Elementor Review: Is It The Best WordPress Page Builder? – Salient Theme 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 distinct features that help Elementor stand apart from the competitors
- Whether you ought to use the free variation or open up your wallet for the premium variation
Salient Theme Elementor
We’ve created Astra, among the most popular themes for Elementor, in addition to a popular add-on for Elementor, so you can probably think that we’re fans of Elementor. Let’s get that out of the way – this is a favorable Elementor review. Salient Theme Elementor.
Comprehending why we like Elementor and have actually developed products in the Elementor community is more important than just the truth that we like it – that’s what we’re going to try and communicate in this review.
By the end of our Elementor review, you must have whatever that you require to make an educated choice about whether or not Elementor is the best tool for your WordPress website.
Salient Theme Elementor
What Does Elementor Offer?
Elementor is a visual, drag-and-drop page Builder. If you’re not acquainted with these terms, this indicates that you can:
- See a sneak peek of exactly what your page will look like to visitors as you’re building it.
- Drag and drop different material and style aspects to create the best design.
Essentially, it transforms developing a beautiful, customized website design from something you require to be a developer to do, to something that anybody can do. Salient Theme Elementor.
Elementor is now actively utilized by over four million WordPress websites, which makes it the most popular WordPress page Builder. It’s likewise preserved an excellent 4.7-star ranking (out of 5) on over 5,900 reviews, so the majority of those users are pretty happy with Elementor.
There are a lot 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 successful?
Well, we’ll enter into this in more depth in the future, but some of Elementor’s standout features are:
- Lots of content components – these are the foundation of your page. They’re what you “drag-and-drop” to make your style.
- Responsive style – most people search the web on smartphones, so it’s important that your designs look terrific on all devices. Elementor’s designs are responsive by default and you get great deals of alternatives to manage how it works.
- Templates – staring at a blank page is scary! Elementor includes numerous professionally developed design templates so that you do not have to go back to square one.
- Style options – you get lots of comprehensive style choices to make your style pixel-perfect without resorting to custom CSS (though you can do that too).
- Benefit – you get lots of handy tools like right-click support, a quick find tool, and more to help you build beautiful pages quicker.
- Style Builder – with the Pro variation, you can develop your whole WordPress theme using Elementor (though we still recommend combining it with a quality theme).
- Dynamic content – you can consist of vibrant content from customized fields and plugins like ACF, Pods, and Toolset.
- Popup Builder – with the Pro version, you can also develop all types of popups utilizing the same visual, drag-and-drop interface.
- WooCommerce Builder – if you’re constructing an eCommerce store, you can design your WooCommerce store using Elementor and include items in your other styles. Salient Theme Elementor.
Who Is Elementor For?
Elementor is for … well, nearly anyone who’s utilizing WordPress.
A digital online marketer might enjoy Elementor for its ability to help them rapidly develop landing pages and popups, while a casual user might simply be looking for a way to include some extra style to their blog posts.
Let’s take a look at some particular situations:
Salient Theme Elementor
The Casual User
If you’re simply a casual user trying to find a way to add some style to your blog posts or construct a great-looking homepage, Elementor is perfect for you.
You’ll be able to utilize the visual user interface to spin up some great-looking designs without requiring any technical knowledge … and you’ll most likely be able to do it for free! More on whether you need to utilize the complimentary or paid version later on. Salient Theme Elementor.
The Digital Online marketer
Elementor is excellent for digital marketers and groups due to the fact that it consists of tons of marketing elements.
For example, the Kind widget in Elementor Pro lets you produce all types of lead kinds and link them to popular email marketing services. It also has a Zapier integration, which lets you connect to your CRM.
You can likewise use the Popup Builder to produce 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 also an outstanding option for building WordPress landing pages.
The Site Builder
If you’re developing websites for customers, Elementor is a perfect (and popular) option.
You can combine Elementor with a versatile theme like Astra to build 100% customized customer sites without any code required. You can also use Theme Builder when needed, like developing the design template for a custom-made post type and including vibrant information from ACF, Pods, or Toolset.
Salient Theme Elementor
Elementor Pricing
Short answer: It’s Free.
The base version of Elementor that is readily available in the WordPress Plugin repository is totally totally free to utilize. There is also a professional version with a lot more flexibility and a lot more functions.
Check out our short 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 websites. However, it is limited at certain points.
For example, with Elementor Pro you can tailor your header, footer, posts page, single posts page, or product pages. Salient Theme Elementor.
