Elementor Evaluation: Is It The Best WordPress Page Builder? – Elementor Ready Themes
Trying to decide if Elementor is the right page Builder for your WordPress website? In this hands-on Elementor review, we’ll assist you comprehend:
- How Elementor can benefit you
- Who must utilize Elementor
- The distinct functions that assist Elementor stand apart from the competitors
- Whether you ought to use the complimentary version or open up your wallet for the premium variation
Elementor Ready Themes
We’ve created Astra, one of the most popular themes for Elementor, as well as 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 favorable Elementor review. Elementor Ready Themes.
However understanding why we like Elementor and have actually constructed products in the Elementor community is more crucial than just the fact that we like it – that’s what we’re going to attempt and communicate in this evaluation.
By the end of our Elementor review, you need to have whatever that you require to make an informed decision about whether Elementor is the right tool for your WordPress site.
Elementor Ready Themes
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 developing it.
- Drag and drop various content and style elements to create the ideal style.
Generally, it changes producing a great-looking, custom-made web design from something you need to be a developer to do, to something that anyone can do. Elementor Ready Themes.
Elementor is now actively used by over four million WordPress websites, which 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 the majority of those users are pretty pleased with Elementor.
There are a great deal of WordPress page builders that use a visual, drag-and-drop user interface, though, so what makes Elementor stick out and why is it so successful?
Well, we’ll enter into this in more depth later on, but some of Elementor’s standout features are:
- Lots of content components – these are the building blocks of your page. They’re what you “drag-and-drop” to make your design.
- Responsive design – most people search the web on smart devices, so it is necessary that your designs look great on all devices. Elementor’s designs are responsive by default and you get great deals of alternatives to manage how it works.
- Design templates – staring at a blank page is frightening! Elementor includes numerous professionally designed design templates so that you do not have to go back to square one.
- Style choices – you get lots of comprehensive design options to make your design pixel-perfect without resorting to custom CSS (though you can do that too).
- Convenience – you get lots of useful tools like right-click support, a fast find tool, and more to help you develop great-looking pages quicker.
- Theme Builder – with the Pro version, you can develop your whole WordPress theme using Elementor (though we still suggest 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 variation, you can also design all types of popups utilizing the exact same visual, drag-and-drop user interface.
- WooCommerce Builder – if you’re constructing an eCommerce store, you can design your WooCommerce shop utilizing Elementor and include items in your other styles. Elementor Ready Themes.
Who Is Elementor For?
Elementor is for … well, almost anyone who’s utilizing WordPress.
For example, a digital marketer may like Elementor for its capability to help them rapidly produce landing pages and popups, while a casual user may just be searching for a method to add some extra flair to their blog posts.
Let’s take a look at some specific scenarios:
Elementor Ready Themes
The Casual User
If you’re simply a casual user looking for a way to add some style to your post or construct a great-looking homepage, Elementor is perfect for you.
You’ll have the ability to utilize the visual interface to spin up some beautiful designs without needing any technical knowledge … and you’ll probably be able to do it totally free! More on whether you must use the complimentary or paid variation in the future. Elementor Ready Themes.
The Digital Marketer
Elementor is fantastic for digital online marketers and groups because it includes tons of marketing aspects.
The Kind widget in Elementor Pro lets you create all types of lead kinds and link them to popular e-mail marketing services. It also has a Zapier integration, which lets you link to your CRM.
You can likewise utilize the Popup Builder to produce opt-in popups and target them anywhere on your site. And if you’re offering product and services, you can use WooCommerce Builder to design your sales pages.
Finally, the core Elementor plugin itself is also an exceptional option for building WordPress landing pages.
The Website Builder
If you’re developing websites for clients, Elementor is a perfect (and popular) choice.
You can integrate Elementor with a versatile theme like Astra to develop 100% customized client sites with no code required. You can likewise utilize Theme Builder when required, like creating the template for a customized post type and integrating dynamic information from ACF, Pods, or Toolset.
Elementor Ready Themes
Elementor Pricing
Short answer: It’s Free.
The base variation of Elementor that is available in the WordPress Plugin repository is totally totally free to use. There is also a professional version with a lot more flexibility and a lot more functions.
Check out our post on Elementor Vs. Elementor Pro if you want to get an in-depth review of both.
Elementor is a feature-packed plugin that works for all sites. It is restricted at specific points.
With Elementor Pro you can personalize your header, footer, posts page, single posts page, or item pages. Elementor Ready Themes.
