Elementor Evaluation: Is It The Best WordPress Page Builder? – Optimize Elementor WordPress
Trying to decide if Elementor is the right page Builder for your WordPress site? In this hands-on Elementor review, we’ll help you understand:
- How Elementor can benefit you
- Who ought to utilize Elementor
- The unique functions that help Elementor stick out from the competition
- Whether you must use the free version or open your wallet for the premium version
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We’ve created Astra, among the most popular styles for Elementor, in addition to a popular add-on for Elementor, so you can probably guess that we’re fans of Elementor. Let’s get that out of the way – this is a positive Elementor review. Optimize Elementor WordPress.
But understanding why we like Elementor and have built products in the Elementor ecosystem is more vital than just the truth that we like it – that’s what we’re going to try and communicate in this evaluation.
By the end of our Elementor review, you need to have everything that you require to make an educated decision about whether or not Elementor is the ideal tool for your WordPress website.
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What Does Elementor Offer?
Elementor is a visual, drag-and-drop page Builder. If you’re not acquainted with these terms, this implies that you can:
- See a sneak peek of precisely what your page will look like to visitors as you’re building it.
- Drag and drop different content and style elements to develop the ideal design.
Generally, it changes developing a great-looking, customized website design from something you need to be a developer to do, to something that anybody can do. Optimize Elementor WordPress.
Elementor is now actively utilized by over 4 million WordPress websites, which makes it the most popular WordPress page Builder. It’s likewise kept a remarkable 4.7-star score (out of 5) on over 5,900 evaluations, so the majority of those users are quite happy 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 stick out and why is it so effective?
Well, we’ll enter into this in more depth in the future, however some of Elementor’s standout functions are:
- Great deals of content elements – these are the foundation of your page. They’re what you “drag-and-drop” to make your style.
- Responsive style – the majority of people browse the web on mobile phones, so it is necessary that your designs look great on all gadgets. Elementor’s styles are responsive by default and you get great deals of alternatives to control how it works.
- Templates – staring at a blank page is scary! Elementor includes numerous expertly designed templates so that you do not need to go back to square one.
- Style options – you get lots of in-depth style options to make your design pixel-perfect without turning to custom-made CSS (though you can do that too).
- Benefit – you get lots of convenient tools like right-click assistance, a quick discover tool, and more to assist you construct great-looking pages faster.
- Theme Builder – with the Pro variation, you can create your whole WordPress style utilizing Elementor (though we still advise combining it with a quality theme).
- Dynamic content – you can include vibrant material from customized fields and plugins like ACF, Pods, and Toolset.
- Popup Builder – with the Pro version, you can also create all kinds of popups using the very same visual, drag-and-drop user interface.
- WooCommerce Builder – if you’re constructing an eCommerce shop, you can design your WooCommerce shop utilizing Elementor and include products in your other designs. Optimize Elementor WordPress.
Who Is Elementor For?
Elementor is for … well, almost anybody who’s utilizing WordPress.
For instance, a digital marketer may enjoy Elementor for its capability to help them rapidly develop landing pages and popups, while a casual user may simply be searching for a way to include some extra flair to their article.
Let’s look at some particular scenarios:
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The Casual User
If you’re simply a casual user trying to find a way to add some style to your article or construct a great-looking homepage, Elementor is perfect for you.
You’ll be able to utilize the visual interface to spin up some beautiful designs without requiring any technical knowledge … and you’ll most likely be able to do it free of charge! More on whether you must use the free or paid variation later on. Optimize Elementor WordPress.
The Digital Online marketer
Elementor is excellent for digital online marketers and teams because it includes tons of marketing aspects.
The Type widget in Elementor Pro lets you develop all types of lead forms and link them to popular email marketing services. It likewise has a Zapier integration, which lets you connect to your CRM.
You can likewise utilize the Popup Builder to create opt-in popups and target them anywhere on your website. And if you’re selling services or products, you can use WooCommerce Builder to design your sales pages.
Finally, the core Elementor plugin itself is likewise an exceptional service for building WordPress landing pages.
The Website Builder
If you’re developing websites for clients, Elementor is an ideal (and popular) choice.
You can combine Elementor with a flexible style like Astra to build 100% custom client sites without any code required. You can also use Theme Builder when required, like developing the template for a customized post type and including dynamic information from ACF, Pods, or Toolset.
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Elementor Prices
Short answer: It’s Free.
The base version of Elementor that is available in the WordPress Plugin repository is totally totally free to use. There is likewise a professional version with a lot more versatility and a lot more features.
