Elementor Pro Review: Is It Worth It? (2021)

Elementor was launched in 2016 and has since evolved to become one of the most popular and powerful WordPress page builder plugins.

Thanks to recent updates, it’s now a WordPress website builder rather than just a page builder plugin. This means that the intuitive drag-and-drop interface of Elementor Pro can be used to not only create custom designs for your content (posts and pages) but also control the appearance of your entire WordPress website (header, footer, and more).

In addition to the content editor, Elementor Pro has a large library of high-quality editable templates that you can use to build your website. It has many other features, too, that go way beyond what was previously possible with a WordPress page builder plugin.

So, if creating a bespoke WordPress website from scratch or customizing your existing site — without the need to edit any code — sounds appealing, Elementor Pro could be the tool for you.

In this Elementor Pro review, I’ll show you what this plugin can do, why it could be right for you, and what it’s like to use it. I’ll also highlight the downsides of Elementor Pro and the reasons why this plugin might not be suitable for your project.

Elementor vs Elementor Pro

Although this review focuses on the premium Elementor Pro plugin, there’s also a free version known as Elementor.

However, the free plugin lacks many of Elementor Pro’s features, including its large library of premium page templates and blocks, many of its widgets, the popup and theme builders, and more. You don’t get the online form functionality or the ability to integrate your pages with third-party services, either. For more information, check out the full details of the differences between the free and paid plugin.

You can use the free version of the plugin to better understand the Elementor user experience. However, you can also take advantage of the money-back guarantee to try Elementor Pro without risk for 30 days. Doing the latter will definitely give you a more accurate understating of what this powerful tool can do and whether or not it’s right for you.

So be aware when reading this review that many of the features covered here are missing from the free version of Elementor.

Elementor Pro Overview

As mentioned, Elementor Pro is a WordPress website builder. Once you’ve activated the plugin on your WordPress site, you can start using the Elementor user interface to create custom designs for your posts and pages.

Elementor Pro also has the ability to customize the header, footer, post archives, and other areas of your site that are outside of the post and page content area. This means that Elementor Pro is a true WordPress website builder rather than just a content editor or page builder. If you want full creative control over your website with the ability to design a custom WordPress website, Elementor Pro has the necessary functionality.

Elementor Pro works with the popular WooCommerce plugin as well, enabling you to customize your online store. In fact, Elementor Pro is compatible with most third-party plugins and themes for WordPress. Thanks to this, it doesn’t matter what type of WordPress website you have or plan to build, Elementor Pro should be able to help you customize it.

Here’s a quick overview of the best features and main benefits of Elementor Pro before we explore this plugin in more detail:

• Drag-and-drop editor with a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface
• Large library of individual templates and website kits
• Lots of widgets for enhancing your content
• Should work with any WordPress theme
• Theme Builder feature for editing the header, footer, and other areas of your site
• Ability to create custom single post and post archive templates
• Popup Builder and other marketing tools to help generate more leads
• Visual form builder for adding custom online forms to your website
• Integrates with many third-party services
• Large ecosystem of free and paid third-party products for adding more features

User Experience

Before we explore the Elementor Pro user interface (UI) and experience, it’s worth taking a quick look at the different components of the core WordPress user interface.

By default, WordPress has two main UIs that site owners use to build their websites:

• WordPress Customizer – used to personalize a website’s appearance, such as changing the fonts and colors.
• WordPress Editor – used when creating new posts and pages (its latest version is also referred to as the Gutenberg or block editor).

When Elementor Pro is activated, a third user interface is added to WordPress, giving you a further way to customize the appearance of your site and create posts and pages.

The default WordPress post and page editor has come a long way in the last few years. Thanks to some recent updates, creating custom post and page designs with interesting layouts using a wide range of different blocks, such as image galleries, videos, and buttons, is a lot easier than it once was.

Despite these improvements, good content editor plugins such as Elementor still have their place. They give you way more freedom than you get with the default WordPress experience, without the need for any coding skills.

Custom Page Designs

Once you decide to use Elementor on a specific post or page on your website, you can either start with a blank slate or import one of the many impressive templates.

Elementor Pro also has a library of pre-built blocks that you can insert into your content.

These are different from the blocks of the default WordPress editor — they’re page sections that you can quickly combine to assemble your own designs.

Elementor Pro provides you with over 300 blocks and templates that cover a wide range of scenarios, including creative agency websites, online portfolios, business sites, online shops, and more.

Whether you decide to import a template or start with a blank page, Elementor lets you control the layout of your content using rows and columns. Each page can include multiple rows, and each row can contain multiple columns. You can then add content to these row and column cells.