The Elementor base version delivers the bare minimum you need to develop and personalize your website. But if you wish to have the flexibility of revamping the entire website, Elementor Pro is the very best choice.
With Elementor Pro you can likewise add pop-ups, contact forms, membership types, international widgets, and custom CSS.
Here is a list of additional features that you get in Elementor Pro:
- 50+ extra widgets
- 300+ premium demo imports including 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 modifying product and category pages in eCommerce sites
- Popup Builder with sophisticated functions like, exit intent, after scroll, and controls to show certain pop-ups on particular pages
- Visual Kind Builder that can be integrated with popular email marketing tools
- You can create global widgets and utilize them site-wide
- Include customized CSS
- Release any Elementor widget pretty much anywhere you want
Elementor Pro Pricing
Elementor Pro has a 5 tier prices plan based on the variety of licenses you desire.
If you are working with a single website then the Necessary Strategy would be best for you. If you are working on numerous websites, the Advanced strategy or above strategies would be better.
All the strategies include an annual subscription.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
How Elementor Works: Exploring the Interface
Let’s see how Elementor works with this practical area.
Just 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 directly into developing.
If you are simply starting out, we advise utilizing the default settings only. Head over to pages and open one of the pages that you wish to edit.
Click Edit With Elementor to start modifying.
For the sake of this demonstration, we set up the Astra style and imported one of its demo websites developed with Elementor. Salient Theme 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 various parts numbered.
- The workspace or the main canvas. This is where you edit and upgrade your site
- Elementor widgets area
- Elementor settings
- Open Elementor widgets
- International settings
- Modification history
- Change view (desktop, tablet, mobile).
- Preview changes.
- Publish.
Elementor Structure Hierarchy
If you are totally new to constructing websites, you need to understand the structure of the Elementor page Builder.
Every page developed with Elementor consists of 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. Salient Theme 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 revealing what the structure in Elementor looks like.
Salient Theme Elementor
How to Style a Page in Elementor from Scratch
When developing a websites, you can either begin with a blank screen or import a pre-existing template. In this area, we will cover how you can produce a page from scratch using Elementor. Salient Theme 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 include a new section.
Step 3: Choose a section with a single column or several ones depending on your needs.
Step 4: Drag widgets from the Elementor panel into the columns that you want to.
Once you enjoy with the positioning, you can change the finer information in the Content, Style, and Advanced Sections.
You can experiment with the choices when finding out to discover the right styles for you.
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 extremely different in this case either. It is much simpler to edit an existing Elementor page than beginning from scratch.
Here’s how you do it.
To add a 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 edit text, just click and type on the visual sneak peek:
To develop the layouts for your widgets, use areas and columns.
To customize a widget, click on it. That will open the widget’s settings in the sidebar, which are divided into three tabs:
Utilize a similar technique to tailor sections and columns:
As you alter an aspect’s settings, you’ll immediately see those modifications reflected on the visual preview.
Eight Amazing Functions That Assist Elementor Stand Out
Next, let’s go through a few of the things that assist Elementor stand apart from other visual, drag-and-drop page home builders.
1. Convenient Editing Features for Faster Style
Elementor comes with some convenient editing features that assist you develop designs more quickly.
Elementor comes with right-click assistance, which most other page builders don’t offer.
You can right-click on any component to duplicate it, copy and paste designs, and more:
It likewise comes with a beneficial Navigator view that offers you a purchased list of all the content on your page, broken up by sections and columns. You can use this to quickly open the settings for any component on your page. You can also rename components to make them simpler to discover: Salient Theme Elementor.
And to assist you rapidly browse in between your styles, it likewise consists of a Finder tool that lets you leap to anything that you’ve constructed with Elementor by looking for it by name:
2. Huge Widget Selection for Style Versatility
Throughout the core plugin and add-ons, Elementor has a definitely massive choice of widgets, which offers you a lots of flexibility when constructing your styles.
It’s not almost the 60+ widgets that come with Elementor and Elementor Pro, however, there’s also a huge choice of widgets from third-party designers.
For example, Ultimate Addons for Elementor includes another 36+ new widgets that you can utilize in your styles, covering everything from kind stylers to hotspots, content toggles, videos, and more.
With a lot of choices, you can usually find a widget that does exactly what you desire it to.
3. Detailed Design and Positioning Rules for Pixel-Perfect Designs
Another area where Elementor beats out a great deal of the competition is its design options.