Check out our article on Elementor Vs. Elementor Pro if you want to get a detailed review of both.
Elementor is a feature-packed plugin that works for all sites. It is restricted at specific points.
With Elementor Pro you can personalize your header, footer, posts page, single posts page, or item pages. Optimize Elementor WordPress.
The Elementor base version provides the bare minimum you need to develop and tailor your site. But if you wish to have the liberty of redesigning the entire site, Elementor Pro is the best choice.
With Elementor Pro you can also add pop-ups, contact kinds, subscription types, global widgets, and custom-made CSS.
Here is a list of additional functions that you get in Elementor Pro:
- 50+ extra widgets
- 300+ premium demo imports including imports for header, footer, and pop-ups
- Complete site personalization through Style Builder. This lets you alter the header, footer, and posts pages
- WooCommerce Builder for editing item and category pages in eCommerce sites
- Popup Builder with sophisticated functions like, exit intent, after scroll, and manages to display specific pop-ups on specific pages
- Visual Type Builder that can be incorporated with popular e-mail marketing tools
- You can develop global widgets and use them site-wide
- Add custom-made CSS
- Deploy any Elementor widget pretty much anywhere you want
Elementor Pro Prices
Elementor Pro has a 5 tier rates strategy based upon the number of licenses you want.
If you are dealing with a single website then the Essential Plan would be best for you. If you are working on multiple websites, the Advanced strategy or above strategies would be more suitable.
All the strategies include a yearly subscription.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
How Elementor Works: Touring the Interface
Let’s see how Elementor works with this useful area.
Similar to any other plugin, you need to install and activate 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 among the pages that you want to edit.
Click Edit With Elementor to start editing.
For the sake of this demonstration, we set up the Astra style and imported one of its demonstration websites developed with Elementor. Optimize Elementor WordPress.
Now, let’s go through the Elementor dashboard utilizing that demonstration site.
Here’s what the Elementor control panel looks like.
Here’s the label of different parts numbered.
- The working area or the main canvas. This is where you modify and revamp your website
- Elementor widgets area
- Elementor settings
- Open Elementor widgets
- International settings
- Modification history
- Change view (desktop, tablet, mobile).
- Sneak peek modifications.
- Publish.
Elementor Structure Hierarchy
If you are totally new to building websites, you need to comprehend the structure of the Elementor page Builder.
Every page developed with Elementor contains sections and columns.
Section. A section is basically a row. You can include a background, alter its sizing, and more. Columns and widgets go inside sections.
Column. A column divides a section into various columns. You can then manage each column individually. Optimize Elementor WordPress.
A page can have any number of areas in it. Areas include columns and columns consist of the Elementor widgets.
Here is an illustration showing what the structure in Elementor appears like.
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How to Design a Page in Elementor from Scratch
When developing a websites, you can either start with a blank screen or import a pre-existing design template. In this area, we will cover how you can create a page from scratch using Elementor. Optimize Elementor WordPress.
Here’s how you do it:
Action 1: Open a blank page and click “Edit With Elementor”.
Step 2: Click on the “+” button to include a new area.
Step 3: Choose 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 want to.
When you more than happy with the positioning, you can adjust the finer details in the Content, Design, and Advanced Sections.
You can play around with the choices when learning to find the right styles for you.
How to Design a Pre-Existing Page in Elementor
Sometimes you may need to edit a pre-existing page with Elementor. The process is not very different 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 new widget, drag it from the sidebar left wing.
To reorganize a widget on the visual preview, you can also utilize drag and drop. If you want to modify text, simply click and type on the visual preview:
To create the designs for your widgets, utilize areas and columns.
To tailor a widget, click on it. That will open the widget’s settings in the sidebar, which are divided into 3 tabs:
Use a similar method to tailor sections and columns:
As you change a component’s settings, you’ll instantly see those changes reviewed the visual sneak peek.
8 Incredible Functions That Assist Elementor Stand Apart
Next, let’s go through a few of the important things that assist Elementor stand apart from other visual, drag-and-drop page home builders.
1. Convenient Editing Functions for Faster Design
Elementor features some hassle-free editing functions that help you build designs more quickly.
For instance, Elementor comes with right-click support, which most other page home builders don’t use.
You can right-click on any aspect to replicate it, copy and paste styles, and more:
It likewise comes with an useful Navigator view that gives you a purchased list of all the material on your page, broken up by sections and columns. You can utilize this to rapidly open the settings for any element on your page. You can also rename components to make them much easier to discover: Optimize Elementor WordPress.
