Elementor Evaluation: Is It The Very Best WordPress Page Builder? – How To Use Elementor In WordPress
Attempting to choose if Elementor is the right page Builder for your WordPress site? In this hands-on Elementor review, we’ll assist you understand:
- How Elementor can benefit you
- Who should utilize Elementor
- The special functions that assist Elementor stick out from the competition
- Whether you should use the free version or open your wallet for the premium version
How To Use Elementor In WordPress
We have actually developed Astra, one of the most popular themes for Elementor, in addition to 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 evaluation. How To Use Elementor In WordPress.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
However understanding why we like Elementor and have actually built items in the Elementor ecosystem is more vital than just the reality that we like it – that’s what we’re going to attempt and interact in this evaluation.
By the end of our Elementor review, you should have whatever that you need to make an educated choice about whether Elementor is the best tool for your WordPress website.
How To Use Elementor In WordPress
What Does Elementor Offer?
Elementor is a visual, drag-and-drop page Builder. If you’re not knowledgeable about these terms, this indicates that you can:
- See a sneak peek of exactly what your page will appear like to visitors as you’re constructing it.
- Drag and drop different content and design elements to develop the ideal style.
Generally, it transforms producing a great-looking, customized website design from something you require to be a designer to do, to something that anybody can do. How To Use Elementor In WordPress.
Elementor is now actively utilized by over 4 million WordPress websites, which makes it the most popular WordPress page Builder. It’s likewise preserved an excellent 4.7-star score (out of 5) on over 5,900 evaluations, so the majority of those users are pretty pleased with Elementor.
There are a lot of WordPress page contractors that provide a visual, drag-and-drop interface, though, 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:
- Great deals of content components – 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 browse the web on mobile phones, so it is necessary that your styles look terrific on all gadgets. Elementor’s designs are responsive by default and you get lots of options to manage how it works.
- Design templates – staring at a blank page is scary! Elementor includes hundreds of expertly developed templates so that you do not need to go back to square one.
- Style choices – you get lots of detailed design choices to make your design pixel-perfect without resorting to custom CSS (though you can do that too).
- Benefit – you get great deals of convenient tools like right-click assistance, a quick find tool, and more to help you build great-looking pages faster.
- Theme Builder – with the Pro variation, you can create your entire WordPress style utilizing Elementor (though we still recommend pairing it with a quality theme).
- Dynamic content – you can consist of dynamic content 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 exact same visual, drag-and-drop interface.
- WooCommerce Builder – if you’re developing an eCommerce store, you can create your WooCommerce store using Elementor and consist of items in your other styles. How To Use Elementor In WordPress.
Who Is Elementor For?
Elementor is for … well, almost anyone who’s utilizing WordPress.
For example, a digital online marketer may love 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 situations:
How To Use Elementor In WordPress
The Casual User
If you’re just a casual user trying to find a way to add some style to your blog posts or construct a great-looking homepage, Elementor is best 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 be able to do it for free! More on whether you ought to use the complimentary or paid variation later. How To Use Elementor In WordPress.
The Digital Marketer
Elementor is fantastic for digital online marketers and groups because it consists of tons of marketing aspects.
The Form widget in Elementor Pro lets you create all types of lead forms and connect them to popular e-mail marketing services. It likewise has a Zapier integration, which lets you link to your CRM.
You can also utilize the Popup Builder to develop opt-in popups and target them anywhere on your site. And if you’re selling product and services, you can use WooCommerce Builder to develop your sales pages.
Lastly, the core Elementor plugin itself is also an excellent option for structure WordPress landing pages.
The Website Builder
If you’re constructing sites for clients, Elementor is an ideal (and popular) choice.
You can combine Elementor with a versatile theme like Astra to develop 100% custom-made customer sites with no code required. You can also utilize Theme Builder when required, like creating the design template for a custom-made post type and incorporating vibrant information from ACF, Pods, or Toolset.
How To Use Elementor In WordPress
Elementor Prices
Short answer: It’s Free.
The base version of Elementor that is offered 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 article on Elementor Vs. Elementor Pro if you want to get an in-depth review of both.
Elementor is a feature-packed plugin that works for all websites. It is limited at certain points.
With Elementor Pro you can personalize your header, footer, posts page, single posts page, or item pages. How To Use Elementor In WordPress.
The Elementor base variation delivers the bare minimum you require to create and personalize your website. But if you wish to have the liberty of upgrading the entire website, Elementor Pro is the very best choice.
