WordPress is the most popular CMS platform for a reason. It’s free and open-source, making the website creation process much more accessible than ever. But still, for those who don’t have coding experience it might be hard to access all its features and create a fully functional website.
This is where WordPress plugins come in. Luckily there are a lot of plugins that make using WordPress much easier. And one of them is Elementor (which we – as a web design agency use ourselves).
Elementor is a WordPress plugin that can help to build a functional WordPress website from scratch. And it has become quite popular recently.
If you’re looking for a reliable page builder for your WordPress website, Elementor can be your best choice. And now we’re going to explore what features Elementor has and what benefits it offers as a WordPress page builder.
Let’s go!
What is Elementor?
Elementor is a drag-and-drop page builder plugin that was created to make the process of WordPress website creation much easier. Today, Elementor has more than 11M active installs and is used in 150+ countries.
Before WordPress and similar CMSs, only professional developers who had coding experience could build a fully functional website. True, WordPress made it easier to build websites. But not for those who had no coding experience. You would still need some basic HTML/CSS knowledge. Here is when Elementor becomes more valuable. It was created for designers, marketers and anyone who wants to create a website fast and easily, without coding experience.
It has both free and premium versions, and even its free version will allow you to create an appealing, fully-functioning website.
Let’s explore Elementor’s features in more detail.
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Benefits of Using Elementor
Easy-to-use
As mentioned above, Elementor was created with the purpose of making WordPress website creation much easier. So it’s no wonder that this is one of its main benefits.
With Elementor, everyone can create a website even without any website building and professional coding knowledge. You can customize your pages as you want and create complex designs using this page builder.
Moreover, Elementor has a lot of ready templates and designs available and if you don’t want to spend a lot of time creating your own design, you can use their ready templates and customize them a bit to make your website unique.
Budget-Friendly
Elementor has both free and paid versions, and if you’re not sure if you need all its features, you can use only its free version. Moreover, the free version has quite a lot of functionalities, and you can build a simple, fully-functioning website even with the free version.
When you don’t intend to create an eCommerce shop or a complex website, you probably won’t need Elementor’s advanced features. So Elementor is a very budget-friendly option for those who try to cut down on all unnecessary expenses. Though, note that the premium version is quite affordable as well.
Drag-and-drop Builder
We’ve already mentioned that Elementor is a drag-and-drop builder. But what does that mean? Well, it means that you can easily add or edit the sections and widgets on a page (on the front end of the website) and position them by dragging and dropping to achieve the desired front-end design.
Elementor has a large number of different widgets (especially in the pro version) that you can use to add any type of content needed. You can add images, videos, text, carousels, headlines, buttons, testimonials and many other widgets. You can also customise the styling and colours of these widgets.
Last but not least, with Elementor you also have full control over how your website looks on different screen sizes, which allows you to create a fully responsive design.
High-Quality Website Designs
Elementor is a great choice for web designers. Without any coding knowledge, they can build very high-quality website designs that are completely tailored to the brand.
In the vast majority of cases, it is very hard to find developers who have meticulous attention to detail. Even front-end developers quite often focus on functionality neglecting finer design details, which in a lot of cases leads to the built version of the design being quite a bit different to the design itself.
Elementor and other similarly powerful builders allow designers to build what they design themselves, and designers tend to have a much greater focus on these finer details, resulting in a much higher quality final product (at least in terms of matching the design). This also speeds up any design iterations and makes it easy to then make minor content edits to the design on an ongoing basis.
Responsive, Mobile-Friendly Design
Responsiveness has become a vital key to success for all websites. Today, if your website is not responsive and mobile-friendly, you can’t expect it to perform well or have high rankings. Elementor allows you to create a responsive web design and preview your pages on different screens to make sure it works perfectly on all devices.
You can also edit your website’s mobile and tablet versions to make them more appealing to the end user.
Free vs Elementor Pro Versions
Now, as we’ve gone through the benefits of Elementor, let’s explore the differences between its free and premium versions. If you’re thinking about using this plugin to create your WordPress website, this will help you to understand whether you need the Pro version, or if it’s enough for you to go with the free version.
Theme Builder Full Customization
With Elementro Pro you can customize every part of your website. Elementor Pro Theme Builder offers you limitless possibilities for creating and editing templates in your theme. You can create themes from scratch, or modify the existing ones using Elementors’ widgets.
