Elementor Review: Is It The Very Best WordPress Page Builder? – Free Elementor Page Builder
Attempting to decide if Elementor is the best page Builder for your WordPress website? In this hands-on Elementor review, we’ll help you understand:
- How Elementor can benefit you
- Who ought to use Elementor
- The unique features that assist Elementor stick out from the competition
- Whether you should utilize the free version or open your wallet for the premium variation
Free Elementor Page Builder
We’ve created Astra, one of the most popular styles for Elementor, as well as a popular add-on for Elementor, so you can most likely guess that we’re fans of Elementor. Let’s get that out of the way – this is a positive Elementor review. Free Elementor Page Builder.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
Comprehending why we like Elementor and have actually constructed products in the Elementor ecosystem is more essential than simply the reality that we like it – that’s what we’re going to try and interact in this review.
By the end of our Elementor review, you ought to have everything that you require to make an educated decision about whether Elementor is the best tool for your WordPress site.
Free Elementor Page Builder
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 preview of precisely what your page will look like to visitors as you’re building it.
- Drag and drop different material and style elements to produce the perfect design.
Basically, it changes creating a great-looking, customized website design from something you require to be a designer to do, to something that anyone can do. Free Elementor Page Builder.
Elementor is now actively utilized by over 4 million WordPress websites, that makes it the most popular WordPress page Builder. It’s also preserved a remarkable 4.7-star score (out of 5) on over 5,900 reviews, so most of those users are pretty delighted with Elementor.
There are a great deal of WordPress page contractors that provide a visual, drag-and-drop user interface, however, so what makes Elementor stand apart and why is it so effective?
Well, we’ll enter this in more depth later on, however a few of Elementor’s standout features are:
- Lots of content aspects – these are the foundation 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 styles look terrific on all devices. 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 frightening! Elementor comes with numerous professionally designed design templates so that you don’t need to go back to square one.
- Design alternatives – you get lots of detailed design options to make your style pixel-perfect without turning to custom CSS (though you can do that too).
- Benefit – you get lots of convenient tools like right-click assistance, a fast find tool, and more to help you construct beautiful pages faster.
- Theme Builder – with the Pro version, you can design your entire WordPress theme using Elementor (though we still suggest pairing it with a quality theme).
- Dynamic content – you can include dynamic content from custom fields and plugins like ACF, Pods, and Toolset.
- Popup Builder – with the Pro variation, you can likewise develop all types of popups using the same visual, drag-and-drop interface.
- WooCommerce Builder – if you’re constructing an eCommerce shop, you can develop your WooCommerce shop using Elementor and consist of items in your other styles. Free Elementor Page Builder.
Who Is Elementor For?
Elementor is for … well, practically anyone who’s utilizing WordPress.
A digital online marketer may like Elementor for its ability to help them rapidly develop landing pages and popups, while a casual user might just be looking for a way to add some extra flair to their blog site posts.
Let’s look at some specific circumstances:
Free Elementor Page Builder
The Casual User
If you’re simply a casual user trying to find a method to include some design to your post or build a beautiful homepage, Elementor is perfect for you.
You’ll be able to utilize the visual interface to spin up some great-looking styles without needing any technical knowledge … and you’ll probably be able to do it totally free! More on whether you must utilize the free or paid version later on. Free Elementor Page Builder.
The Digital Marketer
Elementor is terrific for digital online marketers and groups since it consists of tons of marketing components.
The Kind widget in Elementor Pro lets you create all types of lead types and link them to popular email marketing services. It likewise has a Zapier combination, which lets you connect to your CRM.
You can also use the Popup Builder to develop opt-in popups and target them anywhere on your site. And if you’re offering services or products, you can use WooCommerce Builder to develop your sales pages.
The core Elementor plugin itself is likewise an exceptional service for building WordPress landing pages.
The Website Builder
If you’re constructing websites for customers, Elementor is an ideal (and popular) option.
You can integrate Elementor with a versatile style like Astra to build 100% custom customer websites with no code needed. You can likewise utilize Style Builder when needed, like developing the template for a custom-made post type and integrating vibrant data from ACF, Pods, or Toolset.
Free Elementor Page Builder
Elementor Pricing
Short answer: It’s Free.
The base variation of Elementor that is offered in the WordPress Plugin repository is completely 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 evaluation of both.
Elementor is a feature-packed plugin that works for all sites. It is limited at specific points.
For example, with Elementor Pro you can customize your header, footer, posts page, single posts page, or item pages. Free Elementor Page Builder.
The Elementor base variation delivers the bare minimum you need to create and personalize your site. But if you want to have the freedom of revamping the entire website, Elementor Pro is the very best option.