With Elementor Pro you can likewise add pop-ups, contact types, subscription types, international widgets, and customized CSS.
Here is a list of extra functions that you get in Elementor Pro:
- 50+ extra widgets
- 300+ premium demo imports consisting of imports for header, footer, and pop-ups
- Total website personalization through Theme Builder. This lets you alter the header, footer, and posts pages
- WooCommerce Builder for editing product and category pages in eCommerce websites
- Popup Builder with advanced features like, exit intent, after scroll, and manages to show particular pop-ups on certain pages
- Visual Type Builder that can be incorporated with popular e-mail marketing tools
- You can produce worldwide widgets and utilize them site-wide
- Add custom-made CSS
- Deploy any Elementor widget practically anywhere you want
Elementor Pro Rates
Elementor Pro has a 5 tier prices strategy based upon the number of licenses you desire.
If you are working with a single website then the Important Strategy would be best for you. If you are working on several websites, the Advanced strategy or above strategies would be preferable.
All the strategies include an annual subscription.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
How Elementor Works: Touring the Interface
Let’s see how Elementor works with this useful section.
Much like any other plugin, you have to set up and trigger Elementor through the WordPress repository.
Next, you can either pick to customize Elementor settings or dive straight into developing.
If you are just beginning, we advise using the default settings just. Head over to pages and open one of the pages that you wish to modify.
Click Edit With Elementor to start editing.
For the sake of this demonstration, we set up the Astra style and imported among its demonstration sites built with Elementor. How To Use Elementor In WordPress.
Now, let’s go through the Elementor dashboard utilizing that demo website.
Here’s what the Elementor dashboard looks like.
Here’s the label of various parts numbered.
- The working area or the primary canvas. This is where you modify and revamp your website
- Elementor widgets location
- Elementor settings
- Open Elementor widgets
- International settings
- Modification history
- Switch view (desktop, tablet, mobile).
- Sneak peek changes.
- Release.
Elementor Structure Hierarchy
If you are entirely new to constructing sites, you require to understand the structure of the Elementor page Builder.
Every page constructed with Elementor contains sections and columns.
Area. An area 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 different columns. You can then control each column individually. How To Use Elementor In WordPress.
A page can have any variety of sections in it. Areas consist of columns and columns consist of the Elementor widgets.
Here is an illustration revealing what the structure in Elementor looks like.
How To Use Elementor In WordPress
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 Use Elementor In WordPress.
Here’s how you do it:
Step 1: Open a blank page and click “Edit With Elementor”.
Step 2: Click the “+” button to include a new area.
Action 3: Pick a section 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.
When you enjoy with the positioning, you can adjust the finer information in the Material, Design, and Advanced Sections.
You can experiment with the choices when learning to find the ideal styles for you.
How to Design a Pre-Existing Page in Elementor
Sometimes you might require to modify a pre-existing page with Elementor. The procedure is not extremely different in this case either. It is much easier to modify an existing Elementor page than starting 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 sneak peek, you can also utilize 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 sections and columns.
To personalize a widget, click on it. That will open the widget’s settings in the sidebar, which are divided into three tabs:
Use a similar approach to tailor sections and columns:
As you alter a component’s settings, you’ll instantly see those changes assessed the visual sneak peek.
8 Awesome Functions That Help Elementor Stand Out
Next, let’s go through some of the important things that assist Elementor stick out from other visual, drag-and-drop page contractors.
1. Hassle-free Modifying Features for Faster Style
Elementor comes with some hassle-free modifying features that help you develop designs quicker.
Elementor comes with right-click support, which most other page builders do not use.
You can right-click on any element to duplicate it, copy and paste styles, and more:
It also features a helpful Navigator view that gives you an ordered list of all the material on your page, separated by sections and columns. You can utilize this to quickly open the settings for any component on your page. You can also rename elements to make them much easier to find: How To Use Elementor In WordPress.
And to assist you rapidly browse in between your styles, it also consists of a Finder tool that lets you jump to anything that you have actually developed with Elementor by searching for it by name:
2. Substantial Widget Selection for Style Flexibility
Across the core plugin and add-ons, Elementor has an absolutely massive choice of widgets, which offers you a lots of flexibility when developing your styles.
It’s not practically the 60+ widgets that come with Elementor and Elementor Pro, however, there’s likewise a huge selection of widgets from third-party designers.
