Elementor Evaluation: Is It The Best WordPress Page Builder? – Elementor Without Theme
Attempting to choose if Elementor is the right page Builder for your WordPress website? In this hands-on Elementor review, we’ll assist you understand:
- How Elementor can benefit you
- Who need to use Elementor
- The unique functions that assist Elementor stand apart from the competitors
- Whether you ought to utilize the free variation or open up your wallet for the premium variation
Elementor Without Theme
We’ve produced Astra, one of the most popular themes for Elementor, as well as 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 favorable Elementor review. Elementor Without Theme.
However understanding why we like Elementor and have built 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 evaluation.
By the end of our Elementor review, you should have everything that you require to make an educated decision about whether Elementor is the right tool for your WordPress website.
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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 preview of precisely what your page will look like to visitors as you’re constructing it.
- Drag and drop various material and style elements to create the best style.
Generally, it changes developing a beautiful, custom-made web design from something you require to be a designer to do, to something that anyone can do. Elementor Without Theme.
Elementor is now actively utilized by over four million WordPress websites, which makes it the most popular WordPress page Builder. It’s likewise kept an impressive 4.7-star score (out of 5) on over 5,900 evaluations, so most of those users are pretty pleased with Elementor.
There are a lot of WordPress page contractors that offer a visual, drag-and-drop interface, though, so what makes Elementor stand out and why is it so effective?
Well, we’ll enter into this in more depth in the future, but some of Elementor’s standout features are:
- Great deals of content aspects – these are the building blocks of your page. They’re what you “drag-and-drop” to make your style.
- Responsive style – the majority of people search the web on smartphones, so it is essential that your designs look terrific on all gadgets. Elementor’s styles are responsive by default and you get great deals of alternatives to manage how it works.
- Templates – staring at a blank page is scary! Elementor includes numerous expertly developed templates so that you do not have to start from scratch.
- Style choices – you get lots of in-depth style alternatives to make your style pixel-perfect without resorting to customized CSS (though you can do that too).
- Convenience – you get great deals of helpful tools like right-click assistance, a quick find tool, and more to help you build beautiful pages faster.
- Theme Builder – with the Pro variation, you can develop your whole WordPress style utilizing Elementor (though we still suggest combining it with a quality theme).
- Dynamic content – you can consist of vibrant content from custom fields and plugins like ACF, Pods, and Toolset.
- Popup Builder – with the Pro variation, you can likewise design all types of popups using the exact same visual, drag-and-drop interface.
- WooCommerce Builder – if you’re constructing an eCommerce store, you can develop your WooCommerce shop utilizing Elementor and include products in your other designs. Elementor Without Theme.
Who Is Elementor For?
Elementor is for … well, almost anybody who’s utilizing WordPress.
For instance, a digital online marketer may love Elementor for its capability to help them quickly develop landing pages and popups, while a casual user may just be looking for a way to add some additional flair to their article.
Let’s take a look at some specific scenarios:
Elementor Without Theme
The Casual User
If you’re simply a casual user searching for a way to include some design to your article 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 great-looking designs without requiring any technical knowledge … and you’ll probably have the ability to do it totally free! More on whether you ought to utilize the totally free or paid version later on. Elementor Without Theme.
The Digital Marketer
Elementor is terrific for digital marketers and groups since it consists of tons of marketing components.
For instance, the Type widget in Elementor Pro lets you produce all types of lead kinds and connect them to popular e-mail marketing services. It likewise has a Zapier integration, which lets you connect to your CRM.
You can likewise utilize the Popup Builder to develop opt-in popups and target them anywhere on your website. And if you’re offering services or products, you can utilize WooCommerce Builder to develop your sales pages.
The core Elementor plugin itself is likewise an outstanding option for building WordPress landing pages.
The Site Builder
If you’re constructing websites for clients, Elementor is a perfect (and popular) option.
You can integrate Elementor with a flexible style like Astra to build 100% customized customer sites with no code required. You can also utilize Theme Builder when needed, like designing the template for a custom-made post type and integrating vibrant information from ACF, Pods, or Toolset.
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Elementor Pricing
Short answer: It’s Free.
The base variation of Elementor that is offered in the WordPress Plugin repository is entirely complimentary to utilize. There is also a pro variation with a lot more versatility and a lot more functions.
Take a look at our article on Elementor Vs. Elementor Pro if you wish to get a detailed evaluation of both.
Elementor is a feature-packed plugin that works for all websites. However, it is limited at certain points.
For example, with Elementor Pro you can tailor your header, footer, posts page, single posts page, or item pages. Elementor Without Theme.
The Elementor base variation delivers the bare minimum you require to create and personalize your website. However if you want to have the flexibility of revamping the entire website, Elementor Pro is the very best choice.
