Whether you’ve been creating websites from as long as you can remember or are just trying to figure out how to create your first website, today I want to talk about a total game changer: Elementor Pro for WordPress, AKA the page builder AKA the theme builder AKA where were you all these years?
There are so many things I love about Elementor Pro that I could talk about it for hours, but I know your time is precious, so today I’m going to share with you the top 10 reasons I love Elementor Pro and Elementor in general, and why I think you’ll love it too.
1. Elementor Pro is great, but the free version is just stunning too!
Elementor Pro has become a tool of choice in my arsenal, but the great thing about Elementor, is that you can get started with the free version in order to get a feel for it and see for yourself if you like or not.
While this may sound normal to you if you first heard of Elementor as a free WordPress plugin, the value that is packed in the free version used to be charged for a lot of money by companies from the pre-Elementor era.
So when Elementor kicked in, at the beginning even I didn’t pay too much attention because I’ve seen countless attempts to create free page builders, but to be honest, most of these weren’t up to the challenge.
But then I decided to give a shot, and although on the first project I felt a bit confused because it was different from what I was used to, I started seeing the power of this tool, and listen to this: if you want to understand the power of Elementor, the only way in my opinion is to work on a real project.
In my case, this was the “aha moment” that made me fall in love with this tool.
I believe this exact same process happened to a lot of people (and looking at the numbers of Elementor installs, this is a fact), so the other companies from the page builders industry were left with 2 choices : up their game or slowly but surely go out of business.
Luckily for us, that competition has offered us the greatest tools and opportunities I’ve seen around ever since I’ve been building websites!
2. Elementor pack some handy built-in tools
If you are familiar with WordPress, then you know that usually, for whatever functionality you need on your website, there’s probably a plugin for it, with tens of thousands of plugins out there, both free and premium.
But although we love those handy pieces of code that we don’t have to code ourselves, the problem is that the more plugins you have on your website, the more trouble you can get yourself in when it comes to maintenance, security threats, and bloat of your website.
So, I appreciate the fact that some features we all need at some point, are packed in Elementor and Elementor Pro.
Maintenance mode
In Elementor, for example you can activate the maintenance mode right from the built-in tools and cherry on the cake, you get to design your own maintenance page, the way you want it.
You can also decide to let your theme handle the fonts, and the colors on your website, and I find that feature pretty handy.
And while, as we’ll see later in this post, Elementor Pro’s theme builder could make us wonder if the choice of a WordPress theme is still relevant, since we can do pretty much anything with Elementor Pro’s theme builder’s functionalities, I still believe that there are some things that are absolutely best left to the management of a wordpress theme, and as a matter of fact, I’m going to release a post & video just about that, so watch out and make sure you stick around the blog / Youtube channel.
Custom CSS
And talking about Elementor Pro, I love the fact that the pro version comes with custom CSS possibilities, especially when you want localized css, for example on a specific page but not on your whole website: I used to handle that with a dedicated plugin, but now, I don’t have to.
3. Elementor’s responsive tools are great
It is becoming a standard, but not all page builders are equal when it comes to responsiveness.
Elementor’s responsive tools and options are straight to the point, and offer quite a faithful representation of what your website is going to look like on mobile devices.
By coupling Elementor’s responsive tools with the virtual Google Chrome inspector’s mobile devices, I’m usually able to create great mobile experiences, and I get to test it from the comfort of the browser.
And while I always test on a real tablet and smartphone too, with that combo, I’m able to test a wide variety of mobile devices without the needs to invest in virtualization sotfware, or worse, in purchasing a few physical devices.
4. Elementor is well organized
That one really comes to personal preference, but I like the user interface of Elementor, and the logic behind it.
That helps, because even when I try a new widget or add-on, I usually know where I’m going to find such and such option, and that is a time saver.
Things I hope will be implemented soon
One thing I wish I could do is just collapse all widget groups at once, because when you have a lot of add-ons, it’s a pain to close them all, but I’m sure we’ll get an update on this one, because previously you couldn’t even collapse the widget groups, the community asked, the team listened and the feature was implemented.
Now there are free plugins that allow you to do that (collapsing all widget groups at once) but although I love free plugins, in a commercial environment, i.e. when selling website to customers, I’m really picky with the free plugins I use, because for example, I once used one of these plugins because it had a great feature that let you define a begin and end date between which a specific section or module would appear on the page, and that was perfect for one of the projects I was working on.
But then 3 months later, the developers announced that were abandoning the project, and I don’t blame them, because, unless you have a business model that allows you to do free and get money from premium products, it’s not sustainable.
But the consequence is that I found myself in a tricky situation were I had to roll back, remove the plugin, and look for other solutions.
