into different columns. You can then manage each column individually. Elementor Portfolio Template Free.
A page can have any number of sections in it. Sections contain columns and columns consist of the Elementor widgets.
Here is an illustration revealing what the structure in Elementor looks like.
Elementor Portfolio Template Free
How to Design a Page in Elementor from Scratch
When creating a websites, you can either begin with a blank screen or import a pre-existing template. In this area, we will cover how you can create a page from scratch using Elementor. Elementor Portfolio Template Free.
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 on your needs.
Step 4: Drag widgets from the Elementor panel into the columns that you wish to.
When you more than happy with the placement, you can adjust the finer details in the Material, Design, and Advanced Sections.
You can experiment with the options when discovering to discover the best styles for you.
How to Design a Pre-Existing Page in Elementor
Often you might need to edit a pre-existing page with Elementor. The process is not very different in this case either. It is much easier to modify an existing Elementor page than beginning from scratch.
Here’s how you do it.
To include a brand-new widget, drag it from the sidebar on the.
To reorganize a widget on the visual sneak peek, you can likewise utilize drag and drop. If you wish to edit text, simply click and type on the visual preview:
To produce 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 three tabs:
Utilize a similar technique to personalize areas and columns:
As you alter an aspect’s settings, you’ll instantly see those changes assessed the visual preview.
8 Remarkable Features That Assist Elementor Stand Apart
Next, let’s go through some of the important things that assist Elementor stand out from other visual, drag-and-drop page home builders.
1. Practical Modifying Functions for Faster Style
Elementor features some hassle-free editing features that help you develop designs faster.
For instance, Elementor includes right-click support, which most other page home builders don’t offer.
You can right-click on any component to duplicate it, copy and paste styles, and more:
It likewise comes with an useful Navigator view that provides you an ordered list of all the material on your page, separated by areas and columns. You can utilize this to rapidly open the settings for any aspect on your page. You can likewise rename elements to make them simpler to find: Elementor Portfolio Template Free.
And to assist you rapidly browse in between your designs, it also includes a Finder tool that lets you leap to anything that you’ve constructed with Elementor by searching for it by name:
2. Huge Widget Selection for Design Versatility
Throughout the core plugin and add-ons, Elementor has an absolutely enormous selection of widgets, which gives you a ton of versatility when constructing your styles.
It’s not almost the 60+ widgets that include Elementor and Elementor Pro, however, there’s also a big selection of widgets from third-party developers.
Ultimate Addons for Elementor adds another 36+ new widgets that you can use in your styles, covering everything from kind stylers to hotspots, content toggles, videos, and more.
With so many options, you can usually discover a widget that does exactly what you desire it to.
3. Detailed Design and Positioning Guidelines for Pixel-Perfect Styles
Another location where Elementor beats out a great deal of the competitors is its style alternatives.
Elementor lets you do all the essentials – you can switch up colors, typefaces, spacing, etc.
But it likewise adds innovative choices like:
Shape dividers
Custom-made placing
Animations, including parallax scrolling, mouse tracking, 3D tilt, and more
Customized CSS for specific widgets
Simply put, Elementor provides you more choices to create a special, reliable style.
4. Substantial Design Template Selection to Save You Time
If you don’t want to build your styles from scratch, Elementor includes a big choice of design templates, divided into 2 classifications:
Pages – full-page design templates. All you do is personalize them to meet your requirements. Elementor Portfolio Template Free.
Blocks – templates for particular parts of a page, like a FAQ. You can mix-and-match them like legos to build total designs.
As with widgets, you can likewise find design templates from third-party sources.
If you use the Astra WordPress theme, it comes with heaps of pre-made starter design templates built with Elementor. Each starter website includes numerous Elementor design templates that you can tailor as needed.
5. Versatile Form Widget and Integrations
Above, I discussed Elementor’s widget selection in general. But I believe it’s worth singling out a specific widget:
The Type widget.
The Type widget lets you develop custom-made types, complete with as lots of fields as needed. But where this widget gets truly powerful, specifically when it comes to marketing applications, is its integrated combinations.
You can hook it as much as popular email marketing services like ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Mailchimp, and more. There’s also a Webhook option that lets you link to Zapier (and the thousands of apps available there), along with chat combinations for Slack and Discord.
6. Theme Builder With Dynamic Content for Custom-made WordPress Sites
With Elementor Pro, you get the capability to go beyond posts and pages and develop your whole WordPress style with Elementor. That is, you can construct:
Headers
Footers
Single templates
Archive templates
You might produce a customized post type and then use Elementor to design the design template for that post type, rather than messing around with theme design template files directly.
The actually effective thing here is that you have the capability to bring in vibrant material from custom fields that you create with plugins like ACF, Toolset, and Pods.
With this dynamic feature, you can construct genuinely custom-made websites and harness WordPress’ power as a flexible content management system. Elementor Portfolio Template Free.
Simply one note – while this is certainly a powerful function, there are still some reasons that you may want to choose a versatile Elementor theme like Astra even if you choose to utilize Elementor Style Builder.
7. WooCommerce Builder for Custom eCommerce Styles
If you’re producing an eCommerce store, you can likewise use Elementor Theme Builder to your shop content with devoted WooCommerce Builder widgets.
You’ll be able to design both your single product pages and shop pages.
To help you develop your styles, you’ll get a selection of dedicated WooCommerce widgets for everything from product images to upsells.
In among our posts, we talked about how to produce an eCommerce site with Elementor.
8. Popup Builder for Marketing, Functionality, and More
Elementor Pro can do more than simply posts, pages, and theme style – you can also use 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 Form widget to create email opt-in popups and link them directly to your email marketing service of option.
Or, you might use the Login widget to produce a popup login form for your site. Elementor Portfolio Template Free.
