A new WordPress Page Builder for those that are less technically-minded but still want to express their creativity in full.

Elementor was conceived to give non-technical WordPress users a tool to design pixel-perfect layouts directly on the ‘canvas’ like you can do with a desktop publishing tool, or a site builder service like Wix.

It is a standalone plugin, doesn’t come with its own theme but works well with others. Which is why they call it a ‘Live Page Builder’.

So, a good choice for non-techies who do not know how to code (or want to code) but want their website’s design to be 100% original.

Elementor works with any theme, page or custom post type. By using a blank page template, the Elementor Canvas, you can achieve pretty much any layout you want, style it and drop in functions from a growing library of widgets.

While not a theme builder, Elementor allows you to use and customise pre-made templates, create them from scratch and save them to your own library.

This will appeal to a lot of designers and developers who want to avoid having to build a custom theme or having to hack away at an existing one to achieve a specific design and establish set of re-usable elements.

Key features

• Elementor lets you design on the front-end with instant, real-time results
• The interface is intuitive and one can easily switch between desktop, tablet, and mobile views
• When working with layout and the elements they hold, you have a good level of control on width and height, positioning, and padding and margin settings. You can even change the gaps between columns
• You can use Global Widgets (Pro) to create and manage common website elements such as headers and footers
• Elementor includes a decent number of free and pro widgets, as well as third-party ones
• It’s an open source product and built with the best code architecture in mind, which is good for extensibility as well as SEO
• It’s free and the Pro version starts from $49 USD with 12 months worth of updates

Visit their page for complete list of features.

See Elementor in action

Our thoughts: The perfect tool (for a specific audience)

The team behind Elementor must have started with an idea of the perfect page builder and have delivered a fantastic product, that is particularly useful for designers who want to keep away from code but still be able to express their creativity in full swing.

Which also means that it may not be the best tool for coders or those who don’t design – it’s important to mention this, too.

We particularly like the ability to work on a blank canvas and outside of a theme’s framework, to define ‘global’ elements to re-use on different pages, and to have access to the growing library of widgets and elements, including extension for third-party tools:

• The WooCommerce widget, offering a wide variety of options to display your products
• Form integrations with Hubspot, ActiveCampaing, Zapier, MailChimp and other marketing tools
• Single Post Widgets, to be able to style blog posts, for example

Elementor isn’t as powerful as Divi or Beaver Builder, which are more established and offer a wider range of functions for bigger web builds, but makes up for this with its agility and ease of use. Elementor wins on price, too.

Coming soon: the Elementor Theme Builder release

A date hasn’t been released for this but it’s an exciting development:

Soon you’ll be able to go beyond the page level, and delve into designing headers, footers, blog posts, and more using Elementor.

While you can do this already by working with the Elementor Canvas page template, an Elementor Theme builder will transform the product into a more powerful tool for more complex projects. Hopefully, that the current version will stay as is, as it caters nicely to a broad audience.

Conclusion

We’re impressed by Elementor, like many others are. It’s a solid product that addresses challenges a lot of the more creatively minded WordPress developers have.

It’s not necessarily a tool that a coder (or a digital agency) would use, as mentioned earlier. It will be interesting to see how the forthcoming Theme Builder shapes up. Will it be a delight to use as the current version? Will it give non-technical folks a complete toolset for bigger, more sophisticated projects?

We’ll have a close look at it when it’s released. In the meantime, we will continue to use Elementor internally for wireframing and smaller WordPress projects.

We are also impressed by the team behind the scenes. Elementor is still relatively new but has seen its user base grow rapidly to 400,000, which is a reflection on the quality of the product. They release new features frequently, useful ones, and their communications are top-notch.