Elementor Evaluation: Is It The Best WordPress Page Builder? – WordPress Elementor Free Alternative
Attempting to choose if Elementor is the ideal page Builder for your WordPress website? In this hands-on Elementor evaluation, we’ll assist you comprehend:
- How Elementor can benefit you
- Who should use Elementor
- The unique features that assist Elementor stand out from the competition
- Whether you need to use the free version or open up your wallet for the premium variation
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We’ve created Astra, one of the most popular themes for Elementor, as well as 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 evaluation. WordPress Elementor Free Alternative.
Comprehending why we like Elementor and have built items in the Elementor environment is more important than simply the reality that we like it – that’s what we’re going to try and interact in this review.
By the end of our Elementor review, you should have everything that you need to make an educated choice about whether Elementor is the right 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 exactly what your page will appear like to visitors as you’re developing it.
- Drag and drop various content and design aspects to produce the ideal style.
Essentially, it transforms producing a great-looking, custom-made website design from something you require to be a designer to do, to something that anybody can do. WordPress Elementor Free Alternative.
Elementor is now actively used by over four million WordPress sites, which makes it the most popular WordPress page Builder. It’s likewise preserved a remarkable 4.7-star rating (out of 5) on over 5,900 reviews, so the majority of those users are pretty delighted with Elementor.
There are a great deal of WordPress page home builders that provide a visual, drag-and-drop interface, though, so what makes Elementor stand out and why is it so effective?
Well, we’ll enter into this in more depth in the future, however a few of Elementor’s standout features are:
- Great deals of content aspects – these are the foundation of your page. They’re what you “drag-and-drop” to make your style.
- Responsive design – the majority of people browse the web on smartphones, so it is essential that your designs look terrific on all gadgets. Elementor’s designs are responsive by default and you get lots of alternatives to control how it works.
- Templates – staring at a blank page is frightening! Elementor includes numerous professionally developed templates so that you do not need to go back to square one.
- Design choices – you get tons of detailed design options to make your style pixel-perfect without turning to custom CSS (though you can do that too).
- Benefit – you get great deals of useful tools like right-click assistance, a fast find tool, and more to help you develop beautiful pages faster.
- Style Builder – with the Pro version, you can develop your entire WordPress style using Elementor (though we still suggest pairing it with a quality style).
- Dynamic content – you can consist of dynamic material from custom fields and plugins like ACF, Pods, and Toolset.
- Popup Builder – with the Pro variation, you can likewise create all kinds of popups using the exact same visual, drag-and-drop user interface.
- WooCommerce Builder – if you’re constructing an eCommerce store, you can design your WooCommerce store utilizing Elementor and consist of items in your other styles. WordPress Elementor Free Alternative.
Who Is Elementor For?
Elementor is for … well, nearly anybody who’s utilizing WordPress.
A digital marketer might love Elementor for its capability to help them rapidly create landing pages and popups, while a casual user may just be looking for a way to add some extra style to their blog site posts.
Let’s take a look at some particular scenarios:
WordPress Elementor Free Alternative
The Casual User
If you’re just a casual user looking for a method to include some style to your post or build a beautiful homepage, Elementor is best for you.
You’ll be able to use the visual interface to spin up some great-looking designs without requiring any technical knowledge … and you’ll probably have the ability to do it totally free! More on whether you should use the free or paid version in the future. WordPress Elementor Free Alternative.
The Digital Online marketer
Elementor is terrific for digital marketers and teams since it includes lots of marketing aspects.
For instance, the Form widget in Elementor Pro lets you produce all kinds of lead types and connect them to popular e-mail marketing services. It likewise has a Zapier integration, which lets you connect to your CRM, too.
You can also use the Popup Builder to create opt-in popups and target them anywhere on your site. And if you’re selling product and services, you can use WooCommerce Builder to design your sales pages.
The core Elementor plugin itself is likewise an exceptional solution for structure WordPress landing pages.
The Website Builder
If you’re building websites for clients, Elementor is a best (and popular) option.
You can integrate Elementor with a flexible style like Astra to build 100% custom client websites without any code needed. You can also utilize Theme Builder when required, like creating the design template for a customized post type and integrating 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 offered in the WordPress Plugin repository is entirely free to utilize. There is likewise a professional variation with a lot more flexibility 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. Nevertheless, it is restricted at specific points.
For example, with Elementor Pro you can customize your header, footer, posts page, single posts page, or product pages. WordPress Elementor Free Alternative.
The Elementor base version provides the bare minimum you require to create and customize your website. If you want to have the freedom of redesigning the whole website, Elementor Pro is the best choice.
