Are you looking for the best website or page builder for your site? Do you have a short website development timeline? In this in-detail review of an Elementor page builder for WordPress, we will be giving you a snapshot of what you will get and what you should expect to get if you choose to use this plugin. On the other hand, if you are trying to decide on this page builder's suitability for your website or blog, then we have you covered. In this review, we will cover what it is, the components of the plugin, how to get started with this plugin, what are the pros and cons of using the plugin, why you should choose the plugin, and many more. This review will cover most of version 2.0 and the features in the Elementor pro version of the plugin.
What Is Elementor for Wordpress Plugin?
It is a WordPress page builder plugin that essentially uses drag and drop to get your page contents where you want them. It was launched in 2016, from when it has grown to become a favorite for many developers and even non-developers. It is currently the power behind a whopping 5,000,000 websites and has been given a rating of 96% on WordPress.org. The plugin has also received 5585 reviews from the development community. Are you wondering why one plugin could receive so many reviews? Well, it is that good. Being a drag and drop page building plugin, this plugin provides you with the following.
Visually Propelled Design
This means that whatever you see during your design is what your page or website visitors will see. Therefore, it gives you adequate control of your design while at the same time protecting you from the uncertainty of not knowing what your clients or visitors will get.
Drag and Drop Page and Element Design
If you are a developer and do not have the time to work out every line of code or have no experience in any programming language, this plugin has you covered. The drag and drop platform allows you to move elements such as text, images, containers, and sections around to attain the look you want. Essentially, you can create a whole page with your custom content such as text, images, and custom colors within a matter of minutes. The final product is a great page that is visually aesthetic, looks the way you intended it to, and functions the way you want it to without the need for coding.
The Plugin Interface
To better understand how it works, we will begin by explaining how the plugin interface is created and how it works. This is crucial in ensuring that you get a clear image of what you are getting into and what to find. The whole designer window in the plugin interface is divided into various parts. These parts include the following.
• Content area: This is the area in which you will do all your building, writing, dragging, and dropping. It holds the area where you will design your page. The section with the grey dotted lines present the outer margin of your design area.
• Widgets and elements: A widget or an element is a page building block such as a button, a form, a header, footer, etc., that becomes the content of the page that you are designing.
• Settings: In this area, you will be able to undo unwanted changes, redo changes, add preferences on how you want your page displayed on various devices and also keep the display uniform and controlled on various platforms.
How to Build a Layout for Your Page Design
You will probably want to get rolling and start using elements right away. However, it is important first to understand how you want your page to look like and create a basic structure before you start moving elements and widgets around. In designing your page, it provides you with the basic roll-out implementations. Here are the structural elements that will help you to:
• Position and put your elements where you need them
• Control and style the elements in a collection – such as adding backgrounds to entire sections of your page
The structural devices and elements that you will use to position and style your page contents are:
• The sections
• Section divisions called columns
The sections provide the various blocks that represent various layouts on your web page. These could be headers, footers, or body sections. On the other hand, columns are the divisions inside the sections that help you correctly place content on your page. Columns are a great way of ensuring that your page is responsive and can adapt to various situations, such as a smartphone screen rotation or normal window maximization. For instance, you can have a navigation section on the left side of your page. This section will have two columns for navigation URLs and navigation icons. Consequently, you can give these columns styling and effects as you choose.
How to Add New Widgets or Elements to Your Page Design?
If you need to add an element to your page content, such as a form element, a button, or text, drag the element or widget from the left sidebar. On this sidebar, you will find most of the page content elements that you would need. The list of the elements you can choose from includes image elements, text elements, video elements, buttons, spacing elements, text editing elements, headers, etc. Some of the most basic elements that you could add are the headers and title. However, the plugin comes with other cool elements such as carousels and image sliders.
