Elementor is a page-building plugin that can make your life much easier as you create your WordPress site. Web builders worldwide love Elementor for its smooth interface, intuitive use, and many cool features. You can jump right into using Elementor without any coding knowledge or advanced tech skills, making it ideal for those new to web building.
In this Elementor Pro review, we cover all you need to know about this handy plugin. Keep reading for an in-depth Elementor Pro analysis, including new Elementor Pro features, user experience, and pricing.
What’s new on Elementor?
Founded in 2016 by two Israeli software developers, Elementor rapidly gained popularity among users all around the world. People appreciated the simplicity of creating pages by dragging blocks of content and the straightforward front-end editing.
Elementor keeps evolving and adding features to make it more convenient and streamlined. Let’s take a look at a couple of elements Elementor Pro recently added to its toolbox.
Image optimization
Elementor’s Image Optimizer is a fast and efficient image compressor that helps make your website faster. It easily scales down large images, allows you to choose between lossy and lossless compression, and converts images to the lighter WebP format. This useful feature can shorten your site’s loading times and reduce bounce rates.
Element manager
Like many WordPress users, you may have unused widgets on your site. Element Manager makes it easy to locate and disable widgets you don’t use. This will streamline your workspace, speed up loading, and make your editor more efficient.
New taxonomy filter
The latest version of Elementor adds multi-selection capabilities to the popular Taxonomy Filter widget. This upgrade allows you to filter listings using several tags or categories in one taxonomy filter. For example, if your website sells fashion items, you can select “discounted” and “most popular.” You can set the filter either to “and” (to show items that belong to both categories) or “or” (to display items from either category).
Comparing the free and pro versions
Elementor is available in two versions: a free one, which only includes the basics, and Pro, which offers many more advanced features.
The free version of Elementor allows you to use the landing page builder, the drag-and-drop codeless editor, the Hello theme, and a handful of website kits.
With the paid plans of Elementor Pro, you get all of the above, plus access to updates, premium support, hundreds of templates, attractive features like slides and carousels, scrolling effects, marketing widgets, custom CSS, social media integration, animated headlines, and much more.
If you’re new to Elementor, you might want to try out the free version after reading our Elementor Pro review, just to get a feel for working with this page builder. However, the Pro version offers a lot more if you aim to build an attractive and competitive commercial site.
Elementor pro pricing
To ensure we give you a comprehensive Elementor Pro overview, let’s dive deeper into pricing. Elementor Pro currently offers several tiers:
- Essential: 1 website, $49/year, includes all pro features and premium support
- Expert: 25 websites, $199/year, includes all the features the Essential plan offers plus expert website kits
- Studio: 100 websites, $499/year, comes with VIP support
- Agency: 1000 websites, $999/year
Overall, considering all you’re getting with Elementor Pro, this builder offers a great cost vs. value balance. Using Elementor gets more expensive if you need to create multiple sites, which you’ll have to factor into your overhead costs if you’re building sites for clients.
You could also opt for the Elementor Cloud Website plan, which covers all Elementor Pro features plus hosting. The service costs $99 a year for a single website with up to 100,000 visitors per month. This package offers good value if you’re not tech-savvy and only need hassle-free management and hosting for one website.
Setting up Elementor the right way
Elementor Pro is an extension of Elementor Core (the no-cost version of Elementor). If your WordPress site doesn’t already use Elementor Core, you’ll need to install this free plugin first.
Once you choose your Elementor Pro plan, you can download the plugin and access the My Elementor dashboard via your username and password. Download the plugin from the Subscriptions tab.
Next, go to your WordPress admin and choose Add New Plugin. Click on Upload Plugin and upload your Elementor Pro file. Install and activate the plugin. Once you install Elementor Pro, you’ll get a message prompting you to connect the plugin to your Elementor Pro profile. That’s it! You’re good to go.
Using a good host
If you want a smooth-running, secure site, it helps to invest in good hosting. Quality hosting will give you a website that works with minimum downtime, loads faster, has lower bounce rates, and ranks higher in search engines. A good host will also protect you from data breaches and security concerns.
A professional host will keep tabs on your website and send you a quick alert if there’s any issue. It will back up your data and give you a reliable point of contact you can easily connect with if you run into a technical problem.
WP Engine is a popular and reliable hosting choice made for WordPress websites, with plans starting at $20/month. It hosts over 1.5M websites across the globe and boasts excellent customer satisfaction rates. Other reliable hosting options include Bluehost, HostGator, and Hostinger.
Choosing the right theme
Elementor works with most WordPress themes. However, it’s always best to choose a theme designed for Elementor. This will ensure easy page building and smooth integration. OceanWP, Sydney, Nexter, and other popular WordPress themes work great with Elementor. Elementor Theme Builder allows you to customize every theme easily by designing its header and footer, posts, etc.