The Elementor base version provides the bare minimum you require to develop and tailor your website. If you want to have the flexibility of upgrading the whole website, Elementor Pro is the finest choice.
With Elementor Pro you can also add pop-ups, contact types, membership kinds, worldwide widgets, and custom CSS.
Here is a list of additional features that you get in Elementor Pro:
- 50+ additional 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 modifying item and category pages in eCommerce sites
- Popup Builder with sophisticated features like, exit intent, after scroll, and controls to display certain pop-ups on specific pages
- Visual Form Builder that can be incorporated with popular e-mail marketing tools
- You can create international widgets and use them site-wide
- Add custom CSS
- Deploy any Elementor widget basically anywhere you want
Elementor Pro Rates
Elementor Pro has a 5 tier pricing strategy based on the number of licenses you want.
If you are working with a single site then the Vital Plan would be best for you. If you are working on several sites, the Advanced strategy or above strategies would be better.
All the strategies feature a yearly membership.
How Elementor Works: Visiting the Interface
Let’s see how Elementor deals with this practical area.
Just like any other plugin, you need to set up and activate Elementor through the WordPress repository.
Next, you can either select to customize Elementor settings or dive directly into developing.
If you are simply beginning, we recommend using the default settings just. Head over to pages and open among the pages that you wish to edit.
Click Edit With Elementor to begin editing.
For the sake of this demonstration, we installed the Astra style and imported among its demonstration websites developed with Elementor. Elementor Ready Themes.
Now, let’s go through the Elementor control panel utilizing that demo site.
Here’s what the Elementor dashboard looks like.
Here’s the label of different parts numbered.
- The workspace or the primary canvas. This is where you edit and upgrade your website
- Elementor widgets area
- Elementor settings
- Open Elementor widgets
- Worldwide settings
- Revision history
- Switch view (desktop, tablet, mobile).
- Sneak peek modifications.
- Publish.
Elementor Structure Hierarchy
If you are entirely new to constructing sites, you require to comprehend the structure of the Elementor page Builder.
Every page constructed with Elementor contains sections and columns.
Area. A section is essentially a row. You can include a background, alter its sizing, and more. Columns and widgets go inside sections.
Column. A column divides a section into various columns. You can then manage each column individually. Elementor Ready Themes.
A page can have any number of sections in it. Areas include columns and columns include the Elementor widgets.
Here is an illustration showing what the structure in Elementor appears like.
Elementor Ready Themes
How to Style a Page in Elementor from Scratch
When designing a web page, you can either start with a blank screen or import a pre-existing design template. In this area, we will cover how you can produce a page from scratch using Elementor. Elementor Ready Themes.
Here’s how you do it:
Step 1: Open a blank page and click “Edit With Elementor”.
Step 2: Click on the “+” button to add a new area.
Action 3: Pick a section with a single column or multiple ones depending on your requirements.
Step 4: Drag widgets from the Elementor panel into the columns that you wish to.
As soon as you are happy with the positioning, you can change the finer details in the Content, Style, and Advanced Sections.
You can experiment with the alternatives when learning to discover the best styles for you.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
How to Design a Pre-Existing Page in Elementor
Often you might need to edit a pre-existing page with Elementor. The procedure is not really different in this case either. It is much simpler to edit an existing Elementor page than beginning from scratch.
Here’s how you do it.
To add a new widget, drag it from the sidebar left wing.
To reorganize a widget on the visual sneak peek, you can likewise use drag and drop. If you wish to modify text, simply click and type on the visual sneak peek:
To produce the layouts for your widgets, use sections and columns.
To customize a widget, click on it. That will open the widget’s settings in the sidebar, which are divided into three tabs:
Utilize a comparable approach to personalize sections and columns:
As you alter an aspect’s settings, you’ll instantly see those changes reflected on the visual preview.
Eight Awesome Functions That Assist Elementor Stand Apart
Next, let’s go through some of the important things that help Elementor stick out from other visual, drag-and-drop page builders.
1. Convenient Modifying Functions for Faster Design
Elementor features some hassle-free modifying functions that assist you construct designs faster.
Elementor comes with right-click assistance, which most other page home builders do not use.
You can right-click on any component to replicate it, copy and paste styles, and more:
It likewise features an useful Navigator view that provides you a bought list of all the material on your page, broken up by sections and columns. You can use this to rapidly open the settings for any aspect on your page. You can likewise relabel aspects to make them easier to find: Elementor Ready Themes.