With Elementor Pro you can likewise add pop-ups, contact types, membership forms, worldwide widgets, and custom-made CSS.
Here is a list of extra functions that you get in Elementor Pro:
- 50+ additional widgets
- 300+ premium demo imports consisting of imports for header, footer, and pop-ups
- Total site customization through Style Builder. This lets you alter the header, footer, and posts pages
- WooCommerce Builder for modifying item and category pages in eCommerce sites
- Popup Builder with advanced features like, exit intent, after scroll, and controls to display certain pop-ups on particular pages
- Visual Form Builder that can be integrated with popular email marketing tools
- You can produce worldwide widgets and utilize them site-wide
- Add custom CSS
- Deploy any Elementor widget pretty much anywhere you desire
Elementor Pro Pricing
Elementor Pro has a 5 tier pricing strategy based on the number of licenses you want.
If you are working with a single site then the Necessary Strategy would be best for you. If you are dealing with multiple websites, the Advanced plan or above strategies would be more suitable.
All the plans include a yearly membership.
How Elementor Works: Exploring the User interface
Let’s see how Elementor deals with this useful area.
Much like any other plugin, you have to set up and trigger Elementor through the WordPress repository.
Next, you can either pick to tailor Elementor settings or dive straight into designing.
If you are just starting out, we suggest utilizing the default settings just. Head over to pages and open among the pages that you want to modify.
Click Edit With Elementor to start modifying.
For the sake of this presentation, we installed the Astra style and imported one of its demo sites built with Elementor. WordPress Elementor Free Alternative.
Now, let’s go through the Elementor dashboard utilizing that demonstration site.
Here’s what the Elementor dashboard looks like.
Here’s the label of various parts numbered.
- The working area or the main canvas. This is where you edit and redesign your website
- Elementor widgets location
- Elementor settings
- Open Elementor widgets
- International settings
- Modification history
- Switch view (desktop, tablet, mobile).
- Preview changes.
- Publish.
Elementor Structure Hierarchy
If you are entirely brand-new to developing sites, you need to comprehend the structure of the Elementor page Builder.
Every page built with Elementor consists of sections and columns.
Section. A section is essentially 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 different columns. You can then control each column separately. WordPress Elementor Free Alternative.
A page can have any number of sections in it. Sections 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 Style 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 section, we will cover how you can create a page from scratch using Elementor. WordPress Elementor Free Alternative.
Here’s how you do it:
Action 1: Open a blank page and click “Edit With Elementor”.
Action 2: Click on the “+” button to include a brand-new area.
Action 3: Choose a section with a single column or several ones depending on your requirements.
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 change the finer details in the Material, Design, and Advanced Sections.
You can play around with the options when finding out to find the ideal designs for you.
How to Style a Pre-Existing Page in Elementor
Sometimes you may require to modify a pre-existing page with Elementor. The procedure is not really 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 brand-new widget, drag it from the sidebar on the left.
To reorganize a widget on the visual preview, you can also utilize drag and drop. If you wish to edit text, simply click and type on the visual sneak peek:
To develop the designs 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 three tabs:
Utilize a similar technique to personalize areas and columns:
As you alter a component’s settings, you’ll quickly see those modifications assessed the visual sneak peek.
8 Incredible Features That Assist Elementor Stick Out
Next, let’s go through a few of the important things that help Elementor stand apart from other visual, drag-and-drop page contractors.
1. Convenient Editing Functions for Faster Style
Elementor features some practical modifying features that assist you develop designs faster.
Elementor comes with right-click support, which most other page builders do not use.
You can right-click on any element to replicate it, copy and paste designs, and more:
It likewise comes with a beneficial Navigator view that provides you a purchased list of all the content on your page, separated by sections and columns. You can utilize this to rapidly open the settings for any aspect on your page. You can also rename aspects to make them simpler to discover: WordPress Elementor Free Alternative.
And to help you rapidly navigate in between your designs, it also includes a Finder tool that lets you jump to anything that you’ve built with Elementor by searching for it by name:
2. Big Widget Choice for Design Versatility
Across the core plugin and add-ons, Elementor has an absolutely huge selection of widgets, which gives you a lots of versatility when constructing your designs.
It’s not almost the 60+ widgets that come with Elementor and Elementor Pro, however, there’s likewise a big choice of widgets from third-party developers.
For instance, Ultimate Addons for Elementor includes another 36+ new widgets that you can utilize in your designs, covering whatever from form stylers to hotspots, content toggles, videos, and more.
With numerous alternatives, you can usually discover a widget that does precisely what you want it to.
