Elementor
Elementor: The World’s Leading WordPress Page Builder
I’ll be the first to admin that page builders are not always awesome. Some of them add lots of bloat to the backend of a site. Bloat is an obvious concern as site speed is a significant SEO signal now. Since it’s common for sites to see more traffic from mobile than desktop, sites need to be very responsive and load fast. Like, fast on a non-wifi smartphone that is two generations behind the most current ones. That’s why Google has made site speed a significant ranking factor.
Page builders have never been awesome at speed. They tend to use lots of javascript to get things in place just so. And the more you tweak and poke at a page, the more javascript gets hoisted into the code. You see where I’m going with this.
But after using Elementor for over a year now, page bloat doesn’t seem to be a big issue. We haven’t used it everywhere, on every site we’ve build, but we’ve used it enough to be very familiar with it. It has quickly become our favorite page builder for WordPress. It’s feature rich, doesn’t bloat your site, it’s easy-to-use, and is loaded with options.
Elementor is Committed to Updates & New Features
The Elementor team continually ads new features to the platform on a regular basis. And the part I like is that the updates are useful. They just don’t pile on updates to say they make a lot of updates. You can tell they listen to the community, they think about what will be useful, and release helpful additions. I’ve found the updates to also be complete, full updates, too. Not half baked, semi-functional components. They work as advertised.
The Free Version is Good…
Like apps on your phone, there is a free version. And like so many apps on your phone, the free version is often not great. They are designed to get hook you so you pay for the full version. But with Elementor, the free version is good. Really good. You can build a full WordPress web site with it, and for many people, you’ll never need to upgrade to the Pro version at all. They do update the free version, too, and some of the feature and updates are available, though sometimes with a few limitations.
… but the Pro Version is worth it.
The Pro version is really great, and it’s reasonable priced for what it includes. It adds many more professional tools and functions that are very useful, but as I said, not required. Essentially, the Pro version gives you more. For example, the free version has wonderful, already built site layouts that you can import directly into your site and start customizing. The Pro version has many more templates to choose from. There are prebuilt widgets, such as contact forms, that can be easily implemented. The Pro version gives you many more to choose from with more options.
The Pro version also integrates with WooCommerce, very easily, and allows you to create custom 404 pages. Custom 404 pages are very handy and, sadly, often overlooked when building sites. 404 pages create a frustrating experience to site visitors, whereas custom 404 pages allow you to gracefully keep site visitors engaged and moving onward in your site.
The Pro version also includes a full template library that is fully accessible via your own instance of WordPress. If you see a template you like, you can directly import it. No leaving your site, browsing another library, downloading a theme or template and uploading it. It’s all accessible via your dashboard, and it’s frequently updated with new content.
We Recommend Elementor
As we’ve said elsewhere on the site. We only recommend things we use. Nothing here is a paid sponsorship. We use tools for our daily, full-time jobs as digital marketers. And when we find tools we like and find useful, we recommend them to others. We have not use Elementor on every site we’ve build, but we’ve used it on many. We have build sites completely without it, too. But, this WordPress visual page builder is sophisticated, and lacks all the things we hated in other page builders.