Elementor is one of the most popular website builders that help you add extra functionality to your website easily and fast, and also help you manage other pages within your website without having too many troubles as you would get by doing it manually, that is without a website building tool like it.
Many people believe that it offers the best resources for website development and management while others say that it is okay but could be better like its competitors.
And if you are confused about going with Elementor or not as your personal website builder then this detailed Elementor review is what you will want to read to help clear the mist on that issue for you.
Within this review, I will be looking at the key areas about it including how it works, its main features, how to use it, customer reviews, its pricing plans, and how it actually compares with the other known website and page-building tools out there.
So, without taking much of your time, let’s get started.
Name: Elementor
Website: www.elementor.com
Price: Varies with each plan
Founder: Yoni Luksenberg
Ratings: 89/100
Table of Contents
What is Elementor
Elementor is a WordPress website builder, that allows you to create and enhance different areas of your website fast and conveniently.
The builder offers various resources such as webpage templates that you can use on your website, and the ability to easily customize them by dragging and dropping new features.
It also helps you further customize other specific pages, including landing pages, contact pages, and others, of your website and even beautify the overall design.
Essentially, it offers you all the tools and provisions you require to take your website to the next level.
I have been using Elementor for a good deal of time now and it has become my go-to WordPress builder when I want to make custom changes to different aspects of my website.
Elementor was launched in 2016 by Yoni Luksenberg alongside Yakir Sitbon and Ariel Klikstein, and over the years it has been evolving and has expanded its reach with accessibility in more than 180 countries, and has over 5,000,000 active installs.
Its headquarters are in Raman Gat, Israel.
How Elementor Works
Elementor is more of a webpage builder plugin that goes over the usual WordPress editor and allows you more functionality as you style and develop your website through its live frontend editor.
You get to see what you are building as you build it.
Through this, you can create your website live, and come up with detailed layouts visually, so that you don’t have to keep switching between the preview mode and the editor.
You get to install it on your website as a WordPress plugin and then connect your Elementor account to your WordPress website so that you can easily work with it.
Elementor’s page builder helps you to enhance the design for your website, make tweaks to a certain page of your site, build a page from scratch or adopt their templates on your website and other great abilities, all by yourself, without the help of website developers or any other complicated process that will need a lot of your time or money.
However, if you still want to be helped with complex development, you can hire their development team to give you a hand with that.
The platform is user-friendly and easy to work with. So once you understand how it works which is achieved by you consequently working with it as well as learning from the tutorials they have made for the users, you will have a seamless experience with it.
Elementor is frequently updated and uses the latest technology so that it’s fast and responsive, and ensure that the users have the best website development experience.
Elementor Features
Elementor has a wide variety of features for various functions and we are going to go through all of them. Here are the tools you get in each category and how they help you and your WordPress website in various areas:
√Essentials
~ Access to over 300 beautiful templates
~ A drag and drop editor
~ Access to over 90 different widgets
~ A popup builder to help you create great popups
~ Responsive editing that helps make your work accessible from any device
~ Access to a woo-commerce builder
~ Access to theme builder
√Workflow
~ A navigator to help you easily move around page elements
~ No coding feature meaning you can do high-end designs without having to code them
~ Ability to redo and undo to help you easily undo mistakes
~ Hotkeys that act as keyboard shortcuts so that you easily perform various actions faster
~ A finder to help you easily locate something within pages
~ Autosave to help you easily save up your data
~ Access to revision history that allows you to easily retrace your page creation steps
~ Access to a full site editor
~ Shortcut cheat sheet that allows you to see the list of all your shortcuts
~ Draft mode that allows you to save your drafts for later
~ Copy-paste and copy style for copying and pasting various elements of your work
~ Site settings to control the aspects of your site
~ In-line editing to help you type directly on the screen
~ The global widget to manage your widgets across your website
~ Dark mode that allows you to carry out your designs in a darker environment as well as save power in your device
√Design
For you to have a smooth flow with designing your website, you get:
Global colors, global fonts, background videos, global custom CSS, enhanced background images, background overlay, background gradients to help in the adding of gradient colors to any page or post, background slideshow, enhanced background images, blend modes for mixing up backgrounds, shape divider to help separate sections of pages, CSS filters, Box shadow for setting up custom-made box shadows, one-page websites to help create a one-page website, motion effects, icons library for access to many icons, SVG icons, theme style for great theme designs.
√Marketing
For marketing purposes, you are given access to:
A form widget that allows you to create your forms live, landing pages that allows you to easily create and manage your landing pages, a testimonial carousel widget for increasing your business’ social proof, a pop-up builder to help you create great pop-ups, countdown widget helps you add countdowns to your offers, rating star widget to add star rating for your website, action links to help you connect with your audience through various apps, multi-step form for splitting forms into steps for better conversion rates.
√Typography
For pleasant page flow, you get to use:
Title HTML Tag, custom fonts, font-size: PX, EM, REM, type kit integration, font preview, text editor columns, text-shadow, drop cap, and Google fonts.