3. Detailed Design and Positioning Guidelines for Pixel-Perfect Designs
Another location where Elementor vanquishes a great deal of the competition is its design alternatives.
Elementor lets you do all the basics – you can change up colors, typefaces, spacing, and so on.
However it likewise includes sophisticated options like:
Shape dividers
Custom placing
Animations, consisting of parallax scrolling, mouse tracking, 3D tilt, and more
Custom CSS for individual widgets
In other words, Elementor gives you more options to create a distinct, reliable style.
4. Huge Template Selection to Conserve You Time
If you don’t want to develop your designs from scratch, Elementor includes a substantial selection of templates, divided into two categories:
Pages – full-page design templates. All you do is tailor them to satisfy your requirements. WordPress Elementor Free Alternative.
Blocks – design templates for particular parts of a page, like a FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION. You can mix-and-match them like legos to construct total designs.
Just like widgets, you can also discover design templates from third-party sources.
If you utilize the Astra WordPress theme, it includes stacks of pre-made starter templates built with Elementor. Each starter website consists of numerous Elementor templates that you can customize as required.
5. Versatile Form Widget and Combinations
Above, I mentioned Elementor’s widget choice in general. I think it’s worth singling out a particular widget:
The Type widget.
The Kind widget lets you produce custom-made types, complete with as many fields as required. Where this widget gets really powerful, especially when it comes to marketing applications, is its built-in combinations.
You can hook it up to popular e-mail marketing services like ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Mailchimp, and more. There’s also a Webhook alternative that lets you link to Zapier (and the countless apps readily available there), along with chat combinations for Slack and Discord.
6. Style Builder With Dynamic Content for Customized WordPress Sites
With Elementor Pro, you acquire the ability to go beyond posts and pages and design your entire WordPress style with Elementor. That is, you can build:
Headers
Footers
Single templates
Archive templates
For example, you could produce a custom post type and then utilize Elementor to create the template for that post type, instead of tampering theme design template files straight.
The actually effective thing here is that you have the capability to bring in vibrant material from customized fields that you produce with plugins like ACF, Toolset, and Pods.
With this dynamic function, you can build genuinely custom websites and harness WordPress’ power as a versatile material management system. WordPress Elementor Free Alternative.
Simply one note – while this is definitely a powerful feature, there are still some reasons why you might want to choose a versatile Elementor theme like Astra even if you choose to utilize Elementor Theme Builder.
7. WooCommerce Builder for Custom eCommerce Designs
If you’re producing an eCommerce store, you can likewise apply Elementor Style Builder to your shop content with dedicated WooCommerce Builder widgets.
You’ll have the ability to create both your single product pages and go shopping pages.
To help you develop your designs, you’ll get an array of devoted WooCommerce widgets for whatever from product images to upsells.
In among our articles, we talked about how to develop an eCommerce site with Elementor.
8. Popup Builder for Marketing, Use, and More
Lastly, Elementor Pro can do more than simply posts, pages, and style style – you can likewise use it to develop 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 up a lot of possibilities:
For example, you might utilize the Type widget to develop e-mail opt-in popups and link them directly to your e-mail marketing service of option.
Or, you might utilize the Login widget to develop a popup login form for your site. WordPress Elementor Free Alternative.
When you release a popup, you’ll get a range of targeting and trigger guidelines to manage precisely where and when your popup appears:
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Should You Utilize Elementor Free vs Pro?
If you have actually made it this far, there’s a good chance that you believe Elementor is right for your requirements.
That leads to the next question – can you use the totally free variation at WordPress.org or should you acquire Elementor Pro?
This is an essential decision, so we in fact composed a whole post on how to choose in between Elementor free vs Pro.
In general, if you just wish to design some posts/pages or fundamental landing pages, you can probably manage with the free version.
With that being stated, there’s a great deal of worth in Elementor Pro. It adds:
- 30+ brand-new widgets, including the Type widget. The Type widget is especially effective for marketing pages.
- Style Builder. This lets you design your whole theme and WooCommerce store utilizing Elementor.
- Popup Builder. This lets you build popups using Elementor.
- More templates. While the totally free version includes some design templates, you require Pro for complete gain access to.
- More style choices. For example, you get access to custom positioning.
Purchasing Elementor Pro is not the only method to extend Elementor.
For instance, if you want more flexibility to personalize your theme, you do not need to purchase Elementor Pro. Rather, you might utilize a versatile theme like Astra. Through its many Customizer settings, you can adjust Astra to basically any use, and it’s a lot easier than trying to develop your own style from scratch. WordPress Elementor Free Alternative.