With Elementor Pro you can likewise include pop-ups, contact kinds, membership types, global widgets, and customized CSS.
Here is a list of additional functions that you get in Elementor Pro:
- 50+ additional widgets
- 300+ premium demonstration imports consisting of imports for header, footer, and pop-ups
- Total website customization through Theme Builder. This lets you alter the header, footer, and posts pages
- WooCommerce Builder for modifying product and classification pages in eCommerce websites
- Popup Builder with innovative features like, exit intent, after scroll, and manages to display particular pop-ups on particular pages
- Visual Type Builder that can be incorporated with popular e-mail marketing tools
- You can create global widgets and use them site-wide
- Include custom CSS
- Release any Elementor widget pretty much anywhere you want
Elementor Pro Pricing
Elementor Pro has a 5 tier rates plan based on the variety of licenses you desire.
If you are working with a single site then the Essential Plan would be best for you. If you are working on numerous sites, the Advanced plan or above strategies would be preferable.
All the plans feature an annual subscription.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
How Elementor Works: Exploring the Interface
Let’s see how Elementor deals with this practical section.
Just like any other plugin, you have to set up and activate Elementor through the WordPress repository.
Next, you can either select to personalize Elementor settings or dive directly into developing.
If you are simply starting out, we suggest utilizing 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 theme and imported among its demonstration sites developed with Elementor. Elementor Without Theme.
Now, let’s go through the Elementor control panel utilizing that demonstration website.
Here’s what the Elementor control panel appears like.
Here’s the label of different parts numbered.
- The workspace or the primary canvas. This is where you modify and redesign your site
- Elementor widgets location
- Elementor settings
- Open Elementor widgets
- Worldwide settings
- Revision history
- Switch view (desktop, tablet, mobile).
- Sneak peek modifications.
- Publish.
Elementor Structure Hierarchy
If you are completely brand-new to building websites, you need to comprehend the structure of the Elementor page Builder.
Every page constructed with Elementor contains areas and columns.
Section. A section is basically a row. You can include a background, change its sizing, and more. Columns and widgets go inside areas.
Column. A column divides a section into various columns. You can then manage each column individually. Elementor Without Theme.
A page can have any number of sections in it. Areas include columns and columns consist of the Elementor widgets.
Here is an illustration revealing what the structure in Elementor looks like.
Elementor Without Theme
How to Style a Page in Elementor from Scratch
When developing a web page, you can either begin with a blank screen or import a pre-existing template. In this area, we will cover how you can develop a page from scratch using Elementor. Elementor Without Theme.
Here’s how you do it:
Step 1: Open a blank page and click “Edit With Elementor”.
Step 2: Click on the “+” button to include a brand-new area.
Step 3: Pick a section with a single column or several ones depending on your needs.
Step 4: Drag widgets from the Elementor panel into the columns that you want to.
As soon as you are happy with the positioning, you can change the finer information in the Material, Style, and Advanced Sections.
You can play around with the options when learning to find the right styles for you.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
How to Design a Pre-Existing Page in Elementor
Sometimes you may need to edit a pre-existing page with Elementor. The process is not extremely 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 include a brand-new widget, drag it from the sidebar on the left.
To reorganize a widget on the visual sneak peek, you can also utilize drag and drop. If you wish to modify text, just click and type on the visual preview:
To create the designs for your widgets, utilize 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 personalize sections and columns:
As you alter an element’s settings, you’ll quickly see those changes reflected on the visual preview.
8 Remarkable Functions That Help Elementor Stand Apart
Next, let’s go through a few of the things that help Elementor stand apart from other visual, drag-and-drop page home builders.
1. Convenient Editing Functions for Faster Design
Elementor features some practical editing features that help you construct styles faster.
For example, Elementor comes with right-click support, which most other page builders do not use.
You can right-click on any component to duplicate it, copy and paste styles, and more:
It also comes with a helpful Navigator view that provides you an ordered list of all the material on your page, broken up by areas 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 much easier to find: Elementor Without Theme.
And to help you rapidly browse in between your styles, it also includes a Finder tool that lets you leap to anything that you have actually built with Elementor by searching for it by name:
2. Huge Widget Selection for Style Flexibility
Across the core plugin and add-ons, Elementor has an absolutely enormous choice of widgets, which provides you a ton of versatility when building your designs.
It’s not almost the 60+ widgets that include Elementor and Elementor Pro, though, there’s also a huge selection of widgets from third-party designers.
For example, Ultimate Addons for Elementor adds another 36+ brand-new widgets that you can use in your designs, covering whatever from type stylers to hotspots, content toggles, videos, and more.