And to help you quickly browse in between your styles, it likewise includes a Finder tool that lets you jump to anything that you have actually constructed with Elementor by looking for it by name:
2. Substantial Widget Selection for Design Flexibility
Throughout the core plugin and add-ons, Elementor has an absolutely massive selection of widgets, which offers you a ton of flexibility when constructing your styles.
It’s not almost the 60+ widgets that include Elementor and Elementor Pro, however, there’s also a substantial 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 everything from form stylers to hotspots, content toggles, videos, and more.
With a lot of options, you can almost always find a widget that does precisely what you desire it to.
3. Detailed Design and Positioning Rules for Pixel-Perfect Styles
Another area where Elementor vanquishes a great deal of the competition is its style choices.
Elementor lets you do all the fundamentals – you can switch up colors, typefaces, spacing, etc.
It likewise adds innovative options like:
Forming dividers
Custom-made positioning
Animations, including parallax scrolling, mouse tracking, 3D tilt, and more
Custom-made CSS for individual widgets
Put simply, Elementor offers you more options to develop a distinct, efficient style.
4. Big Template Selection to Save You Time
If you do not wish to build your styles from scratch, Elementor comes with a substantial choice of templates, divided into 2 categories:
Pages – full-page templates. All you do is customize them to fulfill your needs. Optimize Elementor WordPress.
Blocks – design templates for particular parts of a page, like a FAQ. You can mix-and-match them like legos to build complete styles.
Just like widgets, you can likewise discover design templates from third-party sources.
If you use the Astra WordPress theme, it features heaps of pre-made starter templates developed with Elementor. Each starter website includes multiple Elementor templates that you can personalize as needed.
5. Versatile Type Widget and Combinations
Above, I discussed Elementor’s widget selection in general. I think it’s worth singling out a specific widget:
The Type widget.
The Form widget lets you develop customized types, complete with as numerous fields as required. Where this widget gets truly effective, particularly when it comes to marketing executions, is its built-in integrations.
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 link to Zapier (and the thousands of apps offered there), along with chat combinations for Slack and Discord.
6. Theme Builder With Dynamic Content for Custom WordPress Sites
With Elementor Pro, you get the capability to go beyond posts and pages and develop your entire WordPress theme with Elementor. That is, you can construct:
Headers
Footers
Single design templates
Archive templates
For example, you could develop a custom-made post type and then use Elementor to create the design template for that post type, rather than tampering theme design template files straight.
The truly effective thing here is that you have the ability to generate vibrant material from custom fields that you produce with plugins like ACF, Toolset, and Pods.
With this dynamic feature, you can construct truly custom-made sites and harness WordPress’ power as a versatile material management system. Optimize Elementor WordPress.
Simply one note – while this is definitely an effective function, there are still some reasons that you might want to pick a versatile Elementor style like Astra even if you decide to utilize Elementor Theme Builder.
7. WooCommerce Builder for Customized eCommerce Designs
If you’re producing an eCommerce store, you can likewise use Elementor Theme Builder to your shop material with devoted WooCommerce Builder widgets.
You’ll have the ability to design both your single item pages and shop pages.
To assist you construct your styles, you’ll get a selection of devoted WooCommerce widgets for everything from item images to upsells.
In one of our articles, we discussed how to produce an eCommerce site with Elementor.
8. Popup Builder for Marketing, Usability, and More
Elementor Pro can do more than just posts, pages, and theme design – you can likewise utilize it to develop popups with Elementor Popup Builder.
With Popup Builder, you get access to the same familiar Elementor user interface and all of the widgets.
This opens up a lot of possibilities:
You could use the Type widget to produce e-mail opt-in popups and link them directly to your email marketing service of option.
Or, you might use the Login widget to develop a popup login kind for your site. Optimize Elementor WordPress.
When you release a popup, you’ll get a selection of targeting and set off guidelines to manage exactly where and when your popup appears:
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Should You Utilize Elementor Free vs Pro?
If you’ve 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 utilize the totally free version at WordPress.org or should you purchase Elementor Pro?
This is an important choice, so we in fact wrote a whole post on how to pick in between Elementor totally free vs Pro.
In general, if you just wish to develop some posts/pages or standard landing pages, you can most likely manage with the complimentary version.
With that being stated, there’s a lot of worth in Elementor Pro. It includes:
- 30+ new widgets, consisting of the Kind widget. The Kind widget is particularly effective for marketing pages.
- Theme Builder. This lets you design your entire style and WooCommerce store utilizing Elementor.
- Popup Builder. This lets you build popups using Elementor.
- More templates. While the free version consists of some templates, you need Pro for full gain access to.
- More design options. You get access to customized positioning.
