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Not sure if Elementor is the right page builder plugin for your website? In this Elementor review, we’ll show you what this tool is all about, list all of its pros and cons, and help you to decide whether or not to use it.
Here’s everything you need to know about the Elementor page builder plugin for WordPress.
As I mentioned earlier, the core functionality of the plugin is to allow you to build, tweak and adjust your pages freely — and then see the outcome of that in real-time.
That live preview feature means you don’t have to wonder what your page is going to look like when published (which is the standard scenario with native WordPress pages that are highly theme-dependent).
So, what can you do exactly? First, Elementor allows you to take advantage of many content elements/modules (more than 90 of them), which you can place anywhere on the page. You can then rearrange those elements with the aforementioned drag-and-drop support.
The available content elements include headlines, images, text paragraphs, videos, buttons, dividers, spacers, icons, image galleries and carousels, counters, testimonials, social media icons, shortcodes, and a lot more. Also, you get to use whatever widgets you already have on your WordPress site.
Apart from that, Elementor gives you access to display settings. This is where you can change the backgrounds, margins and padding values, default colors, fonts, and so on.
On top of that, there’s a full revision history, meaning you can revert to a previous version of the page (in case you messed something up and don’t know how to fix it).
Last, but certainly not least, Elementor gives you full control over what your page looks like on desktop, tablet and mobile.
Using those small toggles, you can switch back and forth between devices, and adjust the fine details to make the page look great everywhere.
Elementor Pricing
It’s free.
Okay, to keep this Elementor review factual, I should probably mention there’s a Pro edition available as well. But you don’t really need it to enjoy, say, 90% of Elementor’s awesomeness — honestly!
The main plugin is available via the official WordPress repository (get it here). There are no hidden costs or signups/registrations needed. It just works!
Now, about that Pro edition. Granted, it does feature some interesting stuff that power users will enjoy:
Using Elementor
Let’s enter the more practical section of our review. Here’s how to get started with Elementor:
Under the hood, Elementor is a WordPress plugin — albeit, a slightly more advanced one. To get it working, you’ll first need to install and activate it. This is all standard — just like with any other WordPress plugin.
After that, there’s a settings panel that you can visit if you want to, but that’s not mandatory. You can head straight to your WordPress pages and create a new one. Right away, you’ll see the option to ‘Edit with Elementor’:
After clicking on this main button, you’re going to see the Elementor user interface. Here’s what’s what:
To build a basic page with Elementor, you first need to understand the page structure hierarchy that it uses:
So, we have:
Page → Sections → Columns → Content → Styling
To get started, you can either add a ready-made template or include a blank section:
Within that new section, you can add new columns, and then populate these columns with content by simply dragging and dropping specific blocks from the sidebar. And, of course, you can rearrange sections with drag-and-drop as well.
Once you have a content block in place, you can click on it to adjust the fine details of what’s in it, as well as its presentation. There are three main tabs available for that: Content, Style and Advanced.
Just like that, one by one, you can work with individual content blocks until you have the whole page ready.
Overall, Elementor is very easy to use and fairly intuitive. Once you grasp the page/structure hierarchy and get to know all of the content elements, working with your pages becomes rather fun. Especially when you start getting into some of the more advanced features, for example:
Pre-made Templates
All of Elementor’s design capabilities are very impressive, but what if you don’t have a design bone in your body? Then you can use one of Elementor’s many pre-made templates.
And when I say ‘many’, I really do mean many. There are 150-plus templates available in the free version and 300-plus more in the Pro.
If that’s not enough, you also get what’s called Elementor Kits — collections of templates that all follow the same design aesthetic and allow you to craft a whole, consistent website.
The library contains all types of common pages for different purposes. You’ll find a nice selection of about pages, contact pages, homepages, landing pages (also for various niches, such as a hotel, restaurant and so on), portfolios, team pages and many more.
Not only can you import templates into your page, but you can then also tweak them freely until you get the exact result you desire.
Lastly, you can save any of your own pages as templates and then either reuse them on another page or share them with the community publicly on the web.
Who Is Elementor Best Suited To?
One thing I have to admit as I’m writing this Elementor review is that I’m really impressed with this tool. I’ve used all of the major page builder plugins out there, but I keep coming back to Elementor as my number one dependable solution.
Elementor is the easiest to grasp of the page builders, and it’s also the one that delivers you the most features for free.
Essentially, it’s the perfect DIY solution for people who want to create awesome page designs all on their own without having any coding skills, HTML or CSS knowledge.
Elementor will also come in handy if you feel a bit limited by what the default block editor in WordPress allows you to do. If you’re struggling to put your content where you want it, make the columns align or add images in a specific way, then Elementor will help you to do all of that.
At the end of the day, Elementor is for people who want to design beautiful pages for their websites without actually being a designer.
Elementor Review Conclusion
So, is Elementor better than the competition? Well, that depends on how we look at it.
Even though the market of page builders has grown a lot over the years, the two main competitors of Elementor’s are still the same — those are Beaver Builder and Divi Builder. Thus, for many people, choosing a page builder comes down to deciding between Elementor, Beaver and Divi.
And rightly so! All three tools are great. They’re the absolute top league of page builders. However, at the same time, none is hands-down better than the others at everything. Ultimately, whether you use Elementor, Beaver, or Divi comes down to your personal preference and the sort of features that are important to you, plus how you like those features delivered (in terms of UI and so on).
Still, there’s one thing that puts Elementor significantly ahead of the others. That thing is the price — or lack thereof.
While there’s a Pro version of Elementor available, you honestly get 90% of the plugin’s awesomeness for free. Beaver and Divi don’t give you that. This makes Elementor the best first option for anyone looking for a page builder plugin.
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