Elementor Evaluation: Is It The Best WordPress Page Builder? – Free Template Elementor
Trying to choose if Elementor is the best page Builder for your WordPress website? In this hands-on Elementor evaluation, we’ll assist you understand:
- How Elementor can benefit you
- Who should utilize Elementor
- The unique functions that assist Elementor stand apart from the competitors
- Whether you ought to utilize the totally free version or open up your wallet for the premium variation
Free Template Elementor
We’ve produced Astra, one of the most popular styles for Elementor, along with 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 favorable Elementor evaluation. Free Template Elementor.
Understanding why we like Elementor and have actually constructed products in the Elementor environment is more crucial than just the fact that we like it – that’s what we’re going to attempt and communicate in this review.
By the end of our Elementor evaluation, you should have everything that you need to make an informed decision about whether Elementor is the ideal tool for your WordPress website.
Free Template Elementor
What Does Elementor Offer?
Elementor is a visual, drag-and-drop page Builder. If you’re not acquainted with these terms, this implies that you can:
- See a preview of exactly what your page will look like to visitors as you’re building it.
- Drag and drop different content and design components to create the ideal design.
Basically, it changes creating a great-looking, customized website design from something you need to be a designer to do, to something that anyone can do. Free Template Elementor.
Elementor is now actively utilized by over 4 million WordPress websites, which makes it the most popular WordPress page Builder. It’s likewise maintained an impressive 4.7-star score (out of 5) on over 5,900 evaluations, so most of those users are pretty delighted with Elementor.
There are a lot of WordPress page contractors that provide a visual, drag-and-drop interface, however, so what makes Elementor stand 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:
- 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 design – the majority of people search the web on smartphones, so it is very important 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.
- Design templates – staring at a blank page is frightening! Elementor features hundreds of expertly created templates so that you don’t have to go back to square one.
- Design alternatives – you get lots of in-depth style choices to make your design pixel-perfect without resorting to customized CSS (though you can do that too).
- Benefit – you get great deals of helpful tools like right-click support, a quick discover tool, and more to help you develop beautiful pages much faster.
- Style Builder – with the Pro version, you can design your whole WordPress theme utilizing Elementor (though we still advise combining it with a quality style).
- Dynamic content – you can consist of dynamic material 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 building an eCommerce store, you can create your WooCommerce shop using Elementor and include items in your other designs. Free Template Elementor.
Who Is Elementor For?
Elementor is for … well, nearly anybody who’s using WordPress.
For example, a digital online marketer might like Elementor for its ability to help them rapidly develop landing pages and popups, while a casual user may just be searching for a method to include some additional flair to their article.
Let’s look at some specific scenarios:
Free Template Elementor
The Casual User
If you’re simply a casual user trying to find a method to add some style to your post or develop a beautiful homepage, Elementor is best for you.
You’ll be able to use the visual user interface to spin up some beautiful styles without requiring any technical knowledge … and you’ll probably have the ability to do it totally free! More on whether you need to utilize the complimentary or paid version later. Free Template Elementor.
The Digital Marketer
Elementor is terrific for digital online marketers and groups since it consists of lots of marketing components.
For example, the Type widget in Elementor Pro lets you develop all kinds of lead kinds and connect them to popular email marketing services. It also has a Zapier integration, which lets you link to your CRM, also.
You can also use 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 create your sales pages.
Finally, the core Elementor plugin itself is also an outstanding service for structure WordPress landing pages.
The Site Builder
If you’re constructing websites for clients, Elementor is a best (and popular) option.
You can combine Elementor with a flexible theme like Astra to develop 100% custom-made customer sites with no code needed. You can also use Theme Builder when required, like creating the design template for a custom-made post type and including vibrant information from ACF, Pods, or Toolset.
Free Template Elementor
Elementor Rates
Short answer: It’s Free.
The base version of Elementor that is available in the WordPress Plugin repository is entirely complimentary to utilize. There is likewise a pro version with a lot more flexibility and a lot more functions.
Take a look at our short 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. It is restricted at specific points.
For instance, with Elementor Pro you can personalize your header, footer, posts page, single posts page, or product pages. Free Template Elementor.
The Elementor base version delivers the bare minimum you require to create and tailor your site. If you want to have the flexibility of revamping the entire site, Elementor Pro is the best choice.
With Elementor Pro you can likewise add pop-ups, contact kinds, subscription kinds, global widgets, and custom CSS.