With a lot of options, you can almost always find a widget that does exactly what you want it to.
3. Detailed Design and Positioning Guidelines for Pixel-Perfect Designs
Another area where Elementor vanquishes a lot of the competitors is its style alternatives.
Elementor lets you do all the fundamentals – you can switch up colors, fonts, spacing, etc.
It also includes sophisticated options like:
Shape dividers
Custom placing
Animations, consisting of parallax scrolling, mouse tracking, 3D tilt, and more
Customized CSS for individual widgets
Simply put, Elementor offers you more choices to produce a special, effective design.
4. Big Template Choice to Conserve You Time
If you don’t want to develop your designs from scratch, Elementor comes with a big choice of templates, divided into two classifications:
Pages – full-page templates. All you do is tailor them to satisfy your needs. Elementor Without Theme.
Blocks – templates for specific parts of a page, like a FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION. You can mix-and-match them like legos to develop complete designs.
Similar to widgets, you can likewise discover templates from third-party sources.
If you use the Astra WordPress style, it includes stacks of pre-made starter templates constructed with Elementor. Each starter site includes numerous Elementor templates that you can customize as needed.
5. Versatile Type Widget and Integrations
Above, I discussed Elementor’s widget selection in general. I believe it’s worth singling out a particular widget:
The Form widget.
The Kind widget lets you develop custom kinds, complete with as lots of fields as required. Where this widget gets really powerful, specifically when it comes to marketing applications, is its built-in combinations.
You can hook it as much as popular email marketing services like ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Mailchimp, and more. There’s likewise a Webhook choice that lets you connect to Zapier (and the thousands of apps offered there), along with chat combinations for Slack and Discord.
6. Style Builder With Dynamic Content for Customized WordPress Sites
With Elementor Pro, you acquire the ability to surpass posts and pages and create your entire WordPress theme with Elementor. That is, you can construct:
Headers
Footers
Single templates
Archive design templates
You might develop a customized post type and then utilize Elementor to develop the design template for that post type, rather than messing around with style template files directly.
The really powerful thing here is that you have the capability to generate dynamic content from custom fields that you create with plugins like ACF, Toolset, and Pods.
With this dynamic feature, you can build really custom websites and harness WordPress’ power as a versatile content management system. Elementor Without Theme.
Just one note – while this is definitely an effective function, there are still some reasons you may wish to choose a flexible Elementor style like Astra even if you choose to use Elementor Style Builder.
7. WooCommerce Builder for Custom eCommerce Designs
If you’re developing an eCommerce shop, you can likewise apply Elementor Theme Builder to your store content with dedicated WooCommerce Builder widgets.
You’ll have the ability to design both your single item pages and shop pages.
To help you construct your designs, you’ll get a range of devoted WooCommerce widgets for whatever from product images to upsells.
In one of our posts, we talked about how to create an eCommerce website with Elementor.
8. Popup Builder for Marketing, Usability, and More
Finally, Elementor Pro can do more than just posts, pages, and theme design – you can also utilize it to develop 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 a lot of possibilities:
You could use the Type widget to produce email opt-in popups and link them straight to your email marketing service of option.
Or, you might use the Login widget to develop a popup login type for your website. Elementor Without Theme.
When you release a popup, you’ll get a range of targeting and activate guidelines to manage exactly where and when your popup appears:
Elementor Without Theme
Should You Use Elementor Free vs Pro?
If you’ve made it this far, there’s a great chance that you believe Elementor is right for your needs.
That causes the next concern – can you use the complimentary version at WordPress.org or should you acquire Elementor Pro?
This is a crucial decision, so we actually composed a whole post on how to pick in between Elementor totally free vs Pro.
In general, if you simply wish to design some posts/pages or basic landing pages, you can probably get by with the free variation.
With that being said, there’s a lot of worth in Elementor Pro. It adds:
- 30+ new widgets, including the Form widget. The Form widget is especially effective for marketing pages.
- Theme Builder. This lets you design your whole theme and WooCommerce store utilizing Elementor.
- Popup Builder. This lets you build popups utilizing Elementor.
- More templates. While the complimentary variation consists of some templates, you require Pro for complete gain access to.
- More design options. For instance, you get access to customized positioning.
Buying Elementor Pro is not the only way to extend Elementor.
For example, if you desire more versatility to personalize your theme, you don’t need to purchase Elementor Pro. Rather, you might use a versatile style like Astra. Through its numerous Customizer settings, you can adjust Astra to practically any use, and it’s a lot easier than trying to create your own theme from scratch. Elementor Without Theme.
You can develop your header and footer utilizing Astra. Since Astra is built to match with Elementor, you can still utilize Elementor to design the content that goes “in between” your header, footer, and other theme components.