The bottom line
But to come back to the organization side of Elementor, I think it’s well thought out. It may not be the prettiest UI but it gets the job done, and let’s you work fast and focus on your masterpiece.
5. Elementor is translated in a lot of languages, and more to come!
Believe it or not, not everybody speaks or work in the english language, and even if you are in an english speaking environment, you may at one point, have to work on a project for a client that speaks a foreign language and that may want to have the interface in their own language when they want to update their website with content.
Luckily, Elementor comes with a lot of languages translations, and if your language is not yet translated, you can participate to the greater good of the community by translating it yourself, or outsourcing to a translator or translation agency if that’s a requirement for that specific project.
6. Elementor pro’s theme builder is a game changer
When Elementor Pro was first released, what you got out of it were a collection of premium widgets that the free version obviously didn’t get.
And that was already great, and actually made me trust that company, because as mentioned earlier, giving away everything for free is not sustainable. So the fact that they released the Pro version made me think “Okay, let me give it a shot. At least I know they’re serious about their tool and they are in business.“.
The real magic
But then, the real magic revealed itself when Elementor released Elementor Pro’s theme builder.
And that, my friend, coming for the heart of someone who started building websites by handcoding them on notepad++ in html before moving to the WordPress eco-system, is a dream come true.
I love WordPress, as well as the creative community and the myriad of beautiful themes you can find out there.
But one issue I rapidly found myself faced with, was the fact that no matter how beautiful a wordpress theme was, there was always a frustration when I could not implement my own design decisions, unless I was ready to learn WordPress custom theming and spend hours fiddling around to create what I wanted.
I’ve done it a couple of times, and it was very rewarding intellectually to manage to achieve what I had in mind, but the time I spent on those projects could have been used to work on 10 new client projects, but I was not paid 10 times more.
So to cut a long story short, it was not sustainable for a one-man operation website creation business.
The first milestone
So the first milestone in that area, was the uprising of page builders because at least I could control how the pages looked and that was already great, but I still had that frustration when it came to the archives pages of a website, the 404 pages, the blog posts templates, the navigation, the footer, the Woocommerce archives and product pages, and the list goes on.
The second milestone
So the second milestone, and the real magic in Elementor Pro is that you can now take total control of how these pages and archives look like, and this means, that you can now produce websites that are truly custom made and for a lot less time than when you had to do that manually.
And the consequence is that, if you are trying to create your own website for your business, you can now have a professional website for a fraction of the cost and time required. And if you are running your own freelancing website creation studio or agency, you can now produce more custom made websites, in less time, and for more money than if you were selling a website based on a WordPress theme where design decisions were forced upon you, unless you spent a lot of time modifying it.
A game changer
I can’t stress enough how much of a game changer that is. Now Elementor is not the only plugin doing that, but:
– where some other plugins charge more for the theme builder features, the Elementor team packs it in the Elementor Pro subscription, so no added fees are charged
– it justs works really well, is very stable and constantly gets updated
I’m looking forward to see what the competition comes up with, but Elementor really got a great headstart, and I’m confident they are putting a lot of time and effort into making their theme builder the best thing since sliced bread for us website creators.
7. Elementor Pro’s dynamic features
That brings me to the cherry on the cake when it comes to Elementor Pro’s theme builder: the dynamic features.
Because instead of just displaying static text from the page builder, you can now use Elementor Pro to dynamically display content from the WordPress database.
Make your blog stand out
So for example, you could create a layout template for your blog posts, and tell Elementor Pro exactly how you want your blog posts laid out, and then let’s say that you have 100 blog posts in a year, and you want to completely change the design of your blog posts, you can just change the one blog post template layout, and Elementor Pro will apply it to the whole of your 100 blog posts.
I’m really simplifying here, because the truth is: you can do a lot more with Elementor Pro’s dynamic features, such as creating a movie review website, or a real estate website completely from scratch but in a fraction of the time, by using tools like ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) Pods or JetEngine from Crocoblock.
Using those in combination with Elementor Pro will allow you create web applications, for example a real estate website, and then all your clients have to do is login to wordpress, and just encode that data for a specific property like the title, the address, the price, the pictures, and so on, and all that from the back-office of WordPress, so that they don’t have to get in the Elementor page builder interface and potentially mess things up.
And just like mentioned before for the blog post example, if at one point, they want you to completely revamp the property single pages, you can just do that in a snap by altering the one property page layout, and the data will remain intact because it is dynamically pulled from the database.
8. Elementor Pro is surrounded by quality third party addons
Now before I go further on this one, I must say that the first addon I recommend before you consider anything else, is Elementor Pro.