Ultimate Addons for Elementor adds another 36+ brand-new widgets that you can utilize in your designs, covering whatever from type stylers to hotspots, content toggles, videos, and more.
With numerous choices, you can usually discover a widget that does precisely what you want it to.
3. In-depth Style and Positioning Guidelines for Pixel-Perfect Styles
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, font styles, spacing, and so on.
It also adds sophisticated choices like:
Forming dividers
Custom-made positioning
Animations, including parallax scrolling, mouse tracking, 3D tilt, and more
Custom-made CSS for specific widgets
In other words, Elementor offers you more options to produce a special, effective style.
4. Big Design Template Selection to Conserve You Time
If you don’t want to build your designs from scratch, Elementor comes with a substantial choice of templates, divided into two classifications:
Pages – full-page templates. All you do is customize them to meet your requirements. How To Use Elementor In WordPress.
Blocks – design templates for specific parts of a page, like a FAQ. You can mix-and-match them like legos to construct total styles.
As with widgets, you can likewise find templates from third-party sources.
If you utilize the Astra WordPress style, it comes with stacks of pre-made starter templates built with Elementor. Each starter site includes numerous Elementor design templates that you can tailor as required.
5. Flexible Type Widget and Combinations
Above, I pointed out Elementor’s widget choice in general. However I believe it deserves singling out a particular widget:
The Kind widget.
The Form widget lets you develop custom types, total with as numerous fields as required. However where this widget gets really effective, particularly when it concerns marketing executions, 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 choice that lets you link to Zapier (and the thousands of apps available there), in addition to chat combinations for Slack and Discord.
6. Style Builder With Dynamic Content for Customized WordPress Sites
With Elementor Pro, you acquire the capability to go beyond posts and pages and develop your whole WordPress theme with Elementor. That is, you can develop:
Headers
Footers
Single design templates
Archive design templates
You could create a custom post type and then use Elementor to design the design template for that post type, rather than messing around with theme design template files straight.
The really powerful thing here is that you have the capability to generate dynamic content from customized fields that you produce with plugins like ACF, Toolset, and Pods.
With this vibrant feature, you can build truly custom-made sites and harness WordPress’ power as a versatile content management system. How To Use Elementor In WordPress.
Simply one note – while this is definitely an effective feature, there are still some reasons you might wish to pick a flexible Elementor theme like Astra even if you decide to utilize Elementor Style Builder.
7. WooCommerce Builder for Custom eCommerce Designs
If you’re creating an eCommerce store, you can likewise use Elementor Theme Builder to your shop content with dedicated WooCommerce Builder widgets.
You’ll have the ability to develop both your single product pages and shop pages.
To help you develop your designs, you’ll get a variety of devoted WooCommerce widgets for whatever from item images to upsells.
In one of our posts, we discussed how to develop an eCommerce site with Elementor.
8. Popup Builder for Marketing, Functionality, and More
Lastly, Elementor Pro can do more than just posts, pages, and style style – you can likewise use it to construct popups with Elementor Popup Builder.
With Popup Builder, you get access to the exact same familiar Elementor interface and all of the widgets.
This opens a great deal of possibilities:
For example, you could use the Form widget to develop email opt-in popups and connect them straight to your e-mail marketing service of choice.
Or, you could use the Login widget to produce a popup login form for your website. How To Use Elementor In WordPress.
When you release a popup, you’ll get a variety of targeting and trigger rules to manage exactly where and when your popup appears:
How To Use Elementor In WordPress
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 results in the next concern – can you use the complimentary variation at WordPress.org or should you buy Elementor Pro?
This is a crucial decision, so we actually composed a whole post on how to pick between Elementor complimentary vs Pro.
In general, if you just wish to create some posts/pages or standard landing pages, you can most likely manage with the totally free version.
With that being said, there’s a lot of value in Elementor Pro. It adds:
- 30+ new widgets, consisting of the Kind widget. The Type widget is particularly effective for marketing pages.
- Style Builder. This lets you create your whole theme and WooCommerce shop using Elementor.
- Popup Builder. This lets you construct popups using Elementor.
- More design templates. While the complimentary version consists of some design templates, you need Pro for complete gain access to.
- More style options. You get access to customized positioning.
Nevertheless, buying Elementor Pro is not the only method to extend Elementor.
For example, if you desire more flexibility to customize your theme, you do not require to purchase Elementor Pro. Rather, you could use a versatile theme like Astra. Through its many Customizer settings, you can adapt Astra to practically any use, and it’s a lot easier than attempting to create your own style from scratch. How To Use Elementor In WordPress.