With Elementor Pro you can likewise add pop-ups, contact kinds, subscription types, international widgets, and custom CSS.
Here is a list of extra functions that you get in Elementor Pro:
- 50+ additional widgets
- 300+ premium demo imports consisting of imports for header, footer, and pop-ups
- Total site modification through Theme Builder. This lets you change the header, footer, and posts pages
- WooCommerce Builder for editing item and category pages in eCommerce websites
- Popup Builder with advanced features like, exit intent, after scroll, and manages to show particular pop-ups on specific pages
- Visual Type Builder that can be incorporated with popular email marketing tools
- You can create worldwide widgets and use them site-wide
- Add customized CSS
- Release any Elementor widget practically anywhere you want
Elementor Pro Pricing
Elementor Pro has a 5 tier pricing plan based upon the number of licenses you want.
If you are working with a single website then the Vital Plan would be best for you. If you are working on numerous websites, the Advanced strategy or above plans would be better.
All the strategies come with an annual membership.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
How Elementor Works: Visiting the Interface
Let’s see how Elementor deals with this useful area.
Similar to any other plugin, you have to install and trigger Elementor through the WordPress repository.
Next, you can either pick to customize Elementor settings or dive straight into creating.
If you are just starting, we advise utilizing the default settings only. Head over to pages and open among the pages that you wish to modify.
Click Edit With Elementor to begin editing.
For the sake of this demonstration, we installed the Astra theme and imported among its demonstration sites developed with Elementor. Free Elementor Page Builder.
Now, let’s go through the Elementor control panel using that demonstration site.
Here’s what the Elementor control panel appears like.
Here’s the label of different parts numbered.
- The working area or the main canvas. This is where you edit and upgrade your website
- Elementor widgets location
- Elementor settings
- Open Elementor widgets
- Worldwide settings
- Revision history
- Switch view (desktop, tablet, mobile).
- Preview changes.
- Release.
Elementor Structure Hierarchy
If you are completely new to developing sites, you require to understand the structure of the Elementor page Builder.
Every page constructed with Elementor includes areas and columns.
Area. A section is basically a row. You can include 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 control each column individually. Free Elementor Page Builder.
A page can have any variety of areas in it. Sections consist of columns and columns consist of the Elementor widgets.
Here is an illustration revealing what the structure in Elementor looks like.
Free Elementor Page Builder
How to Style a Page in Elementor from Scratch
When designing 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 produce a page from scratch utilizing Elementor. Free Elementor Page Builder.
Here’s how you do it:
Step 1: Open a blank page and click “Edit With Elementor”.
Action 2: Click on the “+” button to include a new section.
Step 3: Choose an area with a single column or numerous ones depending upon your needs.
Step 4: Drag widgets from the Elementor panel into the columns that you wish to.
As soon as you enjoy with the positioning, you can adjust the finer details in the Content, Design, and Advanced Sections.
You can experiment with the options when discovering to find the right styles for you.
How to Style a Pre-Existing Page in Elementor
Sometimes you may require 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 add a brand-new widget, drag it from the sidebar on the left.
To reorganize a widget on the visual preview, you can likewise use drag and drop. If you wish to edit text, simply click and type on the visual sneak peek:
To produce the designs for your widgets, utilize areas and columns.
To personalize a widget, click on it. That will open the widget’s settings in the sidebar, which are divided into 3 tabs:
Utilize a similar approach to personalize areas and columns:
As you alter an element’s settings, you’ll immediately see those changes assessed the visual preview.
Eight Remarkable Features That Assist Elementor Stand Out
Next, let’s go through a few of the things that help Elementor stand out from other visual, drag-and-drop page contractors.
1. Convenient Editing Features for Faster Style
Elementor includes some hassle-free editing features that help you build styles quicker.
Elementor comes with right-click support, which most other page builders do not provide.
You can right-click on any element 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 content on your page, separated by areas and columns. You can use this to rapidly open the settings for any component on your page. You can also rename aspects to make them simpler to find: Free Elementor Page Builder.
And to help you rapidly navigate between your designs, it also consists of a Finder tool that lets you leap to anything that you’ve built with Elementor by searching for it by name:
2. Huge Widget Selection for Style Versatility
Throughout the core plugin and add-ons, Elementor has an absolutely massive choice of widgets, which gives you a ton of versatility when constructing your designs.
It’s not just about the 60+ widgets that feature Elementor and Elementor Pro, though, there’s also a huge choice of widgets from third-party developers.
