Company: Elementor Ltd.
Background: Elementor is a website builder that builds on top of WordPress. It employs the drag-and-drop approach to help WordPress users to create and edit a WordPress site. Elementor is active on over five million websites, according to WordPress's official website.
Starting Price: Free
Currency: USD
Visit Online: https://elementor.com/
Review Summary & Ratings
Elementor’s main benefit is that you can design impressive web pages even if you don’t have prior experience with website development. This design structure eliminates any doubt about your website’s appearance once you publish it.
What is Elementor
Elementor is a visual drag-and-drop website builder plugin for WordPress websites. That means that as you create your content and design, you’ll see what your visitors will see. In addition, you can drag and drop design elements like images, forms, buttons, and others to build pages and create content as you wish. You don’t need to write HTML, CSS, JS, or any other markup or scripting language code.
Pros
- Intuitive drag-and-drop interface.
- Template library with numerous high-quality, ready-made page designs.
- Large selection of useful widgets.
- Easily customize theme areas of your website.
- Easy to use for a beginner.
Cons
- Advanced settings are only available in paid plans.
- The drag-and-drop editor can sometimes be slightly buggy
How Elementor Interface Works?
Before discussing some more specific features of Elementor, let’s first look at how the interface works.
The Interface
When you first launch the Elementor editor, you will notice that the interface is divided into three:
- The content area: This is the main canvas where you can place and adjust your content blocks.
- Elements or widgets: The building blocks that you'll combine to create your page.
- Settings: You can undo changes, preview designs across multiple devices, and more.
Layout Building
It’s always great to design your page’s basic structure before adding elements. Fortunately, Elementor offers users two structural elements: Sections and Columns.
Sections are the broadest layout blocks, while columns sit within a section. Note that you can have multiple columns within a section.
Adding Elements
Add a new style to a column or section by simply dragging it onto your page’s visual preview from the left sidebar. You can add basic features like headers, images, videos, and buttons to more advanced features like a logo carousel.
Styling Elements
You can style and control any element, including columns and sections, by clicking on your desired content and using the options in the Elementor sidebar. You can also right-click a section handle and select from the pop-up context menu.
4 Unique Features of Elementor
Now that you understand the basics, let’s look at some of the unique features contributing to Elementor's success.
1. The Elementor Template Library
Elementor users can create intuitive and complete designs from scratch.
However, the Elementor template library ensures that you don’t always have to do everything yourself. The library consists of numerous templates that you can activate with a click.
Furthermore, the plugin also features templates in two formats: pages and blocks.
Pages are importable full-page designs that you can tweak to match your needs.
In contrast, blocks are designs built for specific sections. For example, you can import a pre-built “about me” section to your existing layout using blocks.
Also, once you have your custom designs, you can save them as templates and easily reuse them later.
2. Mobile Previews and Responsive Design Controls
Elementor has mobile preview and response design features to let you control what users see based on the device they use to access your content.
With 4.32 billion unique mobile internet users around the world and over 90% of internet users accessing the web with mobile devices, this feature comes in handy.
Some page elements have unique responsive features. For example, you can reverse columns on mobile or tablet for some sections.
3. Detailed Layout Controls
Page builders allow users to design websites without writing codes. However, that simplicity often leads to trade-offs. Elementor works hard to reduce the need for any trade-offs.
This site builder provides tons of intuitive controls to ensure that you can place every section, column, and widget precisely where you want them and how you want them—like you'd do if you wrote the code.
4. Inline Text Editing
Elementor features an inline text editor to help users build their websites faster.
Inline text editing is a quick and easy way to edit text on your website. Instead of using a popup like several page builders, Elementor simply allows you to click on a page and enter text.
What About Elementor Pro?
Elementor offers both free and paid plans (Elementor Pro). The Elementor Pro plans come with more advanced features that smoothen your site-building experience.
Now, let’s look at some helpful functionalities that splurging cash on the Elementor Pro plan gets you.
Build Themes
Firstly, you can build your entire WordPress theme from scratch. Before its update to Elementor Pro 2.0, Elementor could only build content—not themes. So, you’d still need a theme to run Elementor.
However, you can now build a complete theme on Elementor with its drag-and-drop interface.
Widgets
Secondly, you get more widgets. Asides from offering more flexibility, these widgets could replace other plugins.
Some of the widgets on Elementor Pro include
- Sliders
- Forms (contact forms, login forms, etc.)
- Countdown timers
- Social share buttons
- CTAs
- Pricing tables
And more.
Full Templates Library
Elementor Pro unlocks all the template pages and blocks in the library. Also, exclusive Elementor Pro templates are more detailed and sophisticated. So you get more templates plus improved quality.
Lastly, there are scenarios where you need to reuse a particular element across multiple pages.
For example, you want your “about me” section to have the same content on all your web pages. You can achieve this with global widgets.
This Elementor Pro feature helps you save widgets as templates and reuse them on multiple pages. You can also automatically update every instance of a global widget in a single edit.
Elementor Plans and Pricing
Now, take a look at the plans and pricing for both free and paid plans.
Elementor Free Plan
The free plan includes:
- 30+ different templates to help you create a more professionally-looking website,
- 40+ widgets, and
- A built-in page editor.
Elementor Paid Plans
The paid plans include more templates and more sophisticated features across several plans starting at $49 per year. The Essential plan costs $49 per year and includes these features:
- Installable on a single website,
- 300+ pro templates which are more detailed than the free options,
- 100+ widgets,
- 60+ website template kits
- A theme builder and premium support.
The Advanced package, which costs $99 per year, is installable on three websites.
Whereas, the Expert plan, which costs $199 per year, is installable on 25 websites. It also has all the Essential plan features and an Experts Network Profile.
However, high-end professionals can purchase the Studio plan for $499 per year or the Agency plan for $999 per year. These top-tier plans include VIP live chat support and are installable on 100 and 1000 websites, respectively.
Start Building with Elementor
Elementor is a popular WordPress page builder for a reason. It offers all basics that visual page builders provide.
It then builds on these core functionalities with more sophisticated and helpful interface elements like Theme Builder and Popup Builder.
Still unsure if the plugin is ideal for your project, try out the free version on WordPress. Then if you desire something extra, you can upgrade to a Pro plan to take advantage of all Elementor’s features and functionalities.
