If you want to give your WordPress blog or its content a custom design without hiring a professional developer, then using a page builder is often the most viable option.
However, with so many page builder plugin available for WordPress sites, choosing the right one for your site can be a little difficult task,
In today’s review post, I’ll be taking an in-depth look at Elementor PRO – One of the hottest page builder plugin in the market right now with 2-millions active installation according to WordPress.org.
If you are also figuring out whether Elementor is the right page builder for your WordPress site or not, In this Elementor review, I hope to give you all the information you need to make your decision.
Our in-depth Elementor review includes all the latest features available in Elementor 2.0 and Elementor Pro 2.9.0 (Latest version), so you can be certain you’re getting a full look at everything this page builder can do.
Why you should trust this Elementor Pro Review?
Online World is full of Manipulative and fake elements.
Many online product reviews manipulate their website readers one way or another.
I have seen many instances where reviewers completely share his biased review about a product and at the same time, some reviewers just review a product without having any practical experience with the product.
But as I’ve always said, I try my best to be as transparent and honest as possible with my readers.
Here I want you to assure that I have purchased the Elementor Pro plugin and have been consistently using it for a long time.
So, everything I’ll share in this Elementor Pro review will be based on my practical experience.
A basic introduction to Elementor and its features:
Not too long ago, Page builders didn’t exist.
It means that anyone without having HTML & CSS coding knowledge was out of luck if they wanted to design a simple sales page for their business or create a custom-designed blog post for their blog.
Everyone had to rely solely on web designers and developers – and obviously, those came with a significant cost. In fact, even in today’s time, A web developer charges $250-$500 for a simple sales or landing page design on UpWork.
Eventually, shortcodes came along and speed up the page designing and development process for those who wanted to skip the whole HTML & CSS things.
But the real revolution begins with the Visual drag and drop page builder – an impressive addition to WordPress that given the whole designing procedure a more easy and visual approach.
Elementor – A visual drag and drop page builder plugin for WordPress launched in 2016 has quickly become one of the most popular and most used page builders for WordPress, and it continues to grow at a rapid pace despite stiff competition.
If you are not familiar with the term “Visual” and “drag & drop”, this is what I mean:
- Visual means that when you design your content, you can exactly see what your visitor will see. Unlike WordPress default post editor where you need to go to the preview page to see actual changes on your page.
- Drag and drop mean you can move around various design elements like Text, Heading, Image, button, form, or other elements by just dragging and dropping them on your page.
In a very short period of time, Elementor has quickly shot up the charts and actively used by over 4 million WordPress websites. It has also maintained an impressive 4.9-star ratings out of 5 on over 5.1k reviews, which means most of the users are pretty happy with Elementor.
While there are more than 20-25 page builders available for WordPress, so what makes Elementor stand out and why is it so successful?
Well, I will get into this in details later on, but some of the Elementor standout features are:
Who is Elementor For?
Honestly speaking, Elementor suits well for almost anyone who’s using WordPress CMS.
For Example, a digital marketer might love Elementor for its ability to build a high converting landing page quickly, while a casual blogger might just be looking for a way to give a custom design to their blog post for better user engagement.
Let’s look at this Page Builder from the different users perspective:
The Casual Bloggers:
If you are a blogger like me who likes to add some style to his blog post (Like the one you’re reading right now) or build a great looking home page, Elementor is perfect for you.
You’ll be able to design some great looking post and pages without having any technical knowledge. A custom-designed blog post and homepage can easily help you stand out from your competition.
The Digital Marketers:
Elementor is a good fit for digital marketers and teams as it includes tons of marketing-oriented elements.
For example – Elementor Pro comes with hundreds of professionally designed templates for sales pages, Email capture pages, Webinar pages, live event pages, and other marketing-related works.
These templates help you easily build attractive pages for different marketing purpose and as these pages are designed by top professional web designers, they are highly optimized for conversion.
Another good feature of Elementor for Digital Marketers is its ability to create all types of lead generation forms and have easy integration with all popular email marketing services.
Note: It can be easily connected with Zapier too, which lets you connect with your CRM as well.
If you are selling products and services on your site, you can also use the WooCommerce builder to design your sales pages.
Website Building Experts:
If you are someone who builds sites for clients, Elementor can be a perfect choice for you too.
You can use a good WordPress Theme like GeneratePress and then design the whole section of your client’s sites like Homepage, Archive page, about page, Newsletter page and other with Elementor pro Theme Designing features.
I will get into details of Elementor theme Builder later on..
How the Elementor interface works?