Elementor lets you do all the essentials – you can switch up colors, font styles, spacing, etc.
It also adds sophisticated options like:
Shape dividers
Customized positioning
Animations, consisting of parallax scrolling, mouse tracking, 3D tilt, and more
Custom-made CSS for specific widgets
Simply put, Elementor provides you more options to develop an unique, reliable design.
4. Huge Template Choice to Save You Time
If you don’t wish to develop your designs from scratch, Elementor features a huge selection of templates, divided into 2 categories:
Pages – full-page design templates. All you do is tailor them to fulfill your needs. Salient Theme Elementor.
Blocks – design templates for particular parts of a page, like a FAQ. You can mix-and-match them like legos to build total styles.
Just like widgets, you can likewise discover design templates from third-party sources.
If you utilize the Astra WordPress theme, it features loads of pre-made starter design templates constructed with Elementor. Each starter website consists of several Elementor templates that you can customize as needed.
5. Versatile Type Widget and Integrations
Above, I mentioned Elementor’s widget choice in general. I believe it’s worth singling out a particular widget:
The Kind widget.
The Kind widget lets you produce custom-made kinds, complete with as many fields as required. However where this widget gets truly powerful, particularly when it comes to marketing executions, is its built-in combinations.
You can hook it approximately popular email 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 readily available there), along with chat combinations for Slack and Discord.
6. Style Builder With Dynamic Material for Customized WordPress Sites
With Elementor Pro, you gain the ability to surpass posts and pages and develop your entire WordPress style with Elementor. That is, you can build:
Headers
Footers
Single design templates
Archive templates
For instance, you might create a customized post type and then utilize Elementor to design the design template for that post type, rather than messing around with style design template files straight.
The truly effective thing here is that you have the ability to bring in vibrant material from customized fields that you create with plugins like ACF, Toolset, and Pods.
With this vibrant feature, you can build truly custom sites and harness WordPress’ power as a flexible material management system. Salient Theme Elementor.
Just one note – while this is certainly an effective function, there are still some reasons you might wish to pick a versatile Elementor style like Astra even if you decide to use Elementor Theme Builder.
7. WooCommerce Builder for Customized eCommerce Designs
If you’re developing an eCommerce shop, you can also use Elementor Theme Builder to your store content with devoted WooCommerce Builder widgets.
You’ll have the ability to develop both your single product pages and shop pages.
To assist you construct your designs, you’ll get a variety of dedicated WooCommerce widgets for whatever from item images to upsells.
In one of our short articles, we talked about how to produce an eCommerce website with Elementor.
8. Popup Builder for Marketing, Use, and More
Lastly, Elementor Pro can do more than just posts, pages, and style style – you can also 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 lot of possibilities:
You could utilize the Type widget to develop email opt-in popups and connect them directly to your email marketing service of choice.
Or, you might use the Login widget to develop a popup login form for your website. Salient Theme Elementor.
When you publish a popup, you’ll get a variety of targeting and trigger guidelines to manage precisely where and when your popup appears:
Salient Theme Elementor
Should You Utilize Elementor Free vs Pro?
If you have actually made it this far, there’s a great chance that you think Elementor is right for your requirements.
That leads to the next concern – can you utilize the complimentary version at WordPress.org or should you purchase Elementor Pro?
This is an essential decision, so we really wrote a whole post on how to select between Elementor free vs Pro.
In general, if you just want to create some posts/pages or standard landing pages, you can probably get by with the complimentary version.
With that being stated, there’s a lot of worth in Elementor Pro. It adds:
- 30+ brand-new widgets, including the Kind widget. The Type widget is specifically powerful for marketing pages.
- Style Builder. This lets you design your whole theme and WooCommerce store utilizing Elementor.
- Popup Builder. This lets you build popups utilizing Elementor.
- More design templates. While the totally free version consists of some design templates, you need Pro for full gain access to.
- More style choices. You get access to custom positioning.
However, acquiring Elementor Pro is not the only way to extend Elementor.
If you want more flexibility to personalize your style, you do not require to buy Elementor Pro. Rather, you could use a flexible theme like Astra. Through its numerous Customizer settings, you can adapt Astra to basically any usage, and it’s a lot simpler than trying to design your own style from scratch. Salient Theme Elementor.
You can develop your header and footer using Astra. Because Astra is built to pair with Elementor, you can still use Elementor to develop the material that goes “in between” your header, footer, and other theme elements.