√Layout
You also get these provisions for enhancing your website’s layout:
Content position, nested columns for an advanced column, the Z-Index, section width, full width, column width, margin & padding, vertical & horizontal flexbox alignment for easier distribution of widgets across columns, inline elements, nested columns, section height, and column gap.
√Mobile Editing
If you want to use your mobile devices to work on your website using Elementor, it is possible through the abilities you get that include:
Responsive sizing, mobile font size, padding and margin for making different margin or padding size per device, responsive column width, reverse columns for ordering columns, custom breakpoints for adapting a site to the size of various devices, and the hide and show elements that allow for visibility preferences.
√Theme Builder
If you want to better enhance the look and feel of the theme that is running your website, you can use these resources:
The visual guide, dynamic colors, dynamic content, display conditions, header and footer, 404 page, sticky header, archive page, single post, custom fields integration, and the search results page.
√Other awesome tools
The other tools you get within Elementor include:
Theme content tools, e-commerce tools, forms tools, integration tools, social media tools, library tools, media tools, interaction tools, advanced tools such as a custom CSS for creating your custom CSS code for features you want to have on your website.
Elementor Customer Reviews
In the grand scheme, Elementor users have given positive feedback on the platform.
Most people seemed to love the Global templates feature that lets you create and save a template that you want to use it in a number of places in your site and even get to edit all the places you have used the template by editing one template that then applies to all the other places you have used the template.
And since no platform out there is perfect, there are also users who raised some complaints about it.
Let’s have a look at all of them.
The Positive User Reviews
” Elementor helped me get more comfortable with using WordPress to build websites. Elementor is the first plugin I install once i set up a new WordPress dashboard. The drag and customize features are amazing, it gives so many front end functions that would have required an immense knowledge of coding. The free package can build a decent website, while the paid version which is quite affordable gives you access to more support and features”
“I am using Elementor for several things, sice creating simple one-page sites to creating systems with custom fields ans custom post types.”
“Overall it has been a good experience to design with Elementor allowing me to design quickly, I have found some ways around the limitations of the free version but they are time consuming and you might as well get the paid version to have a great painless experience. If you want compatibility with most elements and plug-ins in WordPress this is a well established software and would work great for you.”
“Elementor helped me get more comfortable with using wordpress to build websites. Elementor is the first plugin I install once i set up a new wordpress dashboard. The drag and customise features are amazing, it gives so many front end functions that would have required an immense knowledge of coding. The free package can build a decent website, while the paid version which is quite affordable gives you access to more support and features”
The Negative User Reviews
“Really bad page builder with lots of issues to fix. Does,t work properly and their customer service and technical support are really bad. Do not recommend”
“I do not recommend Elementor for those of you who do not have a good WP technical background. I could not get my web site launched in 60 days with their software and ran into WP errors due to the Elementor plugin. If you do wish to take a crapshoot on this product, try to use it heavily in the first 30 days as they will not refund your money after the 30-day time period.”
“This software makes any in WordPress worse. The only bright spot is the actual on-page editing, but everything is backwards.”
You can check out more user reviews here.
Elementor Pros and Cons
The Pros
~ Offers you a free plan hence allowing you more freedom to test the platform before you invest
~ Offers a wide range of features to work with thus ensuring more functionalities
~ Price plans are affordable
~ Easy to use especially when creating a website
~ Offers great customization options
~ Offers a Facebook community to help users find advice, support, and tips
~ Provides video tutorials in case you get stuck somewhere
The Cons
~ Most of the awesome functionalities are only accessible in the pro version
~ Customer support leaves a lot to be desired
~ Doesn’t always work quite as effectively with every theme
How to Use Elementor
Step 1. Go to https://elementor.com and click on the “Get started” button.
Step 2. Answer the questions that follow to help the platform best understand who you are and what you want to achieve so that they can help you get the right resources that best fit your goals.
Step 3. You will be asked if you already have a WordPress website and if no, you will be allowed to choose a host from various options provided there.
Step 4. Choose whether to create your website first and then connect it to Elementor or go straight to Elementor. Here, if you already have a website, you should go straight to the connection part. There is no need to create another website.
If you don’t have a website, you can go ahead create your first WordPress website page and then confirm that it’s ready.
From there, you will log in to your WordPress site and Elementor and connect them so that you are able to use Elementor on the WordPress website you have built.
Step 5. If you have a website already, you will be required to provide the full URL to your website to connect it with Elementor. Once you have given your website URL or website address, click on “check for WordPress button”
Step 6. You will then need to login to your site and then install Elementor on your website. You will get a list of steps provided for you to do that.
Step 7. After installing and activating it on your website, you are now set to start using it on your website.
You can watch the videos provided for you to help you learn how to develop and customize the pages you want on your website.