In this section of our Elementor review, I just want to give you some basic ideas of how its interface looks and works.
This will give you some context in the next section, where I’ll single out some of the most unique features of the Elementor page builder.
To get started just normally add a new page or post and then click on the “Edit With Elementor” button.
When you open the Elementor editor, you’ll see something like this:
- Visual Preview: This is where you create your page layout. You can drag and drop your element here to start building your page.
- Designing Elements: From here you can add and configure content elements also called “Widget.”
- Basic settings – From here you can undo changes, preview your design on different devices, and more.
Building the layout for your design
While you can start adding the content elements to your page right away, you’ll probably want to build the basic structure for your page first.
Elementor Provides two structural element that helps you position content element and style multiple-element as a group (Like – Adding Video background to an entire section of the page.)
These two structural elements are:
- Section – A section basically works like a container. Columns and widgets go inside sections.
- Column – Column divides the section into multiple columns (as per your need). You’ll have full control over the width and height of each column appearing under a section.
Adding new elements to your design
To add a new content element to your column or section, you just need to drag your desired element from the left sidebar and drop wherever you want on your page (Any Section or column)
While adding a heading block is just a basic example, being an Elementor Pro user, you can use more than 50 different designing blocks to design your page.
Styling Content Elements, Column or Section
To style any of your content blocks, section or column, you can just click on your desired content and then use the designing options appearing under different tabs (usually 3 tabs) in the left-sidebar:
Whatever styling you make in any of your content, it’ll reflect in your visual preview area in real-time.
10 Awesome Features That Help Elementor Stand Out
While I find Elementor’s interface to be very streamlined and smooth, but I don’t think this is what makes Elementor stand out as there are many visual page builder with a similar sleek interface.
However, there are lots of areas where Elmentor has gone beyond in comparison with other visual page builders. Which is why today it is actively used on over 4 million WordPress sites.
Let’s go through some standout features…
01. Huge Widget Selection for Design Flexibility
One of the prime features of Elementor is its huge collection of Widget library. Elementor has as much as 30 basic widgets in Free version and you can get access to more design-oriented widgets in the pro version.
The best thing is, Elementor team keeps updating the widget library with new Widget over time. From social icons to pricing tables, login forms, sliders, post grids, and more, you get enough widget to design your desired content.
But it’s not just about the 60-75 widgets that come with Elementor Pro, you can extend Elementor with third-party Elementor addons and get access to even more widgets and templates.
With so many options, you can almost always find a widget that does exactly what you want it to.
02. Inline text editing
Having to enter text in the sidebar area of the editor or a popup rather than directly into your page design is by far a major problem of most of the page builder available for WordPress.
In fact, Elementor was also not having inline text editing capabilities in the past, but last year they added Inline text editing which gives you a convenient method for editing text on your page.
Now you can just click on the page and start typing.
03. Detailed Style and Positioning Rules
To put simply, Elementor gives you more designing and styling options than most of the other popular page Builders.
You can of course make basic tweaks like switching up colors, fonts, spacing, etc.
But then Elementor Pro gives you loads of advance designing and styling options. For example:
- Shape Divider: It gives you a great way to add fun transitions between each section of your page. You can choose from more than 25 different shapes and that can be 100% customized to create an endless and versatile array of dividers.
Here is an example of Shape divider:
- Motion Effect: It lets you create eye-catching animation like mouse tracking or 3D tilt, including sophisticated parallax effects.
Watch this Tutorial to check the Motion effect feature live.
- Custom Positioning: It is one of my favourite designing options in Elementor. It lets you position elements anywhere on the page. That means unlike other page builders, you are no longer restricted by your sections/columns layouts.
Watch this quick YouTube Tutorial to understand d the custom positioning feature. (You’ll love it)
And of course, if the inbuilt settings are not enough, Elementor Pro also lets you add custom CSS directly to any of your individual elements.
04. Huge Collection of Template Selection to Save You Time
While Elementor gives you everything to build your page from scratch, but you don’t always need to do everything yourself thanks to the Elementor template library.
Elementor Template library is divided into two categories:
- Pages — Full page templates for different purposes like homepage, sales page, lead generation page, about page, etc. All you do is customize them to meet your needs.
- Blocks — In this section, you’ll find templates for specific parts of a page, like an author bio, call-to-action, footer, header, FAQ, etc. You can mix-and-match them like legos to build complete designs.
Note: Once you have some of your own design, you can also save them as templates or blocks to reuse them.
