Web designers across the globe often feel as if they are engaged in a continual struggle to select the appropriate software for their design projects.
With so many companies delivering ease and support through the design process, it can be difficult to pinpoint software that really works. In recent years, Elementor has been climbing the ranks, becoming a fond favourite for designers everywhere.
If you’re attempting to build and design your own website, which we strongly recommend against unless you’re experienced, you may be considering Elementor. At Blaze Media, our expert Dev and Design Team are big fans of Elementor.
Here is a look at the pros and cons of using Elementor, how it can streamline user-friendly page design, how our designers are using its professionally designed tools to create beautiful landing page templates, and much more.
What is Elementor?
Elementor is a WordPress plug-in that enables us to build fully responsive websites in a ‘drag and drop editor’ format. This means that our web designers can spend more time flexing their creative muscles and working on designs in real time and less time writing lines and lines of code and switching between screens to see their code come to life.
Elementor is a free plugin but offers a paid pro version. We utilise the pro version for the sites we use it on, at no additional cost to our clients. This is because it allows for custom coding, enabling us to truly push the creative boundaries of our site designs with more advanced features.
You might think that having all of this at your fingertips means you would have to sacrifice some of the types of websites you can build, but this isn’t true. You can build limitless types of websites while using the Elementor editor.
WP Elementor: Popular Uses
- Traditional information websites that include a home page, about pages and contact information.
- Conversion-focused elementor landing pages.
- E-commerce websites that sell products or services.
- Easy header footer management for updating and maintaining site structure/navigation.
- Pop ups and forms to promote products or services, or to grow email marketing list signups.ou can include pop ups to grow your email marketing list or to promote a particular service or product.
- Personal portfolio websites.
- Websites that include custom post types. For example, a website that promotes job adverts.
Pros & Cons Of Using Elementor
Having gained some insights about what Elementor offers, let’s explore the pros and cons of what the plugin adds (including if you’ve upgraded to the pro version versus the free option), and how it may be a valuable addition to your WordPress dashboard.
Pros of Using Elementor
Now, it’s no secret that here at Blaze, we love Elementor. Here are some of the reasons why our team loves it so much.
(We promise our reasons aren’t biased; we really do love it.)
Easy to Use
Elementor is extremely easy to use from an end-user perspective. Once your website is live, you can easily log on and make changes within your Elementor template to things like wording, imagery, and even layout. These take quite a while if you were to wait for a developer to customise your website’s code.
Do keep in mind that there is a learning curve when you first get started, but with the support of an expert web developer, you will quickly get the hang of it.
Flexibility
Although Elementor is designed to be easy to use, that doesn’t mean you can’t be flexible with the complexity of your website. The combination of Elementor and an experienced developer enables us to combine our design and coding skills to produce some fascinating results.
HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript are all coding languages supported by Elementor, and can be used alongside the drag-and-drop format to create some truly bespoke websites.
There’s nothing worse than having no creative freedom when designing a website, so this is another reason why Elementor is such a popular tool.
Price / Value
Our designers save countless hours by avoiding the need to code every single page, which accelerates project completion. This reduced time leads to cost savings, making websites more affordable for our clients.
The faster turnaround time doesn’t mean a lack of quality, either. As explained earlier, because Elementor saves our designers’ time in areas that would usually be quite demanding, we have more time to work on making a complete website that’s perfect for your requirements, both in terms of visuals and functionality.
Customisation
Once our designers have built the foundations and got your website up and running, we will hand over the metaphorical keys. In a standard site build this could be something quite scary, especially if you’re not familiar with code. You may avoid trying to make changes all together in case you end up breaking things.
This is where Elementor really shines. What would’ve been quite tricky changes to make are made really simple with Elementor’s theme builder, ‘drag and drop’ format. Plus, even if you do make a mistake and break the site, Elementor has a built-in revisions log, so you can easily revert back to previous versions at a click of a button.
If only we had this option for everyday life, eh?
Not only that, but Elementor has extensive online documentation to help you out if you do run into something you’re unsure of.
WP Elementor Integration
Elementor is designed to work with WordPress which means almost every integration that would work with WordPress works with Elementor. Some examples include…
- Social feeds
- Mailchimp, Hubspot and many other marketing tools
- Recaptchas
- Custom fonts and icons
- Trustpilot and Google Reviews
The added benefit is that some integrations come with their own Elementor widgets, which makes it even easier to add to pages and customise layouts.
Templates
Our designers can build base Elementor templates with custom fields that can be easily reused for future pages. This feature massively increases productivity, as you don’t need to spend time creating a new page and rebuilding it using existing elements from your site over and over again.