There are many fantastic themes you can use with Elementor Pro, but the fastest is probably Hello Elementor. This basic free theme loads incredibly fast (typically under one second), and you can easily personalize it with Theme Builder.
Creating a child theme
If you want to modify your WordPress theme, you can do it by using a so-called child theme. A child theme is basically an offshoot of an existing theme, which you install together with the parent theme. Child themes pull most or all of their design features from the parent theme. When you change the child theme, it will override the parent theme’s settings.
Why use a child theme? If you edit your parent theme directly, any updates will erase all your changes. However, if you use a child theme, you can update the parent theme without losing your work. A child theme also concentrates all your edits and changes, so it’s easy to make tweaks as needed or revert to the parent theme by disabling the child theme.
If you pick the Hello Elementor theme, you can choose the pre-created Hello Elementor child theme. Other popular themes also often have a child theme version. Otherwise, you can use a child theme generator plugin or create a child theme manually.
Pro tip: If you plan to use the child theme generator on a live site, make a backup or try your new settings on a staging site to ensure everything runs smoothly.
Choosing global settings
Settings is the next item on our list of Elementor Pro plugin insights. With Elementor Pro, it’s a piece of cake to control all your site’s global elements, including site identity, layout, theme styles, and lightbox settings.
For instance, you can choose a color scheme and fonts to apply to all your site’s pages for a consistent design. You can easily select and manage theme design elements, like headers, footers, buttons, and form fields. The Color Sampler can help you decide on a color palette that works well with your site’s elements and images.
Font optimizations
Your fonts are a core part of your site’s design. Choosing the perfect font will help project the right tone and reinforce your brand image.
Elementor includes font optimizations for speedier sites. The plugin’s pre-connect resource hints allow Google Fonts to load faster. And if you use Elementor Pro, your site can host custom fonts, which shortens load times even more. Elementor supports multiple font formats, like WOFF, TTF, and SVG.
Image optimizations
Elementor’s Image Optimizer is a useful plugin that makes it easy to compress and resize images or convert them to WebP. This improves your site’s speed, performance, and user experience.
Images are a must for an attractive website, but heavy media files will make your pages load slowly, and users may bounce. The convenient Image Optimizer retains image quality while shrinking file sizes for optimal performance. This plugin supports all common image formats, including JPEG, GIF, PNG, and WebP. Once you install it, it works seamlessly in the background, so you don’t need to worry about file size again.
Apart from Image Optimizer by Elementor, you could try comparable plugins like ShortPixel, WP Compress, Optimole, and TinyPNG.
Using a CDN
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is an interconnected global server network that stores your site’s data. When someone visits your site, the data travels from the server nearest to their location rather than the main server, which improves loading times and the user experience. If your WordPress website targets a worldwide audience, using a CDN is a must.
Elementor Hosting integrates with Cloudflare’s global CDN, with hundreds of servers worldwide. With the Elementor caching tool, you can use the CDN to cache your site’s core files and make your site even faster.
Things we like
Like other Elementor Pro reviews, our Elementor Pro page builder evaluation highlights a ton of things to love about this plugin. It’s versatile, dependable, secure, and convenient to use. On top of that, constant upgrades and updates strive to create an even better Elementor Pro user experience.
Elementor puts strong emphasis on page performance and fast loading, which are key for the user experience and your site’s rankings.
Great free version
If you just want to dip your toes into using the Elementor plugin, the free version is a great place to start. You can install Elementor Core to try the handy drag-and-drop page builder and see how it works for you.
Sure, Elementor Core is pretty basic compared to all that Elementor Pro has to offer. Elementor Core includes a narrow choice of templates, no custom fonts or slides, and limited marketing features. But it still allows you to build WordPress pages easily with no coding knowledge.
Huge community
With millions of users worldwide, WordPress web builders working with Elementor create a massive network. You can join the Elementor community to connect with other professionals and share knowledge.
If you’re a more advanced website builder, Elementor is fully open-source, so you can access the source code and create more elaborate pages using custom CSS. And if you run into a problem or have a question about using Elementor, it’s almost certain someone out there can provide the answer.
Intuitive builder UI
Elementor’s drag-and-drop editor creates a user-friendly, intuitive experience for website builders. You don’t need to know coding to build professional-looking, functional WordPress pages. Elementor uses live editing and responsive design, so you see how your page will look as you build it rather than save your changes and only then view them as they go live on your site.
Elementor presents a fully centralized design process for faster, more consistent page creation. You can choose a style, apply it across your website with a single click, and change it just as easily.
Lots of customization
No matter which Elementor theme you select, you can customize your site by choosing where to position all your elements and picking a color scheme and typography. The global fonts and colors feature ensures the look of your pages matches across your site.
Elementor also makes it easy to set your margins and paddings. You can include overlapping sections for sophisticated layouts.