Elementor Pricing Plans
There are 4 main pricing plans for Elementor:
√The Free plan (doesn’t cost anything), and you use it on any number of sites you want
√Personal plan (costs $49/year), and you use it on only one site
√Plus plan (costs $99/year), and you use it on only three sites
√Expert plan (costs $199/year), and you use it on 1000 sites
Here is a photo with complete information on what you get with every plan.
Elementor Competitor Comparison
When it comes to website developing and fine-tuning different key areas of your website, there are many other website builders that have been created for that purpose too including Wix, Divi, Gutenburg, WPBakery, and Beaver, to name a few.
Let’s see how these compare with Elementor.
Elementor vs Wix
Wix is a website builder that helps you build your entire website from scratch using their drag and drop features. It gives you the option of creating your website using the website editor or the Wix ADI tool. The Wix ADI tool works more like Elementor when it comes to editing various aspects of your website.
In terms of functionality, Wix does offer some good features you can work with but Elementor has really delivered more than Wix. You get value for your money more with Elementor than with Wix when you consider how much you are paying.
Wix has different pricing plans that start from $4.50 per month to $24.50 per month.
Elementor, on the other hand, has a free plan that you don’t pay for at all. On top of that, their lowest plan is $49 per year and the highest is $199 per year.
The value you get from the $49/year plan of Elementor doesn’t compare at all to what you get with the $4.50/month with Wix.
In my opinion, Elementor offers way more useful features than Wix.
And for that reason, I would recommend Elementor between the two.
Elementor vs WPBakery
WPBakery is also another WordPress website builder that offers almost the same features as Elementor.
Although, while most of the features are like Elementor’s, WPBakery lacks a popup builder and a theme builder.
Some users have also reported that using WPBakery is not quite as straightforward as it is with Elementor.
The good thing with WPBakery is that their customer support is way better than what you get with Elementor.
WPBakery has only 2 payment plans. The Regular plan that goes for $45 and then the Extended plan that costs $245.
Overall, the two platforms offer really great features as WordPress website builder plugins but Elementor is slightly better to work with.
Elementor vs Divi
Divi is a WordPress page builder that comes as a plugin as well as a theme.
It has some similarities to Elementor including design settings that are responsive, right-click support, the ability to develop themes, and having visual interfaces that use the drag and drop abilities, among others.
When it comes to differences, Elementor has a popup builder and Divi doesn’t. Also, the third-party extensions you get with Elementor are more than Divi’s.
However, Divi has many templates and layout packs while Elementor deals with templates only. Moreover, Divi has split testing or A/B testing that is built-in.
And the fact that you get Divi as both a theme and plugin is a big deal too.
When it comes to cost, Divi is slightly costly as it has 2 plans, one costs $89 per year and the other gives a lifetime access for $249.
Comparing the two, it pretty much depends on the features you want as the user. If you want a cheaper yearly plan, Elementor will be a good fit.
However, costs aside, both platforms are great in their own right.
Elementor vs Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder is another strong competitor of Elementor.
As far as features are concerned, it offers as many resources and provisions for the user to build their pages.
Most theme developers believe that Beaver has the cleanest code that makes the users find it to load faster.
The differences between the two are quite a number.
Some of them include Beaver not having redo and undo feature, taking a lot of time before making improvements to the builder and having a basic version that doesn’t offer the best experience for someone who is using it to test-drive the platform.
On the other hand, it offers better customer support than Elementor.
Beaver is, however, more expensive compared to Elementor as its plans start from $99. The second plan costs $199 and the other one is $399.
Comparing the two, each builder has its own unique strengths and weaknesses and it is hard to point out the better one here.
So it depends on the features you want as the user and the weaknesses you can tolerate with each as you wait for the owners to fix them.
Elementor vs Gutenburg
Gutenburg is a post and page builder that was made by WordPress. It replaced the classic editor that was previously being used to manage pages and posts within WordPress.
It uses blocks and breaks down pieces of your content into blocks that you can easily edit and enhance.
It is free and is built into WordPress. It seems to be the future of WordPress as far as page and post-editing go.
Well, Elementor certainly offers more features in terms of customizing and adding more functionality to your pages and posts and website as a whole.
Compared to Gutenburg, Elementor does have more functionality.
The good thing is that you can use both on your WordPress website since Gutenburg comes with WordPress by default. And if you like blocks, Gutenburg will serve you well.
My Final Thoughts on Elementor
Elementor is a great drag-and-drop website builder that allows you a lot of flexibility when creating your website.
Due to the fact that it has great usability especially considering the fact that you can get started on a free plan, I recommend it to anyone seeking to build their website.
It is really going to help you improve the design and functionality of your website.
However, if you feel like there are some of its shortcomings that matter a huge deal to you and can’t manage to overlook, you can go for alternatives like the Beaver Builder or Divi as they offer the same value but have handled most of the problems you get with Elementor.
And this is where I come to a screeching halt with Elementor review.
I hope you have known Elementor well enough to figure out if it’s the right builder for you.
If you have any questions about it or about website builders in general, please feel free to drop them in the comments and I will be more than happy to help you out. 🙂