While having to use rows and columns to build the page structure might sound limiting, especially compared to being able to place items anywhere as you can with a standalone tool such as Instapage, it really isn’t. In fact, it’s a very standard approach that’s used by most, if not all, WordPress page builders, and in this case, it works really well.

Also, as you can control exactly how your rows and columns are presented, you can produce some very creative designs. Due to this, your visitors will never become aware of the underlying page structure.

Pre-Designed Widgets

Once you’ve created at least one row, you can start adding widgets to your pages. We’ll cover the widget options in more detail later on in this review; however, there’s a varied selection available that makes it easy to add buttons, video players, and slideshows to your pages.

As you can add widgets from other plugins to your designs, you aren’t limited to the ones that come with Elementor Pro. There’s also a good selection of third-party extensions for Elementor that enable you to add even more widgets to your site — sometimes for free.

Context-Sensitive Controls

Everything you can add to your pages, including the structure, elements, and more, can be heavily customized, both in terms of how they look and function. Applying a range of animation effects is an option, too.

Overall, the builder interface is very easy to use. Simply click on a page item and the relevant controls are displayed in the sidebar area. The controls available depend on what type of element you’re working on, but in most cases, you can customize each element in a wide variety of ways.

The customization controls are all visual, using buttons, sliders, text fields, and more, where appropriate. This makes them very easy to access and experiment with.

However, you can also add custom CSS code through the interface for even more personalization options.

As Elementor Pro has a WYSIWYG interface, any changes you make are instantly applied to the element you’re working on, helping to speed up the design process. There’s no need to save anything, refresh a page, and switch tabs to see how your design really looks — something you had to do in the past with many WordPress page builders.

Drag-and-Drop Editing

As Elementor is a drag-and-drop WordPress website builder, you can easily move items around the page as well as resize columns and rows by dragging their edges, all via your mouse or trackpad.

Furthermore, Elementor has a good selection of hotkeys (keyboard shortcuts) to save you even more time. Other features, such as the revision history and undo and redo capabilities, make Elementor feel more like a standalone website design software application than a WordPress plugin.

Although Elementor does have a WYSIWYG interface that gives you a realistic view of what your page will look like when it goes live, you can preview your page at any time to see how your visitors will experience it. Doing so hides all of the controls of Elementor to give you a true experience of the page.

You can also preview your page in a few different viewports to see how it will look when viewed on smartphones and tablets.

Fully Mobile Responsive

Speaking of responsiveness, the content you create with Elementor will be mobile-friendly by default. As well as that, you also get a lot of control over how your content looks, depending on what size screen it’s being viewed on.

Thanks to the mobile responsive editing controls, you can change the way your page is displayed, depending on the visitor’s device. Examples of this include defining which background image is loaded, changing the position of a page element, or hiding elements on mobile but showing them on desktop devices.

The Elementor Pro user interface has definitely been well designed. Considering you can do so much with this tool, it’s surprisingly easy to make sense of the interface from the outset and find the tools and settings you’re looking for.

Extras, such as the ability to search the panel to find a setting or tool, simplify the process of using Elementor on any device. The navigation window that lets you clearly see what items have been added to your page and how to access them helps with this too. The help icon links that take you directly to the relevant page of the Elementor documentation are a valuable addition as well.

Theme Builder

Although Elementor Pro was originally a page builder plugin, it’s now evolved into a WordPress website builder. This means that you can customize all parts of your website — not just the posts and pages.

Now the header, footer, and all other parts of your website can be personalized through the same intuitive drag-and-drop editor.

Not only that, but you can also create custom templates for your blog posts, post archive pages, and other parts of your site. Thanks to this, you can design a blog post template, and then configure your site so that it’s automatically applied to all of your blog posts.

You can even create multiple templates, then use the conditions feature to assign those templates to specific posts, such as those from a certain category or by a particular user. You can also use conditions to specify which header is displayed with which pages on your site.

By creating archive templates, you’re able to take control over how the lists of blog posts or custom post types on your site are displayed.  

Elementor Pro’s theme builder really is impressive. It gives you the freedom to create an advanced custom design for your entire website and not just your posts and pages.

Templates and Blocks

The user-friendly editor interface of Elementor Pro is its most important feature. If a tool isn’t easy to use, it doesn’t really matter what other features it has. However, the editable Elementor Pro templates are probably the most eye-catching aspect of this plugin.

As these templates can be quickly imported into your pages, they make Elementor Pro ideal for those who want to save time on their site build as well as those with limited design skills.

The pre-built content that you get access to with Elementor Pro includes around 200 individual page templates, 100+ content blocks, and 16 website kits.

All of the templates have been designed to a very high standard. They also cover a wide range of projects to make Elementor Pro a versatile option for anyone who is looking for some pre-built content to help them create their website.