You can develop your header and footer utilizing Astra. Due to the fact that Astra is built to pair with Elementor, you can still use Elementor to design the content that goes “in between” your header, footer, and other style components.
Astra likewise includes lots of pre-built website templates developed with Elementor. So you can import an already-finished website utilizing Astra and after that just modify it to match your requirements using Elementor.
Or, if you wish to add new widgets for style versatility, you might purchase an extension like Ultimate Addons for Elementor, which includes 36+ new Elementor widgets.
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Does Elementor Slow Down Your Website?
Now, this has actually been a question that is recently getting popularity. And rightfully so.
Elementor is a plugin that can be helpful for including gorgeous widgets and styles to your website. Its versatile and user friendly functions have invited a number of addon plugins that let you create extraordinary websites without having to code.
If you utilize too many plugins or have too numerous animations then it may make your entire website sluggish.
The question develops if Elementor slows your site down even without any of these addons. WordPress Elementor Free Alternative.
To find out, we compare 2 of our starter design template sites. Among them was constructed 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 find out.
Here are the websites for you to check out.
- Gutenberg website from Beginner Templates
- Elementor site from Beginner Templates
We hosted both sites on the exact same server and under various directories of the same domain and compared their performance in GT Metrix.
Here are the results.
As you can see, the performance of the Gutenberg site is much faster than the Elementor website.
In terms of exact loading time, the site made with Elementor took about 5.5 s to load completely while the website made with Gutenberg took 2.2 s.
If you are optimizing for SEO, you know how big of a distinction that is!
The very same website constructed with Beaver Builder likewise performs a little better than the Elementor site.
Nevertheless, in regards to completely filled time, it takes a 2nd longer than the Elementor website to load.
Elementor Alternatives
Elementor is a terrific tool, it does not mean that it is the ideal tool for you all the time.
If you are building a focused landing page with the Elementor base variation, you may not be able to do it directly without incorporating another contact kind plugin or a payment entrance. WordPress Elementor Free Alternative.
In such a case you will need to update to Elementor Pro.
For the SEOs out there, you may want to consider a lighter plugin that loads quicker without triggering any hold-ups in page loading.
With all these and numerous other factors in mind, we have created this list of Elementor options that can assist you out.
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Gutenberg
Gutenberg is among the most light-weight and quick website builders due to the fact that it is WordPress default editor. Gutenburg makes it easier than ever to create web pages with ease.
The blocks include whatever you may expect, consisting of headings and subheadings along with lists of products like images or videos within the content location on each private website page – all from one easy user interface!
Building a website in Gutenberg is like building a house using Lego blocks. You organize the blocks in the best order to come up with a lovely website. WordPress Elementor Free Alternative.
In regards to performance. Gutenberg works way better than any other page Builder. It is enhanced for WordPress users and delivers what it promises. However, it likewise lacks the various design aspects that Elementor gives the table.
If you are somebody who prefers performance over design, then Gutenberg is the ideal choice for you.
Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder is not as fancy or feature-rich compared to Elementor (Elementor Vs Beaver Builder comparison). It does offer a stable and consistent experience with its core plugin that only develops specific pieces of content. There is the Beaver Builder Theme available if you want one too! WordPress Elementor Free Alternative.
Beaver Builder is a total page style bundle that provides you with all the tools and parts to develop any sort 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 style and efficiency with Elementor. Beaver Builder does not have as many 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 site speed in mind.
SeedProd’s smart style system makes recycling blocks of material quick and simple by specifying color schemes which will save time when creating new layouts. WordPress Elementor Free Alternative.
It has all the blocks and features you ‘d expect from an effective page Builder such as opt-in kinds, social profiles, countdown timers. It likewise consists of contact pages with an alternative to quickly redirect visitors on any site map or Google Maps listing for their service place!
You can use SeedProd’s customized domain mapping function which will conserve time when managing multiple client landing pages in WordPress while still maintaining branding continuity across platforms.
Any Lingering Questions?
As you can see, our company believe that Elementor is among the very best WordPress page builders out there, which is why we have actually use Astra, one of the most popular styles for Elementor, and Ultimate Addons for Elementor, one of the most popular Elementor widget collections.
We’re also not alone in our positive Elementor evaluation – over 4 million WordPress sites use Elementor and Elementor has a remarkable 4.7-star ranking on over 5,900 reviews.
If you want to experience what Elementor can provide totally free:
Install the totally free Astra theme to develop a versatile base for your Elementor designs.
Install the free Elementor plugin from WordPress.org and begin building. WordPress Elementor Free Alternative.
If you like what you see, believe about whether Elementor Pro is ideal 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 try to help you choose.
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