Here is a list of additional functions that you get in Elementor Pro:
- 50+ extra widgets
- 300+ premium demo imports consisting of imports for header, footer, and pop-ups
- Complete site modification through Style Builder. This lets you change the header, footer, and posts pages
- WooCommerce Builder for editing product and category pages in eCommerce websites
- Popup Builder with innovative features like, exit intent, after scroll, and controls to show certain pop-ups on specific pages
- Visual Kind Builder that can be integrated with popular email marketing tools
- You can create international widgets and use them site-wide
- Include customized CSS
- Deploy any Elementor widget basically anywhere you desire
Elementor Pro Pricing
Elementor Pro has a 5 tier prices strategy based upon 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 dealing with multiple websites, the Advanced plan or above plans would be more suitable.
All the strategies feature an annual membership.
How Elementor Works: Touring the Interface
Let’s see how Elementor deals with this useful section.
Much like any other plugin, you need to install and trigger Elementor through the WordPress repository.
Next, you can either select to tailor Elementor settings or dive straight into developing.
If you are simply starting, we advise utilizing the default settings only. Head over to pages and open among the pages that you want to modify.
Click Edit With Elementor to start editing.
For the sake of this demonstration, we installed the Astra theme and imported among its demonstration websites built with Elementor. Free Template Elementor.
Now, let’s go through the Elementor control panel utilizing that demonstration site.
Here’s what the Elementor dashboard appears like.
Here’s the label of different parts numbered.
- The working area or the main canvas. This is where you modify and upgrade your website
- Elementor widgets area
- Elementor settings
- Open Elementor widgets
- Worldwide settings
- Revision history
- Change view (desktop, tablet, mobile).
- Preview modifications.
- Publish.
Elementor Structure Hierarchy
If you are completely brand-new to developing websites, you require to understand the structure of the Elementor page Builder.
Every page built with Elementor contains areas and columns.
Section. An area is basically a row. You can include a background, alter its sizing, and more. Columns and widgets go inside sections.
Column. A column divides an area into various columns. You can then manage each column individually. Free Template Elementor.
A page can have any variety of areas in it. Sections include columns and columns consist of the Elementor widgets.
Here is an illustration showing what the structure in Elementor appears like.
Free Template Elementor
How to Style a Page in Elementor from Scratch
When creating a websites, you can either start with a blank screen or import a pre-existing design template. In this section, we will cover how you can create a page from scratch using Elementor. Free Template Elementor.
Here’s how you do it:
Step 1: Open a blank page and click “Edit With Elementor”.
Action 2: Click on the “+” button to add a brand-new section.
Step 3: Select a section with a single column or multiple ones depending upon your requirements.
Step 4: Drag widgets from the Elementor panel into the columns that you want to.
As soon as you enjoy with the positioning, you can change the finer information in the Material, Design, and Advanced Sections.
You can experiment with the options when finding out to discover the right styles for you.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
How to Style a Pre-Existing Page in Elementor
In some cases you might require to edit a pre-existing page with Elementor. The process is not really various in this case either. In fact, it is much easier to edit an existing Elementor page than going back to square one.
Here’s how you do it.
To add a brand-new widget, drag it from the sidebar on the left.
To rearrange a widget on the visual preview, you can also use drag and drop. If you want to modify text, simply click and type on the visual sneak peek:
To create the designs for your widgets, utilize areas and columns.
To personalize a widget, click it. That will open the widget’s settings in the sidebar, which are divided into 3 tabs:
Use a similar method to customize areas and columns:
As you alter a component’s settings, you’ll quickly see those changes reviewed the visual preview.
8 Amazing Features That Assist Elementor Stand Out
Next, let’s go through some of the things that help Elementor stick out from other visual, drag-and-drop page home builders.
1. Hassle-free Modifying Features for Faster Style
Elementor comes with some practical modifying functions that assist you construct designs faster.
For instance, Elementor comes with right-click assistance, which most other page builders don’t use.
You can right-click on any element to duplicate it, copy and paste designs, and more:
It likewise comes with a beneficial Navigator view that provides you a purchased list of all the content on your page, broken up by sections and columns. You can use this to rapidly open the settings for any component on your page. You can likewise rename aspects to make them easier to discover: Free Template Elementor.
And to help you rapidly browse between your styles, it also consists of a Finder tool that lets you jump to anything that you have actually developed with Elementor by looking for it by name:
2. Substantial Widget Selection for Style Flexibility
Throughout the core plugin and add-ons, Elementor has a definitely massive selection of widgets, which provides you a ton of versatility when constructing your designs.
It’s not almost the 60+ widgets that include Elementor and Elementor Pro, though, there’s also a big choice of widgets from third-party designers.
For instance, Ultimate Addons for Elementor adds another 36+ brand-new widgets that you can use in your styles, covering everything from form stylers to hotspots, content toggles, videos, and more.
With many options, you can usually discover a widget that does exactly what you desire it to.
