Elementor Evaluation: Is It The Very Best WordPress Page Builder? – How To Customize WordPress Theme With Elementor
Attempting to choose if Elementor is the ideal page Builder for your WordPress website? In this hands-on Elementor review, we’ll help you comprehend:
- How Elementor can benefit you
- Who ought to utilize Elementor
- The distinct features that help Elementor stand out from the competitors
- Whether you ought to use the totally free version or open up your wallet for the premium version
How To Customize WordPress Theme With Elementor
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 guess that we’re fans of Elementor. Let’s get that out of the way – this is a favorable Elementor review. How To Customize WordPress Theme With Elementor.
Understanding why we like Elementor and have actually constructed products in the Elementor community is more essential than just the truth that we like it – that’s what we’re going to try and interact in this review.
By the end of our Elementor evaluation, you should have everything that you need to make an informed choice about whether Elementor is the right tool for your WordPress website.
How To Customize WordPress Theme With Elementor
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 preview of precisely what your page will look like to visitors as you’re developing it.
- Drag and drop various material and design components to develop the perfect design.
Generally, it transforms creating a beautiful, customized website design from something you require to be a developer to do, to something that anyone can do. How To Customize WordPress Theme With Elementor.
Elementor is now actively utilized by over four million WordPress sites, which makes it the most popular WordPress page Builder. It’s also maintained an excellent 4.7-star rating (out of 5) on over 5,900 evaluations, so the majority of those users are quite delighted with Elementor.
There are a great deal of WordPress page home builders that offer a visual, drag-and-drop interface, however, so what makes Elementor stick out and why is it so effective?
Well, we’ll enter this in more depth later on, but a few of Elementor’s standout functions are:
- Great deals of content aspects – these are the foundation of your page. They’re what you “drag-and-drop” to make your design.
- Responsive style – most people search the web on smart devices, so it’s important that your designs look excellent on all gadgets. Elementor’s styles are responsive by default and you get great deals of choices to control how it works.
- Templates – staring at a blank page is frightening! Elementor comes with hundreds of professionally developed design templates so that you don’t have to start from scratch.
- Design choices – you get tons of in-depth design choices to make your design pixel-perfect without turning to custom-made CSS (though you can do that too).
- Convenience – you get great deals of helpful tools like right-click support, a quick find tool, and more to assist you develop beautiful pages much faster.
- Theme Builder – with the Pro variation, you can design your entire WordPress style utilizing Elementor (though we still recommend matching it with a quality style).
- Dynamic content – you can consist of vibrant material from custom fields and plugins like ACF, Pods, and Toolset.
- Popup Builder – with the Pro version, you can also design all kinds of popups using the same visual, drag-and-drop interface.
- WooCommerce Builder – if you’re building an eCommerce store, you can design your WooCommerce store using Elementor and consist of products in your other styles. How To Customize WordPress Theme With Elementor.
Who Is Elementor For?
Elementor is for … well, almost anyone who’s utilizing WordPress.
For instance, a digital marketer may love Elementor for its ability to help them rapidly produce landing pages and popups, while a casual user may just be trying to find a method to add some extra flair to their article.
Let’s take a look at some specific circumstances:
How To Customize WordPress Theme With Elementor
The Casual User
If you’re just a casual user searching for a way to add some design to your article or develop a beautiful homepage, Elementor is perfect for you.
You’ll have the ability to utilize the visual user interface to spin up some beautiful designs without requiring any technical knowledge … and you’ll most likely have the ability to do it free of charge! More on whether you should utilize the complimentary or paid variation in the future. How To Customize WordPress Theme With Elementor.
The Digital Marketer
Elementor is excellent for digital marketers and groups due to the fact that it includes tons of marketing elements.
The Kind widget in Elementor Pro lets you produce all types of lead kinds and connect them to popular e-mail marketing services. It also 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 website. And if you’re offering products or services, you can utilize WooCommerce Builder to develop your sales pages.
Finally, the core Elementor plugin itself is likewise an outstanding service for building WordPress landing pages.
The Website Builder
If you’re constructing sites for customers, Elementor is a perfect (and popular) choice.
You can integrate Elementor with a flexible style like Astra to construct 100% custom-made customer websites with no code needed. You can likewise use Theme Builder when needed, like designing the design template for a custom post type and incorporating dynamic information from ACF, Pods, or Toolset.
How To Customize WordPress Theme With Elementor
Elementor Prices
Short answer: It’s Free.
The base version of Elementor that is readily available in the WordPress Plugin repository is entirely totally free to use. There is likewise a pro variation with a lot more versatility and a lot more functions.