Many templates
Elementor Pro users currently have access to more than 300 templates and over 90 awesome widgets. This gives you the creative freedom to build every imaginable type of website for any purpose, from educational to commercial and more.
Things we don’t like
To round off our Elementor Pro review, we’ll mention two drawbacks. First, Elementor Pro only includes a subscription model, not a lifelong license. Second, you need to know how to use Elementor the right way to keep your site fast and efficient.
No unlimited license
Other page builders for WordPress, like WPBakery, offer a lifetime license, meaning you pay once and can use the tool forever. In contrast, Elementor Pro only has a subscription model, so you’ll keep paying to renew your license every year.
However, limited-time licensing can also have advantages. For instance, you can adjust your plan as your needs grow, and you can usually depend on quality service since your provider will work hard to ensure you keep your subscription.
Slow performance if not careful
Maybe you have some misgivings about using Elementor because you’ve heard it can slow down websites.
It’s true that every extra plugin may slow down your WordPress website. Elementor uses additional CSS for page building, which could bump up your loading speed. However, this usually isn’t a problem for properly optimized sites. The WordPress theme you choose, your hosting server, and the size of your images will all impact your site’s speed.
To guarantee the site you build with Elementor Pro runs fast, you should:
- Choose quality hosting. A premium hosting plan will minimize pesky downtimes and slow loading.
- Upload lighter media files. Use Elementor’s Image Optimizer or other quality plugins that resize images while keeping their resolution.
- Deactivate unused plugins. Many WordPress users don’t even remember, let alone use, all the plugins they’ve ever installed. Screen your site for unneeded plugins and remove them.
- Choose a fast-loading theme like Hello Elementor.
- Use a CDN to ensure the best possible user experience for visitors from across the globe.
- Update your themes and plugins. Upgrade your WordPress plugins and themes to the latest PHP version to improve speed and security.
Is Elementor the right builder for you?
Elementor enjoys well-deserved popularity as a user-friendly page builder for WordPress sites. This plugin makes it easy for people with no coding background to create stunning, professional-looking WordPress pages for commercial and other uses. The Elementor plugin comes with a ton of useful features and has very few drawbacks.
Elementor is an awesome tool for marketers, freelancers, and agencies providing site-building services. It’s also perfect for private users who want to design a website but have no technical skills.
Elementor Pro’s pricing is very reasonable, too. Whether you want to create just one site or a thousand, you’ll find a suitable subscription model that provides good value for what you pay. Or start with the freebie version and upgrade later as needed.
We hope this honest Elementor Pro review helps you decide whether the Elementor plugin is the right answer to meet your page-building needs.
Frequently asked questions
Is Elementor Pro necessary for Elementor?
While the free version of Elementor provides essential features for building WordPress pages, Elementor Pro offers additional advanced features and premium support. Whether Elementor Pro is necessary depends on the user’s specific needs and preferences for website design and functionality.
What are some recent additions to Elementor Pro’s feature set?
Elementor Pro has continually evolved since its founding in 2016 by adding new features to enhance user experience. Recent additions include the Image Optimizer for faster website loading times, the Element Manager for streamlining workspace efficiency, and a new Taxonomy Filter widget with multi-selection capabilities.
How does Elementor Pro compare to the free version of Elementor?
Elementor offers both a free version and a Pro version. While the free version provides basic functionality such as a landing page builder and a drag-and-drop editor, Elementor Pro offers advanced features like premium support, hundreds of templates, marketing widgets, custom CSS, and more.
What are the pricing tiers for Elementor Pro?
Elementor Pro offers several pricing tiers, including Essential, Expert, Studio, and Agency plans. Prices range from $49/year for one website in the Essential plan to $999/year for up to 1000 websites in the Agency plan.
How can Elementor Pro be set up on a WordPress site?
Setting up Elementor Pro involves installing the free Elementor Core plugin, then downloading and activating the Elementor Pro plugin via the WordPress admin. Users can access their Elementor Pro dashboard to manage subscriptions and downloads.
Why is choosing a good host important for Elementor users?
Quality hosting ensures a smooth-running, secure website with minimal downtime, faster loading times, lower bounce rates, and higher search engine rankings. Professional hosts like WP Engine, Bluehost, HostGator, and Hostinger offer reliable services tailored for WordPress websites.
What is a child theme, and why might Elementor users consider using one?
A child theme is an extension of an existing WordPress theme that retains customizations even after the parent theme receives updates. Elementor users might opt for a child theme to safeguard their modifications and facilitate theme customization without losing work during updates.
How can Elementor users optimize their site’s performance and design?
Elementor offers various tools for optimizing site performance and design, including global settings for controlling site elements, font optimizations for faster loading, image optimizations for improved speed and user experience, and integration with CDNs for global content delivery. These optimizations ensure a fast and efficient website built with Elementor Pro.