3. In-depth Style and Positioning Rules for Pixel-Perfect Designs
Another location where Elementor beats out a great deal of the competitors is its design alternatives.
Elementor lets you do all the essentials – you can change up colors, fonts, spacing, etc.
It likewise adds sophisticated choices like:
Forming dividers
Custom positioning
Animations, including parallax scrolling, mouse tracking, 3D tilt, and more
Custom-made CSS for private widgets
Put simply, Elementor offers you more alternatives to develop a special, effective design.
4. Huge Template Selection to Conserve You Time
If you don’t want to build your designs from scratch, Elementor comes with a substantial choice of design templates, divided into two classifications:
Pages – full-page design templates. All you do is tailor them to fulfill your needs. Free Template Elementor.
Blocks – templates for particular parts of a page, like a FAQ. You can mix-and-match them like legos to develop complete designs.
Similar to widgets, you can also find templates from third-party sources.
If you use the Astra WordPress style, it comes with heaps of pre-made starter design templates developed with Elementor. Each starter website includes numerous Elementor templates that you can tailor as required.
5. Flexible Type Widget and Integrations
Above, I discussed Elementor’s widget choice in general. But I believe it’s worth singling out a particular widget:
The Type widget.
The Type widget lets you produce custom-made forms, total with as lots of fields as needed. Where this widget gets really effective, specifically when it comes to marketing implementations, is its built-in combinations.
You can hook it approximately popular e-mail marketing services like ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Mailchimp, and more. There’s also a Webhook option that lets you connect to Zapier (and the thousands of apps available there), along with chat combinations for Slack and Discord.
6. Style Builder With Dynamic Material for Custom WordPress Sites
With Elementor Pro, you gain the ability to exceed posts and pages and design your entire WordPress theme with Elementor. That is, you can construct:
Headers
Footers
Single design templates
Archive design templates
For instance, you could create a custom-made post type and after that use Elementor to create the design template for that post type, instead of tampering theme design template files directly.
The truly effective thing here is that you have the ability to generate dynamic material from customized fields that you produce with plugins like ACF, Toolset, and Pods.
With this dynamic function, you can construct truly customized websites and harness WordPress’ power as a versatile material management system. Free Template Elementor.
Simply one note – while this is definitely a powerful feature, there are still some reasons why you might want to choose a flexible Elementor style like Astra even if you choose to use Elementor Style Builder.
7. WooCommerce Builder for Customized eCommerce Designs
If you’re creating an eCommerce store, you can likewise apply Elementor Theme Builder to your store content with devoted WooCommerce Builder widgets.
You’ll be able to design both your single item pages and shop pages.
To assist you build your designs, you’ll get a selection of devoted WooCommerce widgets for everything from item images to upsells.
In among our posts, we discussed how to develop an eCommerce website with Elementor.
8. Popup Builder for Marketing, Functionality, and More
Finally, Elementor Pro can do more than just posts, pages, and style style – you can also utilize it to develop popups with Elementor Popup Builder.
With Popup Builder, you get access to the exact same familiar Elementor user interface and all of the widgets.
This opens up a lot of possibilities:
For example, you could use the Type widget to produce e-mail opt-in popups and connect them directly to your email marketing service of choice.
Or, you could utilize the Login widget to develop a popup login kind for your site. Free Template Elementor.
When you release a popup, you’ll get an array of targeting and activate rules to control exactly where and when your popup appears:
Free Template Elementor
Should You Utilize Elementor Free vs Pro?
If you’ve made it this far, there’s a good chance that you believe Elementor is right for your needs.
That results in the next concern – can you use the complimentary version at WordPress.org or should you acquire Elementor Pro?
This is a crucial choice, so we really wrote an entire post on how to pick between Elementor totally free vs Pro.
In general, if you simply wish to design some posts/pages or standard landing pages, you can most likely get by with the totally free variation.
With that being stated, there’s a great deal of value in Elementor Pro. It includes:
- 30+ new widgets, including the Form widget. The Kind widget is particularly effective for marketing pages.
- Theme Builder. This lets you create your entire style and WooCommerce store using Elementor.
- Popup Builder. This lets you develop popups using Elementor.
- More templates. While the totally free version consists of some templates, you require Pro for full gain access to.
- More design choices. For example, you get access to custom-made positioning.
Buying Elementor Pro is not the only way to extend Elementor.
If you desire more flexibility to tailor your style, you don’t require to acquire Elementor Pro. Instead, you might utilize a flexible theme like Astra. Through its numerous Customizer settings, you can adapt Astra to basically any use, and it’s a lot easier than trying to design your own style from scratch. Free Template Elementor.
You can develop your header and footer utilizing Astra. Since Astra is built to match with Elementor, you can still use Elementor to design the content that goes “in between” your header, footer, and other theme aspects.
