Elementor Pro
Elementor Pro is a brand new website builder plugin for WordPress. If you want to give your WordPress website and its content a custom design, then a page builder tool is often the best option.
However, with so many page builder plugins available for WordPress, which one should you choose? In this Elementor Pro review, we’ll provide you with all the information needed to decide whether this is the best WordPress page builder plugin for you or if you should look elsewhere.
About Elementor Pro
Elementor Pro is a newly released commercial WordPress plugin that can be used to add a drag-and-drop page builder to your website, no matter what theme you’re using. Elementor has been created by the Pojo Themes team. As well as themes, the team has created 12 WordPress plugins, including the popular free version of this page builder plugin, Elementor.
After a recent update, it’s now possible to use Elementor to customize the header, footer, and other areas of your website with the Theme Builder feature. You’re now no longer limited to creating custom post and page designs with this plugin.
Although Elementor Pro is a new plugin, the free version has been available since June 2016. This has given the team plenty of time to test and perfect its basic functionality before releasing the more powerful commercial Pro version.
Why Use a WordPress Page Builder?
If you’re reading this Elementor Pro review then you probably have a good idea of what a WordPress page builder is and why you might want to use one. But if not, the purpose of a page builder plugin is to upgrade the default WordPress editor, giving you a way to create custom designs for your website and its content that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
Instead of being limited to simply adding text and images to your content through the default WordPress editor, with a good page builder plugin, you can start creating advanced layouts of multiple columns and rows. You can then add a wide range of content to those layouts, as well as customize their appearance in almost any way.
Whether you want to create a truly unique homepage design for your WordPress website, give your articles custom layouts, or craft the perfect landing page for your project, a good WordPress page builder plugin will provide you with all the features and functionality you’ll need.
Although WordPress page builders aim to give you improved creative freedom, they all work in slightly different ways and deliver slightly different results. By the end of this Elementor Pro review, you’ll know whether this page builder is the right tool to help you unlock the potential of your website and give it the custom look it needs.
Elementor Pro Features
To help you decide if Elementor Pro is the best WordPress page builder plugin, here’s an evaluation of its key features.
The Elementor Pro User Interface
At the heart of any page builder is its user interface. No matter how powerful a tool is, if it’s difficult to use it’s not going to help you get the results you want. Thankfully, Elementor Pro features a well-executed, modern user interface.
After clicking on the Edit with Elementor button on the WordPress post or page editor screens, the user interface of the page builder is displayed.
Once the Elementor Pro page builder has loaded, you can start work by either loading a template or adding your own content to the page. We’ll explore the Elementor Pro templates in the next section of this page builder review; however, they cover a range of uses and styles and are a quick and effective way to kick-start your designs.
Pages created with Elementor Pro can have multiple sections, and each section can have its own column layout. You can then populate those sections with custom content, including the Elementor Pro elements. Again, we’ll cover the elements in more detail, but in short, they give you a quick way to add modules to your pages such as images, buttons, price lists, slides, testimonials, and much more. You can also add any of the WordPress widgets to your page designs, including the recent posts, pages, text, and the other widgets you can usually only add to your site’s sidebar and footer areas.
It’s great to see that Elementor Pro has a true drag-and-drop user interface. Thanks to this, you can quickly drag elements into your layout and then move them around the page to find their best position. Clicking on an element of your page design instantly displays the corresponding settings in the sidebar area. Thanks to this approach, it’s really easy to pick up and start using this page builder.
If you want to change the size or position of any of the elements on your page, you can simply click and drag them to make the necessary adjustments. How your page looks in the Elementor Pro page builder user interface closely resembles how your page will look when it’s published. This makes the whole design process faster and intuitive than it would be otherwise, removing much of the guesswork that occurs when using less-modern back-end page editors.