You can build your header and footer using Astra. Then, due to the fact that Astra is built to couple with Elementor, you can still utilize Elementor to design the material that goes “in between” your header, footer, and other style elements.
Astra also includes lots of pre-built website design templates developed with Elementor. So you can import an already-finished site using Astra and after that simply fine-tune it to match your needs utilizing Elementor.
Or, if you want to include brand-new widgets for design versatility, you might acquire an extension like Ultimate Addons for Elementor, which includes 36+ new Elementor widgets.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
Does Elementor Decrease Your Website?
Now, this has actually been a concern that is just recently gaining popularity. And truly so.
Elementor is a plugin that can be beneficial for including beautiful widgets and designs to your website. Its flexible and easy-to-use features have welcomed a variety of addon plugins that let you produce amazing websites without needing to code.
Nevertheless, if you use a lot of plugins or have a lot of animations then it may make your whole website sluggish.
So the question develops if Elementor slows your site down even with no of these addons. How To Use Elementor In WordPress.
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 websites for you to check out.
- Gutenberg website from Beginner Templates
- Elementor site from Starter Templates
We hosted both sites on the very same server and under different directory sites of the very same domain name and compared their efficiency in GT Metrix.
Here are the results.
As you can see, the efficiency of the Gutenberg website is much faster than the Elementor site.
In regards to specific 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 optimizing for SEO, you understand how huge of a distinction that is!
The exact same website developed with Beaver Builder likewise performs a little better than the Elementor site.
However, in regards to fully packed time, it takes a second longer than the Elementor site to load.
Elementor Alternatives
Although Elementor is a fantastic tool, it does not suggest that it is the right tool for you all the time.
For instance, if you are constructing a focused landing page with the Elementor base version, you may not be able to do it directly without incorporating another contact kind plugin or a payment entrance. How To Use Elementor In WordPress.
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 lots of other consider mind, we have developed this list of Elementor options that can assist you out.
How To Use Elementor In WordPress
Gutenberg
Gutenberg is among the most lightweight and quick website builders because it is WordPress default editor. Gutenburg makes it easier than ever to create websites with ease.
The blocks include everything you might anticipate, consisting of headings and subheadings as well as lists of products like images or videos within the content location on each private site page – all from one simple user interface!
Developing a website in Gutenberg resembles building a house using Lego blocks. You organize the blocks in the ideal order to come up with a gorgeous site. How To Use Elementor In WordPress.
In terms of efficiency. Gutenberg works way better than any other page Builder. It is optimized for WordPress users and provides what it promises. Nevertheless, it also does not have the different design elements that Elementor gives the table.
If you are someone who chooses efficiency over design, then Gutenberg is the ideal choice for you.
Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder is not as flashy or feature-rich compared to Elementor (Elementor Vs Beaver Builder comparison). However it does offer a steady and consistent experience with its core plugin that only builds specific pieces of content. There is the Beaver Builder Theme available if you want one too! How To Use Elementor In WordPress.
Beaver Builder is a total page design plan that offers you with all the tools and elements to construct any sort of site. It has aspects such as headings, buttons, maps, sliders, contact forms, reviews, and more all in one place.
It stands head to head in regards to style and efficiency with Elementor. 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, user friendly with website speed in mind.
SeedProd’s smart style system makes recycling blocks of content fast and easy by defining color schemes which will save time when designing brand-new layouts. How To Use Elementor In WordPress.
It has all the blocks and functions you ‘d anticipate from an effective page Builder such as opt-in forms, social profiles, countdown timers. It likewise consists of contact pages with an option to quickly reroute visitors on any website map or Google Maps listing for their business place!
You can use SeedProd’s custom-made domain mapping feature which will save time when managing several customer landing pages in WordPress while still preserving 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’ve usage Astra, one of 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 4 million WordPress sites use Elementor and Elementor has an amazing 4.7-star ranking on over 5,900 evaluations.
If you wish to experience what Elementor can use free of charge:
Install the totally free Astra theme to produce a versatile base for your Elementor styles.
Set up the totally free Elementor plugin from WordPress.org and start structure. How To Use Elementor In WordPress.
Then, if you like what you see, think about whether Elementor Pro is right for your needs.
Exists anything we missed in our Elementor evaluation that would assist you make your choice? Leave a remark and we’ll attempt to assist you choose.