And to assist you rapidly navigate between your designs, it also includes a Finder tool that lets you jump to anything that you have actually constructed with Elementor by looking for it by name:
2. Huge Widget Selection for Style Flexibility
Across the core plugin and add-ons, Elementor has a definitely huge choice of widgets, which provides you a ton of flexibility when developing your styles.
It’s not just about the 60+ widgets that come with Elementor and Elementor Pro, though, there’s also a huge selection of widgets from third-party developers.
Ultimate Addons for Elementor adds another 36+ brand-new widgets that you can utilize in your designs, covering everything from type stylers to hotspots, content toggles, videos, and more.
With a lot of options, you can usually find a widget that does exactly what you want it to.
3. Comprehensive Style and Positioning Guidelines for Pixel-Perfect Styles
Another area where Elementor beats out a lot of the competitors is its design options.
Elementor lets you do all the essentials – you can switch up colors, font styles, spacing, and so on.
It also adds sophisticated choices like:
Shape dividers
Custom positioning
Animations, including parallax scrolling, mouse tracking, 3D tilt, and more
Custom CSS for individual widgets
In other words, Elementor provides you more alternatives to develop a special, effective style.
4. Big Template Choice to Save You Time
If you don’t want to construct your designs from scratch, Elementor comes with a huge selection of design templates, divided into 2 classifications:
Pages – full-page design templates. All you do is personalize them to fulfill your needs. Elementor Ready Themes.
Blocks – templates for specific parts of a page, like a FAQ. You can mix-and-match them like legos to construct total styles.
Just like widgets, you can also discover templates from third-party sources.
If you use the Astra WordPress theme, it features stacks of pre-made starter templates constructed with Elementor. Each starter site includes multiple Elementor design templates that you can personalize as needed.
5. Versatile Type Widget and Integrations
Above, I pointed out Elementor’s widget choice in general. However I believe it deserves singling out a particular widget:
The Kind widget.
The Form widget lets you produce custom-made types, complete with as many fields as needed. Where this widget gets truly powerful, especially when it comes to marketing executions, is its built-in integrations.
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 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 construct:
Headers
Footers
Single design templates
Archive templates
You might create a customized post type and then use Elementor to design the template for that post type, rather than messing around with style design template files directly.
The actually effective thing here is that you have the capability to bring in dynamic material from custom fields that you create with plugins like ACF, Toolset, and Pods.
With this vibrant feature, you can construct genuinely custom-made sites and harness WordPress’ power as a flexible material management system. Elementor Ready Themes.
Just one note – while this is definitely a powerful feature, there are still some reasons why you may wish to choose a versatile Elementor theme like Astra even if you decide to use Elementor Theme Builder.
7. WooCommerce Builder for Custom eCommerce Designs
If you’re creating an eCommerce store, you can likewise use Elementor Theme Builder to your shop material with devoted WooCommerce Builder widgets.
You’ll have the ability to develop both your single product pages and go shopping pages.
To assist you develop your styles, you’ll get a variety of devoted WooCommerce widgets for whatever from item images to upsells.
In one of our short articles, we talked about how to develop an eCommerce site with Elementor.
8. Popup Builder for Marketing, Use, and More
Elementor Pro can do more than just posts, pages, and style style – you can likewise use it to construct popups with Elementor Popup Builder.
With Popup Builder, you get access to the same familiar Elementor interface and all of the widgets.
This opens up a great deal of possibilities:
You could use the Type widget to create e-mail opt-in popups and connect them directly to your e-mail marketing service of choice.
Or, you could use the Login widget to produce a popup login form for your site. Elementor Ready Themes.
When you publish a popup, you’ll get an array of targeting and trigger rules to manage precisely where and when your popup appears:
Elementor Ready Themes
Should You Utilize Elementor Free vs Pro?
If you’ve 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 version at WordPress.org or should you purchase Elementor Pro?
This is an essential decision, so we actually composed a whole post on how to pick between Elementor free vs Pro.
In general, if you just want to develop some posts/pages or standard landing pages, you can probably get by with the complimentary version.
With that being stated, there’s a great deal of value in Elementor Pro. It includes:
- 30+ brand-new widgets, including the Type widget. The Form widget is especially effective for marketing pages.
- Theme Builder. This lets you create your entire style and WooCommerce shop using Elementor.
- Popup Builder. This lets you build popups utilizing Elementor.
- More templates. While the complimentary version includes some templates, you require Pro for full access.
- More design choices. You get access to customized positioning.
Acquiring Elementor Pro is not the only method to extend Elementor.