For instance, Ultimate Addons for Elementor includes another 36+ brand-new widgets that you can use in your styles, covering whatever from type stylers to hotspots, content toggles, videos, and more.
With numerous choices, you can often find a widget that does exactly what you desire it to.
3. Detailed Design and Positioning Guidelines for Pixel-Perfect Designs
Another area where Elementor vanquishes a great deal of the competition is its style alternatives.
Elementor lets you do all the basics – you can switch up colors, font styles, spacing, and so on.
But it likewise includes innovative alternatives like:
Forming dividers
Custom-made placing
Animations, consisting of parallax scrolling, mouse tracking, 3D tilt, and more
Customized CSS for individual widgets
Put simply, Elementor offers you more choices to produce a distinct, efficient style.
4. Substantial Design Template Choice to Save You Time
If you do not want to develop your designs from scratch, Elementor comes with a substantial selection of templates, divided into two categories:
Pages – full-page design templates. All you do is customize them to fulfill your requirements. Free Elementor Page Builder.
Blocks – design templates for specific parts of a page, like a FAQ. You can mix-and-match them like legos to build complete styles.
As with widgets, you can also find design templates from third-party sources.
If you use the Astra WordPress style, it comes with heaps of pre-made starter design templates constructed with Elementor. Each starter website includes several Elementor design templates that you can tailor as required.
5. Versatile Form Widget and Integrations
Above, I mentioned Elementor’s widget selection in general. But I believe it deserves singling out a specific widget:
The Kind widget.
The Kind widget lets you produce customized forms, total with as many fields as required. However where this widget gets actually powerful, particularly when it comes to marketing implementations, is its integrated combinations.
You can hook it up to popular email marketing services like ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Mailchimp, and more. There’s likewise a Webhook option 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 Material for Customized WordPress Sites
With Elementor Pro, you get the ability to surpass posts and pages and design your whole WordPress theme with Elementor. That is, you can develop:
Headers
Footers
Single design templates
Archive templates
You might develop a custom post type and then use Elementor to design the template for that post type, rather than messing around with style design template files straight.
The truly powerful thing here is that you have the ability to bring in dynamic content from custom fields that you create with plugins like ACF, Toolset, and Pods.
With this dynamic function, you can build genuinely customized sites and harness WordPress’ power as a versatile material management system. Free Elementor Page Builder.
Just one note – while this is certainly an effective feature, there are still some reasons why you may want to pick 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 producing an eCommerce shop, you can likewise use Elementor Style Builder to your shop content with devoted WooCommerce Builder widgets.
You’ll be able to develop both your single product pages and shop pages.
To help you construct your designs, you’ll get a selection of dedicated WooCommerce widgets for everything from item images to upsells.
In among our short articles, we discussed how to create an eCommerce site with Elementor.
8. Popup Builder for Marketing, Usability, and More
Elementor Pro can do more than simply posts, pages, and style style – 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 up a great deal of possibilities:
You might utilize the Type widget to produce email opt-in popups and connect them directly to your e-mail marketing service of choice.
Or, you could use the Login widget to create a popup login form for your website. Free Elementor Page Builder.
When you publish a popup, you’ll get a range of targeting and trigger rules to control precisely where and when your popup appears:
Free Elementor Page Builder
Should You Use Elementor Free vs Pro?
If you have actually made it this far, there’s a likelihood that you believe Elementor is right for your requirements.
That leads to the next question – can you use the complimentary variation at WordPress.org or should you acquire Elementor Pro?
This is a crucial choice, so we in fact composed a whole post on how to choose between Elementor totally free vs Pro.
In general, if you just wish to develop some posts/pages or basic landing pages, you can probably get by with the free version.
With that being said, there’s a great deal of value in Elementor Pro. It adds:
- 30+ brand-new widgets, including the Form widget. The Form widget is especially effective for marketing pages.
- Style Builder. This lets you design your entire theme and WooCommerce store using Elementor.
- Popup Builder. This lets you construct popups utilizing Elementor.
- More design templates. While the free variation includes some design templates, you need Pro for complete gain access to.
- More design choices. You get access to customized positioning.
Purchasing Elementor Pro is not the only way to extend Elementor.
For instance, if you want more versatility to customize your theme, you don’t need to buy Elementor Pro. Instead, you could utilize a versatile theme like Astra. Through its many Customizer settings, you can adjust Astra to pretty much any use, and it’s a lot easier than trying to create your own theme from scratch. Free Elementor Page Builder.
You can develop your header and footer using Astra. Because Astra is developed to match with Elementor, you can still use Elementor to develop the material that goes “in between” your header, footer, and other theme aspects.