05. Mobile previews and responsive design controls
Nowadays, more people browse the internet through mobile devices than the computer. In fact, according to the 2020 first quarter search report – Mobile devices (excluding tablets) generated 52.6 percent of global website traffic.
So, it means your designs should look greats no matter how people are browsing.
To make sure your page designs look good on all types of devices (computer, laptop, mobile & tablet) Elementor all design elements are pre-responsive.
On top of that Elementor let you easily preview how your designs look on the different devices within a single click.
But this is not what makes Elementor the most responsive page Builder.
Elementor lets you control the styling option for each element based on a user’s device.
For example – You can have different heading sizes for Desktop, mobile as well as Tablets. Similarly, you can have different font colors for different devices and so on.
Elementor also takes things further by letting you show and hide individual sections or elements on certain devices.
For example – If you have a large full-width hero section on your page that you don’t want to display on the mobile version of your site. Elementor’s responsive design control lets you hide it on mobile devices with just click of a toggle.
06. Flexible Form Widget and Integrations
Above I mentioned the huge collection of Widget available in Elementor Pro, but its worth mentioning out a specific widget called “Form” widget.
Elementor allows you to build complete and beautiful online forms in minutes, controlling every aspect of layout, spacing, and structure
It lets you collect any type of data from your user – emails, number, URL, dates, and more using dedicated fields
On top of that, you can hook your forms with any email marketing services like Mailchimp, Mailerlite, Convertkit, ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, and more.
There’s also a Webhook option that lets you connect to Zapier (and the thousands of apps available there), as well as chat integrations for Slack and Discord.
07. Easy undo/redo and full revision history
It’s pretty common that we often make mistakes and when it comes to designing the probability of making mistake gets higher.
So, If you do mess something up, Elementor makes it easy to undo your mistakes in 3 different ways.
First, you can press CTRL + Z on your keyboard to manually undo your most recent changes.
Second, every single change you make in your design is recorded and can be reverted as needed.
Lastly, every time you save your design, you’ll also get a completely new revision and you can easily revert your design to any revision you made in the last 30 days. (Isn’t it cool)
08. WooCommerce Builder for Custom eCommerce Designs
If you have ever tried to build a Wocoommerce site, you must be knowing how complicated it is to customize the layout of these types of websites.
With the Elementor WooCommerce builder feature, you reach a pixel perfect custom-designed store without writing a single line of code.
Elementor’s WooCommerce builder deals with the two most fundamental areas of WC sites:
- Single Product page: It lets you create the perfect product pages with pre-designed templates that get more sales.
- Product Archive page: It lets you optimize the look and feel of pages that showcase your products.
I’ll recommend you to watch this YouTube to see how Elementor can easily help you build a WooCommerce site:
09. Popup Builder for Marketing, Usability, and More
If you are using Elmentor Pro, then you don’t need to use a separate plugin like OptinMonster or Thrive lead for creating opt-in or popup forms.
You can use Elmentor Popup Builder, you can create any modal you can imagine: Fly-In, Full Screen, Hello Bar, Bottom Bar, Classic, Slide-in and more.
The best thing is Elementor allows you to use the same designing interface to build all sorts of popups and display them anywhere on your site as per hundreds of triggering and targeting conditions.
On top of that, you can use the full array of Elmeneotr widget in your popup – This opens up a lot of possibilities:
- You can create Email opt-in popups with the Form widget and connect them directly to your email marketing service provider.
- Login popups using the Login widget.
- Create promotion and sales banner to get more eyes on your special offers by including them inside popups
- You can use it to Reveal your premium content (content locks and upgrades) to users who opted in or agreed to your terms
- Social share button popups using the Share Buttons widget.
- Display exit-intent popup to motivate your visitors to stay or buy, just when they are about to leave your site
The possibilities are pretty much endless!
One more thing which is worth mentioning here is it’s Advanced Yet Intuitive Targeting rules.
It lets you determine where you want to display popups on your site (Like a specific post, page, category or anywhere else) as well as when you want to display your popup (Like when your user click on something, After X amount of time, at the time of exit and so on)
10. Clean code if you ever deactivate Elementor
Even some popular page builder like WWPBakery or DIVI completely messes up things when you deactivate them from your site.
As soon as you deactivate them, they will leave thousands of shortcodes on your age designing with those page builder.
Thankfully, you don’t have to worry about something like that with Elementor. It leaves no shortcode on your page even if you deactivate the plugin. Though you’ll obviously lose all the styling but that doesn’t mean your page will look odd. All the texts, images, links will appear as it is.