If you want more versatility to tailor your theme, you don’t require to acquire Elementor Pro. Instead, you could utilize a versatile style like Astra. Through its many Customizer settings, you can adjust Astra to pretty much any usage, and it’s a lot easier than trying to develop your own style from scratch. Elementor Ready Themes.
You can develop your header and footer using Astra. Since Astra is developed to match with Elementor, you can still utilize Elementor to create the content that goes “in between” your header, footer, and other style elements.
Astra also includes tons of pre-built website templates constructed with Elementor. So you can import an already-finished website utilizing Astra and then simply modify it to match your requirements using Elementor.
Or, if you wish to add brand-new widgets for style versatility, you could buy an extension like Ultimate Addons for Elementor, which adds 36+ new Elementor widgets.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
Does Elementor Decrease Your Website?
Now, this has actually been a question that is recently gaining popularity. And rightfully so.
Elementor is a plugin that can be beneficial for adding beautiful widgets and designs to your website. Its flexible and easy-to-use features have invited a number of addon plugins that let you create amazing sites without needing to code.
If you use too lots of plugins or have too many animations then it might make your entire website sluggish.
So the concern emerges if Elementor slows your site down even without any of these addons. Elementor Ready Themes.
To find out, we compare two of our starter template websites. Among them was constructed 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 find out.
Here are the sites for you to have a look at.
- Gutenberg website from Starter Templates
- Elementor site from Beginner Templates
We hosted both sites on the same server and under different directory sites of the very same domain name and compared their efficiency in GT Metrix.
Here are the outcomes.
As you can see, the performance of the Gutenberg website is much faster than the Elementor website.
In terms of exact 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 very same site constructed with Beaver Builder also carries out somewhat better than the Elementor site.
In terms of fully packed time, it takes a second longer than the Elementor website to load.
Elementor Alternatives
Although Elementor is a fantastic tool, it does not indicate that it is the best tool for you all the time.
If you are building a focused landing page with the Elementor base version, you might not be able to do it directly without integrating another contact form plugin or a payment entrance. Elementor Ready Themes.
In such a case you will require 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 hold-ups in page loading.
With all these and lots of other consider mind, we have produced this list of Elementor alternatives that can assist you out.
Elementor Ready Themes
Gutenberg
Gutenberg is one of the most lightweight and quick website contractors because it is WordPress default editor. Gutenburg makes it easier than ever to produce websites with ease.
The blocks consist of whatever you might expect, including headings and subheadings as well as lists of products like images or videos within the content area on each private website page – all from one easy user interface!
Developing a site in Gutenberg is like building a house using Lego blocks. You set up the blocks in the best order to come up with a stunning site. Elementor Ready Themes.
In terms of performance. Gutenberg works way much better than any other page Builder. It is optimized for WordPress users and delivers what it assures. It also lacks the various style components that Elementor brings to the table.
If you are someone who chooses performance over design, then Gutenberg is the ideal choice for you.
Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder is not as flashy or feature-rich compared to Elementor (Elementor Vs Beaver Builder contrast). It does provide a steady and constant experience with its core plugin that only develops individual pieces of material. There is the Beaver Builder Style offered if you want one too! Elementor Ready Themes.
Beaver Builder is a complete page style plan that offers you with all the tools and elements to construct any kind of website. It has components such as headings, buttons, maps, sliders, contact forms, testimonials, 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 many 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 fast, user friendly with site speed in mind.
SeedProd’s clever design system makes reusing blocks of content quick and basic by defining color design which will conserve time when designing new designs. Elementor Ready Themes.
It has all the blocks and functions you ‘d get out of a powerful page Builder such as opt-in forms, social profiles, countdown timers. It likewise includes contact pages with a choice to easily reroute visitors on any site map or Google Maps listing for their service location!
You can utilize SeedProd’s custom-made domain mapping feature which will conserve time when managing multiple client landing pages in WordPress while still maintaining branding continuity throughout platforms.
Any Lingering Questions?
As you can see, we believe that Elementor is one of the very best WordPress page contractors out there, which is why we’ve 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 evaluation – over four million WordPress websites use Elementor and Elementor has an amazing 4.7-star rating on over 5,900 reviews.
If you want to experience what Elementor can use for free:
Install the complimentary Astra theme to create a flexible base for your Elementor designs.
Install the complimentary Elementor plugin from WordPress.org and begin structure. Elementor Ready Themes.
Then, if you like what you see, think about whether Elementor Pro is right for your requirements.
Exists anything we missed in our Elementor review that would help you make your choice? Leave a comment and we’ll attempt to help you choose.
Get Started with Elementor Pro