Astra also includes lots of pre-built website design templates constructed with Elementor. You can import an already-finished site utilizing Astra and then simply fine-tune it to match your needs utilizing Elementor.
Or, if you want to include new widgets for design flexibility, you could buy an extension like Ultimate Addons for Elementor, which includes 36+ brand-new Elementor widgets.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
Does Elementor Slow Down Your Website?
Now, this has been a question that is recently getting appeal. And truly so.
Elementor is a plugin that can be helpful for including gorgeous widgets and styles to your website. Its versatile and user friendly functions have actually invited a variety of addon plugins that let you create extraordinary sites without needing to code.
Nevertheless, if you use too many plugins or have too many animations then it may make your entire site slow.
So the concern arises if Elementor slows your site down even with no of these addons. Free Elementor Page Builder.
To learn, we compare 2 of our starter template websites. Among them was built with Gutenberg and the other with Elementor. Gutenberg is the default editor for WordPress and should have greater speeds in general, however by what degree?
Let’s discover.
Here are the sites for you to have a look at.
- Gutenberg site from Starter Templates
- Elementor website from Starter Templates
We hosted both websites on the same server and under various directories of the exact 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 terms of exact 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 optimizing for SEO, you understand how big of a difference that is!
The same website built with Beaver Builder likewise carries out a little much better than the Elementor site.
In terms of fully filled time, it takes a second longer than the Elementor website to load.
Elementor Alternatives
Elementor is a great tool, it does not indicate that it is the ideal tool for you all the time.
For instance, if you are building a focused landing page with the Elementor base variation, you might not be able to do it directly without integrating another contact kind plugin or a payment gateway. Free Elementor Page Builder.
In such a case you will need to update to Elementor Pro.
For the SEOs out there, you might want to think about a lighter plugin that loads quicker without causing any hold-ups in page loading.
With all these and lots of other factors in mind, we have actually created this list of Elementor alternatives that can help you out.
Free Elementor Page Builder
Gutenberg
Gutenberg is one of the most light-weight and fast site contractors since it is WordPress default editor. Gutenburg makes it much easier than ever to produce web pages with ease.
The blocks consist of whatever you may anticipate, consisting of headings and subheadings along with lists of products like images or videos within the content area on each private site page – all from one simple user interface!
Constructing a website in Gutenberg resembles constructing a home using Lego blocks. You organize the blocks in the right order to come up with a beautiful site. Free Elementor Page Builder.
In regards to performance. Gutenberg works way much better than any other page Builder. It is optimized for WordPress users and delivers what it guarantees. It likewise lacks the different style components that Elementor brings to the table.
If you are someone who chooses efficiency over design, then Gutenberg is the best option for you.
Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder is not as flashy or feature-rich compared to Elementor (Elementor Vs Beaver Builder comparison). It does provide a stable and constant experience with its core plugin that only develops private pieces of content. There is the Beaver Builder Style offered if you desire one too! Free Elementor Page Builder.
Beaver Builder is a complete page style bundle that supplies you with all the tools and components to develop any type of site. It has elements such as headings, buttons, maps, sliders, contact kinds, testimonials, and more all in one place.
It stands head to head in regards to design and efficiency with Elementor. Nevertheless, Beaver Builder does not have as lots of addons built for itself as Elementor does.
SeedProd
SeedProd is a premium drag-and-drop landing page Builder plugin for WordPress. It has actually been created to be as quickly, easy-to-use with site speed in mind.
SeedProd’s wise style system makes reusing blocks of content fast and simple by specifying color schemes which will save time when designing brand-new designs. Free Elementor Page Builder.
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 consists of contact pages with a choice to easily redirect visitors on any website map or Google Maps listing for their business location!
You can utilize SeedProd’s custom domain mapping function which will conserve time when managing several client landing pages in WordPress while still maintaining branding connection throughout platforms.
Any Lingering Questions?
As you can see, our company believe that Elementor is among the best WordPress page home builders out there, which is why we have actually usage Astra, among the most popular themes for Elementor, and Ultimate Addons for Elementor, among the most popular Elementor widget collections.
We’re likewise not alone in our positive Elementor review – over four million WordPress sites use Elementor and Elementor has a fantastic 4.7-star ranking on over 5,900 reviews.
If you want to experience what Elementor can offer for free:
Set up the totally free Astra theme to create a flexible base for your Elementor styles.
Install the complimentary Elementor plugin from WordPress.org and begin building. Free Elementor Page Builder.
Then, if you like what you see, think of whether Elementor Pro is right for your requirements.
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.
Get Started with Elementor Pro