Inline text editing is the only area where Elementor Pro falls behind some of the competition. With some other page builders, you can click on the text area in your design and just start typing. However, having to enter text in the sidebar area of the editor rather than directly into your page design is far from a major problem. With Elementor Pro, your page design is instantly updated as you type in the sidebar, giving you a live preview of your content. Inline text editing is a nice feature, but Elementor Pro’s approach only involves one or two extra clicks.
Through the live front-end user interface of Elementor Pro, you can customize almost every aspect of your content. You can easily change the section widths and heights, resize columns, alter the margins and padding settings, plus a whole lot more.
Elementor Pro is definitely up there with the best page builder plugins for WordPress in terms of its user interface and controls.
Elementor Pro Templates
As mentioned, Elementor Pro includes a selection of high-quality templates. You can import these templates into your pages and then customize them to make them your own.
At the time of writing this review, there are over 20 templates. The designs cover homepages and landing page designs, menu templates for restaurants, about page templates, contact page designs, and product and service page layouts. They’re a varied selection that have all been designed to a high standard. As this is a new plugin, you won’t have to filter through outdated designs when choosing a template to work from.
Once you’ve inserted a template into your page design, you can add and remove sections and elements and customize it any other way. You can also insert multiple templates into the same page and combine them to make your own custom designs. Your own pages can then be saved in the template library for reuse elsewhere on your site. Thanks to the ease of use of the Elementor Pro editor, if a template catches your eye but its purpose doesn’t quite match your project, modifying it to meet your needs shouldn’t be a problem.
Elementor Pro Elements
Another key feature of Elementor Pro is its elements. These elements work like traditional WordPress widgets, except they can be inserted into your page designs and customized through the Elementor Pro page builder. Giving you a quick way to upgrade your content, the Elementor Pro elements include counters, Google Maps, image carousels, icon boxes, and plenty more.
However, you aren’t limited to the elements included with this page builder. Any of the widgets that come with WordPress, as well as those added to your site via third party plugins, can be inserted into your page designs with Elementor Pro. This opens up a whole world of possibilities when it comes to adding content to your designs and creating effective pages.
Elementor Pro also gives you the option of saving your elements as global widgets. You can then reuse those global widgets throughout your site, edit them once, and see your changes applied to every instance of the widget instantly. This can be a real time saver if you want to add the same custom element to multiple pages or areas on your site.
More Elementor Pro elements are on the way. However, if there’s a feature you’d like to add to your page designs, thanks to the plugin’s compatibility with third party widgets, you should be able to find a suitable plugin that provides the functionality.
Elementor Theme Builder Feature
As mentioned earlier, the Theme Builder feature of Elementor Pro was added in a recent update to the plugin and now gives you even more control over the design of your WordPress website.
Previously, it was only possible to create custom post and page designs for your website with Elementor. Now though, you have the option of creating unique header and footer designs for your WordPress website, as well as templates for other areas of your site. Part of this new functionality allows you to use the intuitive visual editor of Elementor to create one or more header and footer designs for your site.
You can then choose where they are used on your site. For example, you could create one header design for your homepage and another for your blog and its posts. As well as customizing the appearance and content of your header, you can also set the header as sticky to keep it permanently on display as your visitors scroll down the page. The high level of mobile support from Elementor extends into these new features of the plugin, allowing you to configure how your templates behave depending on what device your visitors are using.
Using the Theme Builder to create a dynamic template for your blog is also an option. Thanks to this, you can decide which content is displayed on your blog archive pages. This could include displaying the title of each blog post and an excerpt of the content, or instead, displaying the featured image and the full blog post content. As Elementor Pro now has a set of dynamic widgets, you can drag and drop an element onto the layout that will, for example, display the post info and the author.
Choosing when and where your custom layouts are used on your site is straightforward too. You can create multiple conditions for each template, include when to display them, and when not to. This could include only using an archive template for posts in a certain category, or posts by a specific author.
The Theme Builder feature is a great addition to Elementor Pro and helps elevate this tool beyond just a page builder. Now you can create custom website layouts, and then apply them to different areas of your site, such as your homepage, portfolio, or blog. All this work takes place through the Elementor Pro visual editor, with no coding necessary.