Instead, you simply enter the information you need into the fields provided, and the data will be automatically applied to a pre-made design within your template library. Oh, and it’s all fully responsive, too.
You can’t grumble about that, can you?
Cons of Elementor
Now that we’ve highlighted everything that we love about Elementor, it’s only fair that we discuss some of the cons of using Elementor.
Doing this feels like telling your child their painting hasn’t made the fridge, so though we could only identify one notable con, it still hurts.
Site Speed
It’s been well known in the industry for a while that Elementor can cause some performance issues and make sites slower compared to freshly coded builds. This can be true to a degree, but Elementor has come a long way since then.
The developers at Elementor work continuously to improve the plugin and release frequent updates, which have helped improve overall performance.
When Elementor site builds are combined with an experienced design agency like Blaze Media, performance is significantly improved. Our developers ensure that they build sites as efficiently as possible and are well-versed in the best industry practices to maximise the potential of their builds.
We combine this knowledge with super-fast servers and caching plug-ins like Litespeed to maximise site performance. So, slower performance doesn’t matter much with a great time on your side.
Page Speed Examples of Sites We’ve Worked on With Elementor
How We’ve Successfully Used Elementor For Our Clients
Portico first came to us with an existing website and branding. The site itself was functional, but did require some improvements.
A key point the client mentioned was that making changes proved difficult on the original build, and things that should have been easy seemed really complicated. That’s the moment we knew building the website with Elementor would be the perfect solution.
We first got to work rebuilding every page using the drag-and-drop builder and replacing existing coded pages. This meant that if the client ever wanted to make changes to wording, images, or layout, they could now easily do so.
Creating Elementor Templates For Portico
On this project, we decided to template some pages, such as their development pages, that we knew the client would want to produce more of.
Portico uses its development pages as case studies to showcase properties they have worked on. Each development has its own landing page with content unique to that property.
After recognising the consistent pattern in the data included in each development, we began creating a single master template and establishing a custom post type with all the necessary fields.
This meant that from the client’s perspective, they only needed to log on and create a new post – it’s as simple as making a new blog post. All of the required data would pull through automatically in a fully responsive way onto the template.
This saved the client massive amounts of time and made day-to-day site maintenance super easy in comparison to their old build.
Elementor’s Dynamic Display
We also made the most of Elementor’s dynamic display conditions and PHP integrations. Each landing page on the website has its own header, one that contains no links that could take the user away from the landing page itself.
By default, the client would need to access the header template and add a display condition for each page to indicate, ‘Show this template on this page.’ This would be acceptable if there were only a few landing pages, but our client anticipated wanting to add more in the future.
To make things as efficient as possible, we added some custom PHP to the site which allowed us to categorise each page. Now all the client needs to do now is add the page to the landing page category, and the landing page header will automatically apply itself. This has saved the client so much time so that they can work on the more important things!
Unlock The Power of Elementor With Blaze
Through this blog, we hope that we have showcased exactly how Elementor can be used to help build a website. At Blaze, we love Elementor and think it is a brilliant web design and development tool.
Want to see how Elementor could help your business grow? Contact our team today.
Elementor FAQs
Can Elementor Be Used With Any Theme?
Yes! That’s the great part about using Elementor. You can apply all the benefits of Elementor to an existing theme which means you don’t have to lose anything you’ve already created.
Do I Need Elementor for WordPress?
No. Elementor is a plugin for WordPress, which means it’s an additional add-on. You can use WordPress without using Elementor.
Can You Add Elementor to an Existing Site?
As long as your website is built with WordPress, you can add Elementor to it. The Elementor editor is a plugin you can install from your WordPress dashboard.
Does Elementor Make a Website Slow?
By default, Elementor creates a fairly large DOM size, which can slow down a website depending on its construction. However, employing good practices during the building process can significantly enhance performance. Additionally, using a reliable server will further improve site speed.
Does Elementor Work With WooCommerce?
Absolutely! Elementor thrives with WooCommerce and makes it possible to create bespoke product pages that engage your users/customers. Elementor WooCommerce sites are becoming increasingly popular among online businesses that want more freedom in their designs, and often gives more time to focus on things like product merchandising and specs etc.
Does Yoast Work With Elementor?
Yes, in fact, the majority of plug-ins that work with WordPress work with Elementor. Any compatibility issues across plugins should flag automatically. If you have any specific questions about Elementor plugin compatibility on WordPress, get in touch with our team.
Are WordPress and Elementor the Same Thing?
No. WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that provides the foundations of a website. Elementor is a plug-in that helps make site customisation easier.