Astra likewise includes lots of pre-built site design templates built with Elementor. So you can import an already-finished site using Astra and then simply tweak it to match your needs using Elementor.
Or, if you want to add new widgets for design flexibility, you could purchase an extension like Ultimate Addons for Elementor, which adds 36+ brand-new Elementor widgets.
Does Elementor Decrease Your Website?
Now, this has been a question that is recently getting appeal. And rightfully so.
Elementor is a plugin that can be useful for adding stunning widgets and styles to your site. Its flexible and easy-to-use features have welcomed a variety of addon plugins that let you develop extraordinary websites without having to code.
If you use too lots of plugins or have too lots of animations then it might make your whole site sluggish.
So the question emerges if Elementor slows your site down even with no of these addons. Free Template Elementor.
To find out, we compare 2 of our starter template websites. One of them was built with Gutenberg and the other with Elementor. Gutenberg is the default editor for WordPress and should have higher speeds in general, but by what degree?
Let’s learn.
Here are the sites for you to take a look at.
- Gutenberg website from Starter Templates
- Elementor site from Starter Templates
We hosted both websites on the exact same server and under various directory sites of the exact same domain name and compared their performance in GT Metrix.
Here are the results.
As you can see, the efficiency of the Gutenberg site is much faster than the Elementor website.
In terms of precise loading time, the site made with Elementor took about 5.5 s to load totally while the website made with Gutenberg took 2.2 s.
If you are optimizing for SEO, you know how big of a difference that is!
In fact, the exact same site built with Beaver Builder also carries out slightly much better than the Elementor website.
Nevertheless, in regards to fully filled time, it takes a second longer than the Elementor website to load.
Elementor Alternatives
Elementor is an excellent tool, it does not imply that it is the ideal tool for you all the time.
If you are developing a focused landing page with the Elementor base version, you may not be able to do it straight without incorporating another contact kind plugin or a payment gateway. Free Template Elementor.
In such a case you will require to update to Elementor Pro.
For the SEOs out there, you might want to think about a lighter plugin that loads faster without triggering any hold-ups in page loading.
With all these and numerous other factors in mind, we have created this list of Elementor options that can help you out.
Free Template Elementor
Gutenberg
Gutenberg is one of the most light-weight and quick site builders due to the fact that it is WordPress default editor. Gutenburg makes it simpler than ever to produce websites with ease.
The blocks consist of whatever you may anticipate, consisting of headings and subheadings along with lists of items like images or videos within the content area on each specific website page – all from one easy user interface!
Building a website in Gutenberg resembles building a house using Lego blocks. You arrange the blocks in the ideal order to come up with a stunning website. Free Template Elementor.
In terms of performance. Gutenberg works way much better than any other page Builder. It is enhanced for WordPress users and delivers what it guarantees. Nevertheless, it likewise does not have the various design components that Elementor gives the table.
If you are somebody who prefers performance over style, 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 contrast). However it does offer a steady and consistent experience with its core plugin that just constructs specific pieces of material. There is the Beaver Builder Style offered if you desire one too! Free Template Elementor.
Beaver Builder is a total page style plan that offers you with all the tools and elements to build any sort of site. It has components such as headings, buttons, maps, sliders, contact forms, reviews, and more all in one place.
It stands head to head in terms of style and efficiency with Elementor. However, Beaver Builder does not have as numerous 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, user friendly with site speed in mind.
SeedProd’s smart design system makes recycling blocks of material fast and simple by defining color pattern which will save time when designing new layouts. Free Template Elementor.
It has all the blocks and features you ‘d expect from a powerful page Builder such as opt-in kinds, social profiles, countdown timers. It likewise includes contact pages with a choice to easily reroute visitors on any site map or Google Maps noting for their organization location!
You can utilize SeedProd’s customized domain mapping feature which will conserve time when handling several customer landing pages in WordPress while still keeping branding connection throughout platforms.
Any Lingering Questions?
As you can see, we believe that Elementor is among the very best WordPress page builders out there, which is why we’ve use Astra, among the most popular themes for Elementor, and Ultimate Addons for Elementor, among the most popular Elementor widget collections.
We’re also not alone in our positive Elementor review – over four million WordPress websites use Elementor and Elementor has an incredible 4.7-star ranking on over 5,900 reviews.
If you wish to experience what Elementor can offer for free:
Set up the complimentary Astra style to develop a versatile base for your Elementor designs.
Install the complimentary Elementor plugin from WordPress.org and start structure. Free Template Elementor.
If you like what you see, believe about whether Elementor Pro is best for your requirements.
Exists anything we missed out on in our Elementor evaluation that would assist you make your decision? Leave a comment and we’ll try to help you choose.