Astra also includes lots of pre-built site design templates built with Elementor. So you can import an already-finished site using Astra and then simply fine-tune it to match your requirements using Elementor.
Or, if you want to add brand-new widgets for style flexibility, you might buy an extension like Ultimate Addons for Elementor, which adds 36+ brand-new Elementor widgets.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
Does Elementor Decrease Your Site?
Now, this has actually been a question that is just recently gaining appeal. And truly so.
Elementor is a plugin that can be beneficial for adding lovely widgets and designs to your site. Its flexible and user friendly features have actually welcomed a variety of addon plugins that let you develop amazing websites without having to code.
If you utilize too many plugins or have too lots of animations then it may make your entire website slow.
The concern arises if Elementor slows your website down even without any of these addons. Elementor Without Theme.
To learn, we compare two of our starter design template sites. Among them was constructed with Gutenberg and the other with Elementor. Gutenberg is the default editor for WordPress and should have higher speeds in general, but by what degree?
Let’s learn.
Here are the websites for you to take a look at.
- Gutenberg website from Starter Templates
- Elementor site from Beginner Templates
We hosted both websites on the very same server and under different directories of the same domain name and compared their efficiency in GT Metrix.
Here are the results.
As you can see, the performance of the Gutenberg website is much faster than the Elementor website.
In terms of precise loading time, the website made with Elementor took about 5.5 s to load entirely while the site made with Gutenberg took 2.2 s.
If you are enhancing for SEO, you understand how huge of a distinction that is!
The exact same website developed with Beaver Builder likewise performs somewhat much better than the Elementor website.
Nevertheless, in regards to totally loaded time, it takes a second longer than the Elementor website to load.
Elementor Alternatives
Elementor is a great tool, it does not mean that it is the best tool for you all the time.
For instance, if you are building a concentrated landing page with the Elementor base variation, you may not be able to do it straight without integrating another contact kind plugin or a payment gateway. Elementor Without Theme.
In such a case you will require to update to Elementor Pro.
For the SEOs out there, you may want to think about a lighter plugin that loads quicker without triggering any hold-ups in page loading.
With all these and many other consider mind, we have actually produced this list of Elementor alternatives that can assist you out.
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Gutenberg
Gutenberg is among the most lightweight and quick site 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 anticipate, consisting of headings and subheadings in addition to lists of products like images or videos within the content location on each individual website page – all from one easy user interface!
Developing a website in Gutenberg is like constructing a house utilizing Lego blocks. You arrange the blocks in the ideal order to come up with a beautiful website. Elementor Without Theme.
In regards to performance. Gutenberg works way better than any other page Builder. It is enhanced for WordPress users and provides what it promises. However, it also lacks the different design aspects that Elementor brings to the table.
If you are somebody who prefers efficiency over style, then Gutenberg is the ideal choice for you.
Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder is not as fancy or feature-rich compared to Elementor (Elementor Vs Beaver Builder comparison). It does supply a stable and constant experience with its core plugin that only constructs private pieces of material. There is the Beaver Builder Theme readily available if you desire one too! Elementor Without Theme.
Beaver Builder is a total page style bundle that supplies you with all the tools and elements to construct any sort of site. It has aspects such as headings, buttons, maps, sliders, contact types, testimonials, and more all in one location.
It stands head to head in regards to design and efficiency with Elementor. However, Beaver Builder does not have as lots of addons constructed 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 site speed in mind.
SeedProd’s smart design system makes recycling blocks of content fast and easy by specifying color design which will save time when developing brand-new layouts. Elementor Without Theme.
It has all the blocks and functions you ‘d expect from an effective page Builder such as opt-in forms, social profiles, countdown timers. It also consists of contact pages with an alternative to easily reroute visitors on any website map or Google Maps noting for their business location!
You can use SeedProd’s custom domain mapping function which will conserve time when handling multiple customer landing pages in WordPress while still maintaining branding connection across platforms.
Any Lingering Questions?
As you can see, we believe that Elementor is one of the best WordPress page home builders out there, which is why we have actually usage Astra, one of 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 favorable Elementor review – over 4 million WordPress sites utilize Elementor and Elementor has an incredible 4.7-star ranking on over 5,900 evaluations.
If you want to experience what Elementor can offer totally free:
Set up the totally free Astra theme to develop a versatile base for your Elementor styles.
Set up the totally free Elementor plugin from WordPress.org and start structure. Elementor Without Theme.
Then, if you like what you see, consider whether Elementor Pro is right for your needs.
Is there anything we missed in our Elementor review that would help you make your choice? Leave a comment and we’ll try to help you decide.