Adding Color and Style to Your Elements, Sections and Columns
Normally if you were to style your page's content programmatically, you would have to use cascading style sheets, and you would probably have to write lines over lines of code. However, in this plugin, that is all taken care of. All you need to add styling to your element is to click the element you want to be styled and click the style you want. When you click an element on your page, the left sidebar will change to editing mode. From here, you can now select the style from the tab-pane that appears on the left sidebar and select the style you want.
How Hard Is It to Learn This Plugin?
If you have tried other page builders, you understand the complexity and ease of using drag and drop page creation. However, it is one of the easiest page builder plugins that you will come across. In as much as we would want all the plugins to be as easy as possible for the page building, there still exists a learning curve. Since you will be using a very simple tool to create pretty complex and visually rich web interfaces, it is only advisable that you take your time to understand how it works. The learning period is very brief and does not require any experience with other page builder plugins. All you need is a web page and enough passion. If you have no previous knowledge of web components and elements such as those used in this plugin, you can take a quick tutorial from an online source, which will provide you with the basics. However, if you need a quick way to learn, you can do the following.
• Import Elementor templates that are already pre-built. This process takes less than a second.
• Deconstruct the template. After importing, you can break it into the various components, widgets, and elements it contains. This deconstruction will give you an idea of what goes where and how to place the elements.
• Look for the advanced implementation of the widgets and elements to better understand what you should do when you need a particular action to happen.
To better understand the plugin, we will give you a list of six features that make this tool your go-to solution.
Features of the Plugin
1. Elementor Templates
We have already seen that it gives you complete autonomy to create pages and elements completely from scratch. For instance, you can develop a contacts page by dragging around the form elements, the buttons, and text and later styling them to fit the certain theme's specifications. However, the template library in it gets things better. This library comes with thousands of ready-made page templates for almost all of your needs. With the advent of Elementor Pro 2.0, the templates now come as the following.
• Page templates are single full pages that you can import and then customize to fit your design needs.
• Design blocks that can be used on page sections instead of on a full page. For instance, if you need a contact section, you can drag and drop it on the section you want.
2. Responsive Design and Mobile Preview Controls
It would be wise to bet that your website will be running more on mobile devices than on computers. A giant portion of web traffic goes through mobile devices. Therefore, if you implement a mobile interface or design for your page, you will be able to reach all your prospective customers via their mobile devices. The plugin ensures that all the pages that you design are responsive. Responsive design is a phrase that is used to refer to how a web page responds to different screen sizes. Therefore, if your webpage looks good on mobile, then it is responsive. During the design with the plugin, you can use the mobile preview functionality to determine whether your page will be as responsive as you would want it to be.
3. Layout Controls That Are Well Detailed
The advent of website page builders came to eliminate the need for customized programming. This gives you enough space to exercise your flexibility though in a limited way. A good example of this limitation is in the positioning of elements. However, you will get tons of very intuitive guides and controls to ensure that you put your element, widget, column, or section where you want them. You can achieve this by doing the following.
• Manually creating margin and padding values for the widgets, columns, and sections
• Adjusting the width of a column using the column divider between the columns
• Position your elements or widgets vertically inside a column or various columns in a certain section
• Set the blank space between the columns using the column gap that can be adjusted
4. Capability to Edit Text Inline
Unlike other page builders, where you have to edit your text on popups, this page builder gives you the capability to edit your text inline. All you have to do is click the text on your page and get on with typing.
5. Revision History With Easy Redo and Undo
You will probably need to get a few changes off or a few changes back during your design process. This page builder provides you with just the tools that you need. If you need to remove a certain change, you can always use the page builders undo option, which will remove the latest action or change applied to your page.
6. Clean Code If You Choose to Deactivate This Page Builder
In the future, you might decide to deactivate the plugin for various reasons. If you do that, you will be left with clean code that you can use later for page construction purposes. However, you will lose the styling of the page.
Conclusion
Website page building can be a very engaging activity. If you do not have the skills or the time to create something coded from scratch, you can always use this page builder for quick and well-built pages. If you need professional website pages or just a personal website, this plugin is arguably your best choice. Elementor pro is a very efficient and reliable web builder that you should choose.