When you release a popup, you’ll get an array of targeting and trigger rules to manage exactly where and when your popup appears:
Elementor Portfolio Template Free
Should You Use Elementor Free vs Pro?
If you’ve made it this far, there’s a likelihood that you believe Elementor is right for your requirements.
That leads to the next concern – can you utilize the totally free version at WordPress.org or should you acquire Elementor Pro?
This is an essential decision, so we actually wrote an entire post on how to select between Elementor free vs Pro.
In general, if you simply want to design some posts/pages or fundamental landing pages, you can probably get by with the free variation.
With that being stated, there’s a great deal of value in Elementor Pro. It adds:
- 30+ new widgets, including the Form widget. The Type widget is particularly effective for marketing pages.
- Theme Builder. This lets you develop your whole style and WooCommerce store using Elementor.
- Popup Builder. This lets you develop popups using Elementor.
- More design templates. While the complimentary variation includes some templates, you need Pro for full access.
- More design options. For instance, you get access to custom-made positioning.
However, purchasing Elementor Pro is not the only way to extend Elementor.
For instance, if you desire more versatility to tailor your theme, you do not require to purchase Elementor Pro. Instead, you could utilize a flexible style like Astra. Through its lots of Customizer settings, you can adjust Astra to pretty much any usage, and it’s a lot easier than attempting to design your own style from scratch. Elementor Portfolio Template Free.
You can build your header and footer using Astra. Because Astra is built to combine with Elementor, you can still utilize Elementor to design the material that goes “in between” your header, footer, and other theme elements.
Astra also includes lots of pre-built site design templates developed with Elementor. So you can import an already-finished website using Astra and then just tweak it to match your requirements utilizing Elementor.
Or, if you want to include new widgets for design versatility, you could purchase an extension like Ultimate Addons for Elementor, which adds 36+ brand-new Elementor widgets.
Does Elementor Decrease Your Site?
Now, this has been a concern that is just recently acquiring popularity. And rightfully so.
Elementor is a plugin that can be beneficial for adding lovely widgets and styles to your website. Its versatile and easy-to-use functions have actually invited a number of addon plugins that let you create extraordinary websites without needing to code.
If you utilize too numerous plugins or have too many animations then it might make your entire website sluggish.
The concern develops if Elementor slows your website down even without any of these addons. Elementor Portfolio Template Free.
To find out, we compare 2 of our starter template sites. One of them was developed with Gutenberg and the other with Elementor. Gutenberg is the default editor for WordPress and should have higher speeds in general, but by what degree?
Let’s find out.
Here are the websites for you to take a look at.
- Gutenberg website from Starter Templates
- Elementor site from Beginner Templates
We hosted both sites on the exact same server and under different directory sites of the very same domain name and compared their performance 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 regards to precise loading time, the site made with Elementor took about 5.5 s to load completely while the website made with Gutenberg took 2.2 s.
If you are enhancing 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 website.
Nevertheless, in terms of fully loaded time, it takes a 2nd longer than the Elementor site to load.
Elementor Alternatives
Elementor is a great tool, it does not suggest that it is the ideal 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. Elementor Portfolio Template Free.
In such a case you will need to upgrade to Elementor Pro.
For the SEOs out there, you might want to consider a lighter plugin that loads much faster without triggering any hold-ups in page loading.
With all these and many other factors in mind, we have developed this list of Elementor alternatives that can help you out.
Elementor Portfolio Template Free
Gutenberg
Gutenberg is among the most lightweight and quick website home builders since it is WordPress default editor. Gutenburg makes it much easier than ever to develop web pages with ease.
The blocks consist of whatever you may expect, consisting of headings and subheadings along with lists of products like images or videos within the content location on each individual website page – all from one easy interface!
Building a website in Gutenberg is like constructing a house utilizing Lego blocks. You organize the blocks in the ideal order to come up with a stunning website. Elementor Portfolio Template Free.
In regards to performance. Gutenberg works way better than any other page Builder. It is enhanced for WordPress users and delivers what it promises. It likewise lacks the various style elements that Elementor brings to the table.
If you are somebody who prefers performance over design, then Gutenberg is the best option for you.
Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder is not as fancy or feature-rich compared to Elementor (Elementor Vs Beaver Builder contrast). But it does supply a steady and consistent experience with its core plugin that just constructs specific pieces of content. There is the Beaver Builder Style available if you desire one too! Elementor Portfolio Template Free.
Beaver Builder is a complete page style package that offers you with all the tools and components to construct any type of site. It has elements 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 many 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, user friendly with website speed in mind.
SeedProd’s smart design system makes recycling blocks of material quick and easy by specifying color design which will conserve time when creating brand-new layouts. Elementor Portfolio Template Free.
It has all the blocks and features you ‘d get out of a powerful page Builder such as opt-in kinds, social profiles, countdown timers. It also consists of contact pages with an option to quickly reroute visitors on any site map or Google Maps listing for their business location!
You can utilize SeedProd’s custom domain mapping feature which will conserve time when handling numerous client landing pages in WordPress while still maintaining branding connection across platforms.
Any Lingering Questions?
As you can see, our company believe that Elementor is among the best WordPress page builders out there, which is why we have actually use 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 evaluation – over 4 million WordPress websites utilize Elementor and Elementor has a fantastic 4.7-star ranking on over 5,900 evaluations.
If you wish to experience what Elementor can offer free of charge:
Set up the complimentary Astra theme to develop a flexible base for your Elementor designs.
Install the totally free Elementor plugin from WordPress.org and start structure. Elementor Portfolio Template Free.
If you like what you see, think about whether Elementor Pro is ideal for your needs.
Exists anything we missed in our Elementor evaluation that would assist you make your decision? Leave a comment and we’ll attempt to help you choose.