Check out our article on Elementor Vs. Elementor Pro if you wish to get a comprehensive evaluation of both.
Elementor is a feature-packed plugin that works for all websites. It is limited at particular points.
For instance, with Elementor Pro you can personalize your header, footer, posts page, single posts page, or item pages. How To Customize WordPress Theme With Elementor.
The Elementor base version provides the bare minimum you require to design and customize your site. But if you want to have the flexibility of revamping the whole website, Elementor Pro is the very best choice.
With Elementor Pro you can likewise add pop-ups, contact types, membership types, international widgets, and custom CSS.
Here is a list of extra features that you get in Elementor Pro:
- 50+ extra widgets
- 300+ premium demo imports consisting of imports for header, footer, and pop-ups
- Total website customization through Style Builder. This lets you change the header, footer, and posts pages
- WooCommerce Builder for editing item and category pages in eCommerce sites
- Popup Builder with advanced features like, exit intent, after scroll, and manages to show certain pop-ups on certain pages
- Visual Form Builder that can be incorporated with popular email marketing tools
- You can create worldwide widgets and use them site-wide
- Include customized CSS
- Release any Elementor widget practically anywhere you want
Elementor Pro Pricing
Elementor Pro has a 5 tier pricing plan based on the variety of licenses you desire.
If you are working with a single website then the Vital Plan would be best for you. If you are dealing with several sites, the Advanced strategy or above strategies would be preferable.
All the plans feature a yearly subscription.
How Elementor Works: Visiting the User interface
Let’s see how Elementor deals with this useful section.
Similar to any other plugin, you have to install and trigger Elementor through the WordPress repository.
Next, you can either select to tailor Elementor settings or dive straight into creating.
If you are just starting out, we advise utilizing the default settings just. Head over to pages and open among the pages that you want to edit.
Click Edit With Elementor to start modifying.
For the sake of this demonstration, we installed the Astra theme and imported one of its demo websites developed with Elementor. How To Customize WordPress Theme With Elementor.
Now, let’s go through the Elementor control panel utilizing that demo 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 revamp your site
- Elementor widgets location
- Elementor settings
- Open Elementor widgets
- International settings
- Revision history
- Change view (desktop, tablet, mobile).
- Sneak peek changes.
- Publish.
Elementor Structure Hierarchy
If you are entirely new to developing websites, you need to understand the structure of the Elementor page Builder.
Every page built with Elementor includes areas and columns.
Area. A section is basically a row. You can include a background, alter its sizing, and more. Columns and widgets go inside areas.
Column. A column divides an area into various columns. You can then control each column separately. How To Customize WordPress Theme With Elementor.
A page can have any number of areas in it. Sections include columns and columns consist of the Elementor widgets.
Here is an illustration showing what the structure in Elementor looks like.
How To Customize WordPress Theme With Elementor
How to Design 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 utilizing Elementor. How To Customize WordPress Theme With Elementor.
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 brand-new section.
Step 3: Select a section with a single column or several 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 placement, you can change the finer details in the Content, Design, and Advanced Sections.
You can experiment with the options when discovering to discover the best designs for you.
How to Design a Pre-Existing Page in Elementor
Often you may need to modify a pre-existing page with Elementor. The procedure is not extremely different in this case either. In fact, it is much easier to modify 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 edit text, just click and type on the visual preview:
To develop the layouts for your widgets, utilize areas and columns.
To customize a widget, click on it. That will open the widget’s settings in the sidebar, which are divided into 3 tabs:
Use a similar approach to personalize areas and columns:
As you alter a component’s settings, you’ll instantly see those changes reviewed the visual sneak peek.
Eight Incredible Functions That Help Elementor Stand Apart
Next, let’s go through some of the things that help Elementor stand apart from other visual, drag-and-drop page home builders.
1. Hassle-free Modifying Features for Faster Design
Elementor includes some practical editing functions that assist you build styles faster.
For example, Elementor comes with right-click support, which most other page contractors do not use.
You can right-click on any component to duplicate it, copy and paste designs, and more:
It likewise features a beneficial Navigator view that offers you a bought list of all the material on your page, separated by sections and columns. You can use this to rapidly open the settings for any element on your page. You can likewise relabel components to make them simpler to find: How To Customize WordPress Theme With Elementor.
And to assist you rapidly browse in 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. Substantial Widget Choice for Style Versatility
Throughout the core plugin and add-ons, Elementor has a definitely enormous selection of widgets, which gives you a lots of versatility when constructing your styles.
It’s not practically the 60+ widgets that come with Elementor and Elementor Pro, though, there’s likewise a huge selection of widgets from third-party designers.
For instance, 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 many options, you can generally discover a widget that does exactly what you want it to.