Templates such as the landing page designs make Elementor Pro a great addition to existing websites where quickly publishing a page to promote an offer or increase conversions would be beneficial.

The blocks are a useful addition too. Rather than being entire templates, they can be used to add certain popular sections to your pages. Some examples include the about, contact, clients, and testimonial blocks. Like the templates, the blocks are fully editable through the Elementor Pro interface.

One downside of the Elementor Pro templates is that lots of them are individual or standalone templates. However, there are a few template kits, too, that cover the main pages a website needs, such as the home, about, contact, and services pages.

If we compare Elementor Pro to the Divi page builder, Divi organizes all of the templates into kits or packs, making it much easier to build an entire website with a consistent style. With Elementor Pro, you might not be able to find a set of templates that work well together and cover all the pages your new site needs. You should be able to get around this though, by editing the templates to change their purpose, such as changing an about page to a contact page.

For more information about the differences between these two builders, check out our Elementor vs Divi comparison.

Otherwise, though, the Elementor Pro templates are all very well designed and sure to give your website and its content a premium look.

Widgets

When creating your custom designs, Elementor Pro provides you with a large selection of widgets that you can insert into your pages and other areas of your site.

These widgets include basic ones, such as image galleries, buttons, and carousels, and more advanced options, such as call-to-actions, PayPal buttons, and pricing tables. There are many more, so be sure to check out the list on the Elementor website.

As mentioned earlier, all of the widgets can be customized to ensure that they have the right look for your website. You can also add even more widgets to Elementor Pro via free and paid extensions, including PowerPack Lite and Ultimate Addons. Creating your own widgets is an option too.

Other Features

The main features of Elementor Pro are the page builder UI, templates, and widgets. However, there are many other reasons to consider this tool, including:

• Popup Builder: create custom popups to generate more leads from your website, including collecting email addresses or selling products.
• Form Builder: create basic and advanced custom forms through the drag-and-drop editor.
• WooCommerce Builder: customize your eCommerce store and access the WooCommerce widgets.
• Role Manager: control which logged-in users at your site can use Elementor Pro and which of its features.
• Integrations: connect your website to many tools and services, including email marketing services, social networks, and lots more.
• Global Widgets: create custom dynamic widgets for use throughout your site.
• Hello Theme: optional free theme optimized for use with Elementor.

To find out more, visit the features page on the Elementor website.

Pricing

Elementor Pro is a premium plugin that’s available on a few different licenses, starting at $49 a year. The good news is that regardless of which option you choose, you’ll get access to all of the Elementor Pro features.

The only real differences between the plans are how many sites you can use Elementor Pro on, and that the lower-priced plans only include access to support via email. With the other plans, you can also contact support via live chat.

Here are your options for purchasing Elementor Pro:

• Essential – $49 a year for use on 1 website and access to support via email
• Advanced – $99 a year for use on 3 websites and access to support via email
• Expert – $199 a year for use on 25 websites and access to support via email
• Studio – $499 a year for use on 100 websites and access to support via email and live chat
• Agency – $999 a year for use on 1,000 websites and access to support via email and live chat

As mentioned, there’s also a free version of Elementor available, giving you a good opportunity to try out the page builder interface to see if it’s something you would be happy to use.          

Is Elementor Pro Worth It?

As you can see, Elementor Pro is a powerful tool for building custom WordPress websites and creating unique content designs. Whether you want to build a new WordPress website from scratch or add powerful website customization and page building capabilities to your existing site, Elementor Pro has the necessary features.

In fact, out of all the WordPress website and page builders I’ve tried, Elementor Pro has the best balance of features and usability.

With prices starting at $49 a year, it’s a good value option too. This is especially true when you consider what you get access to in terms of templates, widgets, and other features such as the popup builder.

The main downside of Elementor Pro, compared to some of its rivals, is that most of the layouts are individual templates in contrast to the complete website demos you get with themes such as Avada or the layout packs you get with Divi. Elementor Pro does have some website kits, but not as many as the competition.

Divi also has a useful split-testing tool to help you optimize your content while Elementor doesn’t have built-in testing functionality — even though it does support third-party tools.

Due to this, if you’re starting a new website from scratch and want a product that will provide you with everything you need to quickly launch a new site, then one of those products, with their demos and layout packs, might be better.

However, if you already have a website with a design you’re relatively happy with, but you would like the ability to edit it and/or create custom designs for your posts and pages, Elementor Pro comes highly recommended. It’s also a great choice if you want to design a new WordPress website from scratch and don’t need a full set of matching templates for every part of your site.

Do you still have any questions or thoughts about Elementor Pro? Let us know in the comments!