Acquiring Elementor Pro is not the only way to extend Elementor.
For example, if you desire more versatility to customize your style, you don’t require to buy Elementor Pro. Instead, you might utilize a versatile theme like Astra. Through its many Customizer settings, you can adjust Astra to practically any usage, and it’s a lot easier than trying to create your own style from scratch. Optimize Elementor WordPress.
You can build your header and footer utilizing Astra. Because Astra is built to combine with Elementor, you can still use Elementor to create the content that goes “between” your header, footer, and other style elements.
Astra likewise includes lots of pre-built website templates built with Elementor. You can import an already-finished site utilizing Astra and then just tweak it to match your requirements using Elementor.
Or, if you want to include brand-new widgets for style 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 Site?
Now, this has been a question that is recently getting popularity. And rightfully so.
Elementor is a plugin that can be helpful for adding stunning widgets and styles to your website. Its versatile and user friendly functions have welcomed a variety of addon plugins that let you create amazing websites without having to code.
Nevertheless, if you utilize too many plugins or have a lot of animations then it might make your entire site sluggish.
So the question emerges if Elementor slows your site down even without any of these addons. Optimize Elementor WordPress.
To find out, we compare two of our starter template websites. One of them was constructed 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 take a look at.
- Gutenberg website from Beginner Templates
- Elementor site from Beginner Templates
We hosted both sites on the same server and under various directories of the very same domain and compared their efficiency in GT Metrix.
Here are the outcomes.
As you can see, the efficiency of the Gutenberg site 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 totally while the site made with Gutenberg took 2.2 s.
If you are optimizing for SEO, you understand how big of a difference that is!
In fact, the very same site built with Beaver Builder also carries out somewhat better than the Elementor site.
In terms of totally loaded time, it takes a second longer than the Elementor site to load.
Elementor Alternatives
Although Elementor is an excellent tool, it does not suggest 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 might not be able to do it straight without incorporating another contact type plugin or a payment gateway. Optimize Elementor WordPress.
In such a case you will need to upgrade to Elementor Pro.
For the SEOs out there, you might wish to think about a lighter plugin that loads faster without triggering any hold-ups in page loading.
With all these and many other consider mind, we have actually created this list of Elementor alternatives that can assist you out.
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Gutenberg
Gutenberg is one of the most light-weight and fast website builders since it is WordPress default editor. Gutenburg makes it easier than ever to create websites with ease.
The blocks include everything you may anticipate, consisting of headings and subheadings in addition to lists of items like images or videos within the content area on each specific website page – all from one simple interface!
Building a website in Gutenberg resembles constructing a home using Lego blocks. You arrange the blocks in the right order to come up with a gorgeous site. Optimize Elementor WordPress.
In terms of performance. 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 various design components that Elementor gives the table.
If you are somebody who chooses efficiency over design, then Gutenberg is the ideal option for you.
Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder is not as flashy or feature-rich compared to Elementor (Elementor Vs Beaver Builder comparison). It does offer a steady and constant experience with its core plugin that only constructs individual pieces of content. There is the Beaver Builder Theme readily available if you want one too! Optimize Elementor WordPress.
Beaver Builder is a complete page design plan that provides you with all the tools and elements to construct any kind of site. It has components such as headings, buttons, maps, sliders, contact kinds, testimonials, 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 been created to be as quick, easy-to-use with website speed in mind.
SeedProd’s wise design system makes recycling blocks of material quick and basic by defining color design which will save time when creating brand-new layouts. Optimize Elementor WordPress.
It has all the blocks and features you ‘d anticipate from an effective page Builder such as opt-in types, social profiles, countdown timers. It also includes contact pages with an option to easily reroute visitors on any website map or Google Maps noting for their business place!
You can utilize SeedProd’s custom domain mapping feature which will save time when handling several client landing pages in WordPress while still maintaining branding continuity throughout platforms.
Any Lingering Questions?
As you can see, our company believe that Elementor is one of the very best WordPress page contractors out there, which is why we’ve use Astra, one of the most popular styles 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 4 million WordPress websites utilize Elementor and Elementor has an incredible 4.7-star ranking on over 5,900 reviews.
If you wish to experience what Elementor can use free of charge:
Install the free Astra style to produce a versatile base for your Elementor styles.
Install the complimentary Elementor plugin from WordPress.org and start structure. Optimize Elementor WordPress.
If you like what you see, believe about whether Elementor Pro is right for your needs.
Is there anything we missed out on in our Elementor evaluation that would help you make your choice? Leave a remark and we’ll attempt to help you choose.