Furthermore, the Theme Builder will work with any well-coded WordPress theme. However, the Elementor team has produced a barebones WordPress theme that’s ideal for anyone who wants to create their own fully custom website, rather than modifying an existing theme.
You can find out more about the Theme Builder feature on this page of the Elementor website.
Other Features of Elementor Pro
Those are the key features of Elementor Pro. On paper and in terms of usability, it’s certainly up there with the best page builders for WordPress. However, here are some of the other reasons why you might want to choose Elementor Pro for your website:
- Display your templates in the sidebars and other areas of your site
- Full WooCommerce support for creating custom ecommerce stores
- Built-in slider tool
- Edit forms through the live editor
- Create global color palettes and font libraries for site-wide consistency
- Over 600 Google Fonts to work with
- Detailed mobile responsive controls and settings
- Multilingual and RTL text support
- Add custom CSS to page designs
- Detailed documentation with tutorial videos
Elementor Pro WordPress Theme Compatibility
Elementor Pro should work with any well-coded WordPress theme. The development team has reportedly tested Elementor with many WordPress themes, with no problems arising. Elementor also now includes a full-width template (no sidebars) and a full-screen template (no sidebars or header or footer) that’s ideal for creating layouts when you don’t want your header, footer, or sidebar areas on display. This is especially useful if you want to create a fullscreen homepage layout for your site or add a landing page.
As mentioned earlier in this Elementor Pro review, there’s now also a barebones WordPress theme available that’s been built especially for use with the new Theme Builder feature. Thanks to this, if you want to create a new WordPress website design from scratch, or you don’t want to work off an existing theme, you now have the ability to easily do so.
Elementor Pro Pricing
Elementor Pro is a commercial plugin that’s available on three pricing plans:
- Personal: $49 for use on 1 website
- Business: $99 for use on 3 websites
- Unlimited: $199 for use on unlimited websites
All of the Elementor Pro pricing options allow you to use the plugin for an unlimited amount of time. However, you’ll only get access to updates and support for one year (unless you renew your license by paying 50% of the original price paid).
This is a reasonable price for a powerful page builder plugin. Some options, like Visual Composer, cost less, while others, including Beaver Builder, are more expensive.
Elementor Pro Review Summary
Elementor Pro is very easy to use. The page builder interface makes creating custom designs for your WordPress website straightforward. Having a live preview of your page while you work helps speed up the design process considerably.
Elementor Pro is a new page builder and choosing a new tool does have its advantages. Usually, you’ll get access to an innovative feature set as well as a selection of high quality, modern pre-built designs. Elementor Pro is no exception in this regard. On the other hand, sometimes choosing a less established and potentially unproven plugin can be risky. However, the core free Elementor Page Builder plugin has already been around for a while. As it has been extensively tested and well received by users, you should be able to choose Elementor Pro with confidence.
The new Theme Builder feature is a great addition to an already powerful plugin. The ability to create custom layouts for the other areas of your website, outside of the post and page content, makes it possible to create a unique WordPress website with Elementor.
Is Elementor Pro the best page builder plugin for WordPress? It’s certainly up there with the best. If you want to carry out more research, there is a chance that one of the other page builders might better meet your own specific set of requirements, such as Thrive Content Builder with its focus on lead generation or Divi Builder with its split testing tool.
However, if you need a page builder tool right now, feel free to purchase Elementor Pro today. I doubt you will be disappointed.
Pros
Easy to use
Intuitive drag-and-drop interface
High-quality page templates
Good selection of elements
Theme Builder tool for creating custom header and footer layouts
Helpful video guides
Cons
Lots of competing page builders
Not as feature rich as some options
Summary
Elementor Pro is a new and powerful page builder plugin for WordPress with live drag-and-drop editing.
Elementor Pro is a new and powerful page builder plugin for WordPress with live drag-and-drop editing.
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