3. Detailed Design and Positioning Rules for Pixel-Perfect Designs
Another area where Elementor vanquishes a lot of the competitors is its design alternatives.
Elementor lets you do all the basics – you can change up colors, fonts, spacing, and so on.
But it also includes innovative choices like:
Forming dividers
Custom-made placing
Animations, consisting of parallax scrolling, mouse tracking, 3D tilt, and more
Custom-made CSS for private widgets
Simply put, Elementor offers you more choices to develop a distinct, effective design.
4. Big Design Template Selection to Conserve You Time
If you don’t wish to construct your designs from scratch, Elementor features a substantial selection of design templates, divided into two categories:
Pages – full-page templates. All you do is personalize them to satisfy your needs. How To Customize WordPress Theme With Elementor.
Blocks – templates for particular parts of a page, like a FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION. You can mix-and-match them like legos to develop total styles.
Similar to widgets, you can likewise find design templates from third-party sources.
If you use the Astra WordPress theme, it comes with heaps of pre-made starter design templates developed with Elementor. Each starter website consists of numerous Elementor design templates that you can customize as required.
5. Versatile Type Widget and Combinations
Above, I mentioned Elementor’s widget selection in general. However I think it deserves singling out a specific widget:
The Kind widget.
The Type widget lets you produce custom-made kinds, total with as many fields as needed. Where this widget gets actually powerful, especially when it comes to marketing implementations, is its built-in combinations.
You can hook it up to popular e-mail marketing services like ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Mailchimp, and more. There’s likewise a Webhook option that lets you link to Zapier (and the countless apps readily available there), in addition to chat integrations for Slack and Discord.
6. Theme Builder With Dynamic Content for Custom WordPress Sites
With Elementor Pro, you gain the capability to surpass posts and pages and design your whole 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 utilize Elementor to create the design template for that post type, rather than messing around with theme template files directly.
The truly effective thing here is that you have the capability to bring in dynamic material from custom fields that you produce with plugins like ACF, Toolset, and Pods.
With this dynamic function, you can construct truly custom-made websites and harness WordPress’ power as a flexible content management system. How To Customize WordPress Theme With Elementor.
Just one note – while this is definitely a powerful feature, there are still some reasons that you might wish to select a flexible Elementor theme like Astra even if you decide to utilize Elementor Theme Builder.
7. WooCommerce Builder for Custom-made eCommerce Designs
If you’re producing an eCommerce store, you can also 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 go shopping pages.
To help you construct your styles, you’ll get a variety of devoted WooCommerce widgets for everything from item images to upsells.
In one of our posts, we spoke about how to produce an eCommerce website with Elementor.
8. Popup Builder for Marketing, Use, and More
Finally, Elementor Pro can do more than simply posts, pages, and theme style – you can likewise use it to construct 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 great deal of possibilities:
For example, you might utilize the Kind widget to develop email opt-in popups and link them directly to your e-mail marketing service of option.
Or, you could utilize the Login widget to produce a popup login type for your website. How To Customize WordPress Theme With Elementor.
When you publish a popup, you’ll get a range of targeting and activate guidelines to manage exactly where and when your popup appears:
How To Customize WordPress Theme With Elementor
Should You Utilize Elementor Free vs Pro?
If you’ve made it this far, there’s a likelihood that you think Elementor is right for your needs.
That causes the next concern – can you utilize the complimentary variation at WordPress.org or should you purchase Elementor Pro?
This is an essential decision, so we actually composed an entire post on how to choose between Elementor totally free vs Pro.
In general, if you just wish to design some posts/pages or standard landing pages, you can probably manage with the free version.
With that being stated, there’s a lot of value in Elementor Pro. It includes:
- 30+ brand-new widgets, consisting of the Form widget. The Type widget is specifically effective for marketing pages.
- Style Builder. This lets you develop your entire theme and WooCommerce store using Elementor.
- Popup Builder. This lets you build popups using Elementor.
- More templates. While the complimentary variation consists of some design templates, you require Pro for complete gain access to.
- More design alternatives. You get access to custom-made positioning.
However, purchasing Elementor Pro is not the only way to extend Elementor.
If you desire more flexibility to customize your theme, you don’t need to buy Elementor Pro. Instead, you might utilize a flexible style like Astra. Through its many Customizer settings, you can adjust Astra to pretty much any use, and it’s a lot easier than attempting to create your own style from scratch. How To Customize WordPress Theme With Elementor.
You can build your header and footer using Astra. Because Astra is developed to pair with Elementor, you can still use Elementor to develop the material that goes “in between” your header, footer, and other theme aspects.