Because think about it: if you just purchase third party addons to try and replicate what Elementor Pro offers for the yearly subscription, and let’s say that everybody does that and only purchased third party addons … Well do your math and figure out what would come next: Elementor would be out of business, and you’d be left with third party addons that can not work without Elementor.
So if you love Elementor, then get Elementor Pro, you get discount renewal when you renew and think about it: the subscription immediately pays itself whether you want to create a website for a single project or create websites for a living.
Just like you need gas in your car, you need professional tools in your Arsenal. You know my motto: it’s time to invest in YOUR success, and not keep on investing in others, because if you can invest in Netflix, in Air Jordans , iPhones, even though I love these companies, if you can invest in their products, but are not willing to invest in your own success, then how do you expect to succeed? Food for thought!
There are a lot of third party addons, but not all of them offer quality so I’ll have dedicated posts & videos about those.
9. Elementor Pro opens the road to endless possibilities
In order to achieve what you can achieve today with Elementor, you used to have to have many skills.
Now of course, nothing beats a good developer, and developers will always be needed, even if only just to create, enhance and maintain gorgeous tools such as Elementor Pro.
But what Elementor Pro has achieved, especially with the theme builder, is that it opened a world of possibilities for several personas:
If you are an entrepreneur on a DIY mission:
If you spend the time needed to learn the tool, you are now able to create a beautiful website of professional quality, for a fraction of the cost.
You can really stand out from your competition and lower your costs on maintenance and development of your website, until your business kicks off and you are able to hire a web professional to take those duties of your time and let you concentrate on your business.
If you are a designer that want to sell websites
You can focus on your design knowledge without letting the technical side of building a beautiful website come in the way.
But if you work in a team, you can also create fully functional prototypes that will help your fellow web developers speed up their work.
If you are a web developer that sells websites
You can now create beautiful websites, even if you initially suck at design. Because Elementor Pro comes with blocks and layouts for the most common sections you need in the majority of your projects. So you won’t have to focus on design and instead you can code custom features in a solid environment.
And if you work in a team, you could build a functional prototype with dynamic content, and let the designers work their design magic.
If you are an online marketer
You can replicate pretty much any funnels with Elementor Pro and some addons (such as Convert Pro) and with premium A/B testing plugins popping up, you can use the power of Elementor to lower your costs for funnels, and focus on your digital marketing skills without the headaches that come with custom development.
10. Elementor Pro’s team listen to the community
One thing I like about Elementor is how Ben and the Elementor team listen and consider the Elementor community.
Now I’m not saying it’s perfect, but who is perfect? Are you? I know I’m definitely not.
But I like how available Ben from Elementor and his team are, and on many occasions, I’ve seen them discuss, review, and then implement features that the community was asking for.
Of course it depends how you ask, and if it fits the very clear roadmap they have for Elementor, but what I like is the mindset. Because it makes me trust them more.
And whether you know it or not, even though you probably don’t speak to the Elementor staff every day, if you use Elementor as an important part of your business, then Elementor is a partner of yours. And it’s nice to be able to rely on a partner you trust.
I hope it goes on, and only gets better.
Is Elementor Pro worth it?
The short answer is… Yeah baby!
As mentioned previously, whether you just want to create a website for your business, or that your business is creating websites for clients, Elementor is one of those no-brainers that you should get, if you’re serious about you do.
A question of perspective
I know sometimes life can be tough and you may feel like it’s a lot of money to invest. But that’s just a matter of perspective.
If you live in a third world country and/ or have very little means of sustaining yourself, then I would say start with Elementor free version, up your skills in CSS and Javascript, which you can learn for free online. Then, sell your first websites using the free version with your own custom changes, and with that money, invest in yourself with Elementor Pro: you will then be able to develop better websites in less time and for more money and my wish is that this would help you make a better living altogether.
If you live in a part of the world considered “rich” and have a job or some money to invest, then revise your priorities. Do you really need that Latte every day? Or that Beats headset? Could you cut some restaurant treats? You get the idea.
I can’t stress this enough: if you want results, you need to change your mentality and start investing in yourself !
In conclusion
So, I hope that this has helped you understand why I love and recommend Elementor Pro and the other tools mentioned today, and if there are other tools you love using with Elementor, let me know in the comments.
If you have other tips you want to share please let me know in the comments of this post. Now when do you plan to start your freelancing business or if you already did, how long did it take you from idea to launch? Let me know in the comments.
If you watch the companion video and if you liked it, please give it a thumbs up, as it really helps growing the channel and if you know someone that could benefit from it, I’m going to ask you if you’d like to share it now, because let’s face it, there are so many things to do in a day that if you don’t do it now you’ll probably forget.
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So I hope to see you around here or on the Youtube channel, and in the meantime, do you know what time it is? I think you do, it’s time to invest in your success!
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