Elementor theme builder – Design your Entire site with Elementor
Started as just a normal page builder in 2016, Elmeneotr has now converted into a full-fledged website builder solution for WordPress.
With Elementor Pro latest theme Builder feature, now you can finally visually customize your homepage, website header, footer, single posts, about page, category and tags pages and other areas of your site.
This not only saves you time, but introduces a whole new drag and drop experience to building WordPress websites.
Previously, I was using Thrive Architect (A very popular page builder) on my site, but like most of the page builders, Thrive architect is also limited to designing only posts and pages. You can’t customize header, footer or archive pages with most of the page builder.
My homepage designed with Elementor pro:
My category page designed with Elementor pro:
My About page designed with Elementor pro:
My SEO Course page designed with Elementor pro:
The really powerful thing here is that you have the ability to build the framework of your page using dynamic content. This way, your content gets filled dynamically with content from your website.
A good example of dynamic content implementation can be found in the post you are reading right now or any review post of Bloggingnova.
The data I’ve provided in the custom fields (created by ACF), is pulled to the frontend by Elementor.
Note: All the features mentioned in this section are only available in the PRO version of Elementor
Should You Use Elementor Free vs Pro?
If you’ve made it this far, there is a high chance that you think Elementor is the right page builder for you.
That leads to the next question — Should you opt for the free version of Elementor, or pay for the premium upgrade?
See, If you just want to add some flair to your core page and blog posts or build some very basic landing page, then I think the free version can totally meet your needs.
However, if you plan to:
- Build pixel-perfect custom looking designs.
- Design every corner of your site with Elementor.
- Use Elementor for marketing.
Then, you’ll definitely want to upgrade to Elementor Pro version because it’ll give you access to:
- Theme Builder: You can design your entire site (Homepage, archives, about, landing page, newsletter, about, etc.) NOTE: My whole site is fully designed with Elementor – Have a look at all important pages to get some idea.
- Marketing elements: Add forms, build popups, and integrate with your email marketing service.
- 30+ Premium Designing widget: Get more than thirty premium widgets to create more complex designs with ease. (Like pricing table, testimonials, animated headline, etc.)
- More premium template: Get access to hundreds of professionally made templates and blocks that can be easily customized to create stunning websites.
- Advance designing option: Get advanced animations, custom positioning, custom CSS for individual widgets, and more.
- Premium Support: Being a premium user, you also get access to 24/7 support. Professional web designers and Elementor experts will be there to help you anytime.
Considering the fact, Elementor Pro starts at just $49 for access to all of the Pro features – It’s a good investment.
Frequently Asked Questions about Elementor
👉 What is Elementor?
Elementor is a WordPress page builder plugin that helps you create complex layouts and design without writing a single line of HTML and CSS code.
👉 Will Elementor slow down my site?
Not at all. Elementor is an extremely powerful yet light-weight page builder built with performance in mind. Gone are those days when page builder meant bloated code output and slow websites.
👉 Does Elementor need a theme? Which theme works good with Elementor?
Yes, you do need a theme along with Elementorto successfully create a visually appealing website. Though almost all free and premium theme are compatible with Elementor, Astra and GeneratePress are most recommended for all types of sites.
👉 How much does Elementor Cost? Is it Free?
Elementor comes with both Free and Pro versions. With the Free version, you get a limited set of features.
The Pro version of Elementor starts at $49/year which comes with more advance features like Theme Builder which will help you design your whole website.
👉 Is Elementor SEO Friendly?
There is a misconception among a lot of WordPress user that Page Builder are not good for SEO and it affect website performance. But it’s not like that, Elementor generates valid HTML markup. So you don’t have to worry about any technical challenge with SEO. On top of that it is also compatible with all the popular SEO plugin like Rank Math, Yoast or All in One SEO.
Elementor Review: Final thoughts on this Page Builder
The numbers don’t lie when it comes to Elementor – Over four million WordPress sites actively use Elementor and having 4.9-star rating on over 5,400 reviews.
To be honest, my personal experience with Elementor Pro has been so far so good in the last 8 months of use.
Apart from an intuitive interface, flexible section, deep customization, a comprehensive widgets library and hundreds of templates – The new Theme Builder feature is a great addition to an already powerful page builder plugin.
It has helped me to create custom layouts for other areas of my site, out of the post and page contents.
So at last, I will say paying $49 for a very powerful page builder is well worth.
In this Elementor review, I have tried to explain each and everything that will help you make your decision.
If anything I missed here that’ll help you make your decision? Let me know in the comments, I’ll try to answer it ASAP.