Astra also consists of lots of pre-built website design templates built with Elementor. So you can import an already-finished website utilizing Astra and then just fine-tune it to match your requirements utilizing Elementor.
Or, if you wish to include brand-new widgets for style flexibility, you could buy an extension like Ultimate Addons for Elementor, which adds 36+ new Elementor widgets.
Does Elementor Slow Down Your Website?
Now, this has been a concern that is recently acquiring popularity. And rightfully so.
Elementor is a plugin that can be useful for adding lovely widgets and designs to your website. Its flexible and easy-to-use features have actually invited a variety of addon plugins that let you create unbelievable websites without needing to code.
If you use too lots of plugins or have too lots of animations then it may make your entire site slow.
So the question occurs if Elementor slows your website down even with no of these addons. How To Customize WordPress Theme With Elementor.
To learn, we compare 2 of our starter template sites. Among 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 Beginner Templates
- Elementor website from Starter Templates
We hosted both websites on the same server and under different directories of the exact same domain and compared their efficiency in GT Metrix.
Here are the results.
As you can see, the performance of the Gutenberg site is much faster than the Elementor site.
In terms of exact loading time, the site made with Elementor took about 5.5 s to load totally while the site made with Gutenberg took 2.2 s.
If you are optimizing for SEO, you understand how huge of a distinction that is!
The same website constructed with Beaver Builder likewise carries out slightly better than the Elementor site.
However, in regards to totally packed time, it takes a second longer than the Elementor site to load.
Elementor Alternatives
Although Elementor is a terrific tool, it does not mean that it is the ideal tool for you all the time.
For example, if you are constructing a concentrated landing page with the Elementor base version, you might not have the ability to do it straight without incorporating another contact kind plugin or a payment gateway. How To Customize WordPress Theme With Elementor.
In such a case you will require to update to Elementor Pro.
For the SEOs out there, you may wish to think about a lighter plugin that loads faster without causing any delays in page loading.
With all these and many other consider mind, we have actually produced this list of Elementor alternatives that can help you out.
How To Customize WordPress Theme With 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 easier than ever to produce web pages with ease.
The blocks consist of everything you may expect, consisting of headings and subheadings along with lists of items like images or videos within the content area on each specific site page – all from one simple interface!
Building a website in Gutenberg resembles constructing a house utilizing Lego blocks. You organize the blocks in the ideal order to come up with a beautiful website. How To Customize WordPress Theme With Elementor.
In terms of performance. Gutenberg works way much better than any other page Builder. It is enhanced for WordPress users and provides what it assures. Nevertheless, it likewise lacks the different design components that Elementor brings to the table.
If you are somebody who chooses performance over style, then Gutenberg is the right choice for you.
Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder is not as flashy or feature-rich compared to Elementor (Elementor Vs Beaver Builder contrast). But it does supply a stable and constant experience with its core plugin that just constructs private pieces of material. There is the Beaver Builder Style readily available if you desire one too! How To Customize WordPress Theme With Elementor.
Beaver Builder is a complete page style package that provides you with all the tools and parts to construct any sort of website. It has components such as headings, buttons, maps, sliders, contact types, testimonials, and more all in one location.
It stands head to head in terms of style and performance with Elementor. Beaver Builder does not have as numerous addons developed for itself as Elementor does.
SeedProd
SeedProd is a premium drag-and-drop landing page Builder plugin for WordPress. It has been created to be as fast, user friendly with website speed in mind.
SeedProd’s wise design system makes reusing blocks of material quick and easy by specifying color pattern which will save time when designing new layouts. How To Customize WordPress Theme With Elementor.
It has all the blocks and features you ‘d anticipate from an effective page Builder such as opt-in forms, social profiles, countdown timers. It likewise includes contact pages with a choice to easily redirect visitors on any site map or Google Maps listing for their business location!
You can utilize SeedProd’s custom-made domain mapping feature which will conserve time when handling several 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 builders out there, which is why we have actually usage Astra, one of the most popular styles for Elementor, and Ultimate Addons for Elementor, one of the most popular Elementor widget collections.
We’re likewise not alone in our positive Elementor evaluation – over four million WordPress sites utilize Elementor and Elementor has an amazing 4.7-star ranking on over 5,900 evaluations.
If you want to experience what Elementor can use totally free:
Set up the totally free Astra style to create a versatile base for your Elementor styles.
Set up the complimentary Elementor plugin from WordPress.org and begin building. How To Customize WordPress Theme With Elementor.
If you like what you see, think about whether Elementor Pro is best for your requirements.
Is there anything we missed out on in our Elementor review that would help you make your decision? Leave a remark and we’ll try to assist you choose.
Get Started with Elementor Pro