Elementor’s Theme Builder allows you to design your website’s header, footer, archive page, search results, single product and many other templates. You will have no restrictions in creating your designs and customizing them.
100+ Widgets
Elementor Pro offers 100+ widgets, which is 70 more than the basic version. The free version has basic and general widgets (such as text, images, buttons, an image carousel) which can allow you to create basic pages of a professional website.
But the Pro version has more advanced widgets which you can use to create animated headlines, pricing tables, lotties and so much more. This version has:
- PRO widgets, which allow you to add advanced features to the pages
- Theme widgets, which allow you to create custom page templates
- WooCommerce widgets, which you can use to create shop-related pages
Templates
Templates make the process of WordPress website creation much easier. You can find thousands of free and paid WordPress templates and create your website based on them. But if you have Elementor Pro, you won’t have to spend time searching for templates, as Elementor offers hundreds of quality templates.
With the Pro version, you will have access to these templates which will help you create whole pages, individual blocks, light themes, dark themes, pricing tables and any other feature you dreamt of adding to your website with a few clicks.
Global Widgets
Global widgets are a feature of Elementor Pro that allows you to create reusable blocks for your website, like CTAs or forms. But global widgets are more than just reusable templates.
When you edit the global widget from the master copy, the edits will automatically apply wherever the widget appears. So you won’t have to change each copy separately. It can save a lot of time and effort, as re-building and then editing the same section every time from scratch can be quite time-consuming.
Scrolling and Mouse Effects
Different scrolling, mouse or animation effects are not necessary for the website creation. But they can add a lot of personality and dynamics to the website and overall make it more unique and appealing for the users.
Scrolling effects, which also include parallax effects, add depth to the website design. You can add some background effects, make some sections pop compared to others and add some more creativity to your website.
Elementor Pro scrolling effects are:
- Vertical scroll
- Horizontal scroll
- Transparency
- Blur
- Scale
Forms
Contact forms, subscription forms and other kinds of forms are an essential part of websites today. But in order to create a form on WordPress you need to install a form plugin.
With Elementor Pro you won’t have to look for an additional plugin, as it has widgets for creating different kinds of forms. Plus, you can view your form submissions directly in WordPress, which is something most free plugins won’t allow you to do.
Integration of WooCommerce
We’ve already mentioned that Elementor Pro has WooComerce widgets, which enable you to easily customise dynamic WooCommerce templates or parts on the front end of the website. This is especially important if you’re planning on creating an eCommerce store.
These widgets allow you to pull dynamic WooCommerce data and then style how that data appears, which can be very useful for creating product grids, single product templates and shop archives.
Email Integration
Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies for getting new leads and nurturing loyal ones. That’s why it’s one of the most used and beloved marketing types.
Elementor Pro can help you here too. You can easily integrate your contact or newsletter subscription forms with various email marketing tools like Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign.
There are also other differences between the free and the pro versions. You can explore the full list here.
Why Choose Elementor Among Other Page Builders?
Despite all its benefits, we admit that there are a lot of other page builders out there. So what makes Elementor different?
Truth be told, there were many other page builders before Elementor, such as Divi, Beaver Builder, WPBakery and others, but having used all of the alternatives in the past, we can confirm that Elementor was really in a league of its own.
Although many of the other page builders had similar core features, Elementor quickly developed a community around it that supplied dozens of add-ons, ready-made templates, and integrations with popular tools. In addition to this, Elementor worked hard to develop many niche features and a very intuitive and well-tested interface.
All of this, combined with extensive documentation and support available, allowed web designers and developers to create page builder WordPress websites never seen before in terms of complexity, appearance, effects and functionality, all whilst being very easy to update and maintain!
Final Words
Elementor is a great WordPress plugin that allows you to easily build pages and templates from scratch. While we have listed its benefits, we have also talked about additional features the Pro version has, to help you decide whether you need the Pro version or not.
If you are thinking of building your website with WordPress, then we definitely recommend trying out the Elementor plugin!
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General FAQ
What is Elementor?
Elementor is a WordPress page builder, which allows you to create websites with the drag-and-drop feature. Elementor now has more than 10M active installs.
Is Elementor free?
Elementor has both free and paid versions. Although there are a lot of differences between them, you can still create a fully-functioning simple website with the free version.