Astra likewise includes lots of pre-built website design templates constructed with Elementor. 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 include brand-new widgets for style flexibility, you could purchase an extension like Ultimate Addons for Elementor, which adds 36+ new Elementor widgets.
Get Started with Elementor Pro
Does Elementor Decrease Your Site?
Now, this has been a concern that is just recently gaining appeal. And truly so.
Elementor is a plugin that can be useful for including lovely widgets and styles to your site. Its flexible and user friendly functions have welcomed a variety of addon plugins that let you develop incredible sites without needing to code.
Nevertheless, if you utilize a lot of plugins or have too many animations then it might make your entire site slow.
So the question arises if Elementor slows your website down even without any of these addons. Salient Theme Elementor.
To learn, we compare two of our starter design template sites. 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 discover.
Here are the websites for you to have a look at.
- Gutenberg site from Starter Templates
- Elementor site from Starter Templates
We hosted both websites on the very same server and under various directories of the same domain name and compared their efficiency in GT Metrix.
Here are the outcomes.
As you can see, the performance of the Gutenberg website is much faster than the Elementor website.
In terms of 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 enhancing for SEO, you know how big of a difference that is!
The same website developed with Beaver Builder also carries out somewhat better than the Elementor website.
However, in terms of completely loaded time, it takes a second longer than the Elementor site to load.
Elementor Alternatives
Although Elementor is a terrific tool, it does not suggest that it is the best tool for you all the time.
If you are developing a concentrated landing page with the Elementor base variation, you might not be able to do it straight without incorporating another contact form plugin or a payment gateway. Salient Theme Elementor.
In such a case you will require to upgrade to Elementor Pro.
For the SEOs out there, you might wish to consider a lighter plugin that loads quicker without triggering any hold-ups in page loading.
With all these and many other factors in mind, we have created this list of Elementor alternatives that can help you out.
Salient Theme Elementor
Gutenberg
Gutenberg is one of the most lightweight and fast website home builders due to the fact that it is WordPress default editor. Gutenburg makes it simpler than ever to produce web pages with ease.
The blocks consist of everything you might anticipate, consisting of headings and subheadings in addition to lists of items like images or videos within the content location on each specific site page – all from one easy interface!
Building a site in Gutenberg resembles constructing a home utilizing Lego blocks. You set up the blocks in the ideal order to come up with a gorgeous site. Salient Theme Elementor.
In terms of efficiency. Gutenberg works way much better than any other page Builder. It is optimized for WordPress users and delivers what it promises. It also does not have the different style aspects that Elementor brings to the table.
If you are someone who chooses efficiency over design, then Gutenberg is the right option for you.
Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder is not as fancy or feature-rich compared to Elementor (Elementor Vs Beaver Builder contrast). It does offer a steady and consistent experience with its core plugin that only builds individual pieces of content. There is the Beaver Builder Style offered if you want one too! Salient Theme Elementor.
Beaver Builder is a total page style plan that supplies you with all the tools and elements to build any type of site. It has elements such as headings, buttons, maps, sliders, contact kinds, reviews, and more all in one location.
It stands head to head in terms of design 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 designed to be as quick, user friendly with site speed in mind.
SeedProd’s wise style system makes reusing blocks of content quick and easy by defining color design which will save time when designing brand-new layouts. Salient Theme Elementor.
It has all the blocks and features you ‘d get out of a powerful page Builder such as opt-in kinds, social profiles, countdown timers. It likewise includes contact pages with an alternative to easily reroute visitors on any website map or Google Maps listing for their business place!
You can utilize SeedProd’s customized domain mapping function which will save time when managing multiple customer landing pages in WordPress while still maintaining branding connection 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 themes for Elementor, and Ultimate Addons for Elementor, one of the most popular Elementor widget collections.
We’re likewise not alone in our favorable Elementor evaluation – over 4 million WordPress websites utilize Elementor and Elementor has an amazing 4.7-star rating on over 5,900 reviews.
If you wish to experience what Elementor can use free of charge:
Install the complimentary Astra theme to develop a versatile base for your Elementor styles.
Set up the free Elementor plugin from WordPress.org and begin structure. Salient Theme Elementor.
Then, if you like what you see, consider whether Elementor Pro is right for your needs.
Is there anything we missed in our Elementor review that would help you make your choice? Leave a comment and we’ll attempt to help you choose.
Get Started with Elementor Pro