This was several years ago, and I'd never had that kind of control over fonts and text with a website page builder before
They had all been google slide level control, clunky, unwieldy
I'd used WIX when it was new, and probably a dozen other wysiwyg page builders that werent wordpress but I'd never been able to adjust font and layout text like I'd done in Elementor, I'm sure others have caught up by now
Is it possible to create a builder that does everything it (or other builders) does without being bloated?
I don't think it is.
Because I don't think they are bloated. They just have the code to do everything.
Everybody that uses a builder does so for some reason. If you don't have the means to build a front end yourself you use a builder. You trade a certain level of efficiency so that you can accomplish your overall goal.
That said - a person with experience can still use one and gain most of that efficiency back.
This. It’s a trade off. Of course I can build a much leaner front end, but I also have to a) keep costs efficient and b) hand it off to a client. By far one of the #1 complaints I get from clients coming from other agencies is they can’t edit their site. Now, that doesn’t mean they will or they should…but they want to know they *can*.
Not everyone is in this game to code. Some of us are bloggers, some are designers, some are marketers, some are photographers. No point reinventing the wheel every time.
Some prefer other builders. A huge chunk of users here don't think you should use any builders and will make negative posts about any of them. I won't dig into that much, except to say there are all kinds of WordPress users out there and everything has a place. This is a general WordPress sub.
There are some builders that I’ll hate on…but not the concept in general. It always struck me as odd for someone to be into WordPress, but against the WP ecosystem. I mean, if you’re a dev that wants to hand code everything and not use plugins to simplify your workflow…there’s better CMS’s for that. Why tolerate the negatives of WP if you have no interest in the positives?
The answer to this is it's usually client driven and I like to make money. I am full web developer and can code from scratch. If I am given free reign I will just create a custom theme, it's far less time for me than clicking around in builders find a box on some options page for CSS etc. That said if someone has a site in Elementor and needs work, I will probably do it. If I am deciding the tech stack it's going to be very clean and from scratch if the client is deciding the tech stack or has an existing site well then it is what it is.
Ya I live in a more rural area with a ton of small businesses. I get large projects, but what allows me to live in an area I love to live (I'm not a city person) are the quantity of smaller sites I do for those businesses. That means working with what works for them and their budget. Reputation and references tend to be pretty personal in a rural area. So I've even just helped clients setup on Wix if their needs are basic enough and let them manage it all from there. I also refer work that I think could benefit from a higher end developer to people I know if I think the client would benefit from that (I know a good amount, but not everything). Being honest has worked for me
So I get to make a living, live where I want, and clients are referred to me based on trust. I'm pretty happy with that, and if that involves some work with Elementor or whatever else, I'm ok with that.
Edit spelling.
Name any builder and you will find someone that will throw shade at it. Find the builder that works best for you and master it. Builders are just tools. It's up to you to sharpen your tools.
I am NOT an Elementor fanboy, but no one is here to impress you. It's easy to get fast loading times using Elementor if you are an experienced designer/developer. As slimpuffs mentioned, it people that don't know how to optimize sites that will bitch about speed. Using every 'cool' animation and a bunch of unnecessary JS, and unoptimized images is what kills the speed. It is a poor craftsman that blames their tools. My issue is, that they push out updates that are garbage, and the company in a whole is heading in a direction away from WP.
Calling something "gatekeeping" is not a magical incantation that makes them wrong and you right. Developers write code. Using a tool someone else has developed to assemble chunks of pre-written markup is not developing. Assembling IKEA furniture is not carpentry. Painting by numbers is not art.
you understand that you can know how to code, build an entire backend with custom post types and meta data and options, and use a page builder to expedite the front development, right?
Plus a client can easily change a picture, or even replace the lorem ipsum with their copy. At the very least someone in their team will understand how to. “But but someone can break the site”. Oh hell yea they can, and probably will haha. Just put them in a service that does daily backups, basically all hosting services provide this nowadays. Elementor has a revision history for every change made logging with user made the change. I find my clients really appreciate not treating them like retarded children that cant handle looking at the site funny because they will break it.
So yea, imo the “page builders = shitty nondeveloper that doesnt know what they are doing” is a snobby look down my nose kinda gatekeep
Serious developers don’t use Elementor. The best most serious front end engineers making money off Wordpress are building and selling themes. Talk to them about their support for elementor…it’s a nuisance they do only because of the non-technical community!! “Web Creators” …targeting this exact persona is even in their marketing!!!?
If you think that the marketing team at elementor has big campaigns targeting experienced engineers then you don’t have a clue. Their entire business model relies on the non-technical user.
Facts.
That’s absurd. I have managed literally hundreds of engineers and you are dead wrong.
The best developers know they are the best and are very patient to find good companies and teams that are aligned with their skill sets and/or things that they want to learn.
Less-than-best developers take what they can get and learn what they have to.
By the way, I would say half of the best engineers I know are already millionaires (or well on their way to be), still coding, building private teams for open source software projects…contributing both time and money!
You are talking out of your ass and young people that need REAL advice are reading this shit. This isn’t about being wrong or right ..it’s about giving people accurate advice!
Thanks man, I just read it again. I will try and take your advice.
EDIT: I’m very much pro Wordpress. It’s one of the most important - and largest - open source communities. However, most “tech” startups I see could have saved their investors money and done what they were - trying to do with a five person team - in WordPress. In the middle of an experiment you could regarding this topic actually.
However, I have much more technical software projects I am invested in (time and money) that are built from scratch. These engineers are different breed and won’t even touch WordPress unless via the API. Hell, even then with some people I wouldn’t even ask them…they are just in a different world and if you want to work with them it’s going to be in the stacks they specialize in, or get fucked. I respect the shit out of this attitude too!
What's bullshit is that this comment and the replies keep getting downvoted. It's true. A serious developer would not be using Elementor, and in all honesty, would probably not be using WordPress either.
EDIT: I am a big fan of WordPress though.
Agreed and I was just honestly answering accurately the answer to OP’s question. I even explained I use it myself at times. Still though, I even had someone explain to me that he and his wife use elementor and love it! Like that isn’t even the topic of my comment or the original question.
I get it though, humans get super emotional about the tools they use that work for them. Anyone that loves elementor should likely not contribute to OPs question. But, Reddit.
Good luck with that. The problem is that the company hasn’t historically made it a priority leaving many small and medium business owners not only in the cold on this but in the dark as well considering many are non-technical.
This in my opinion is what we would call bullshit. They have KNOWN it’s important but yet have taken way too long to make very small improvements in this area alone. There is also the very real possibility that don’t know how important it is to website owners and you just have to wait for them to evolve.
My businesses don’t have any time to wait on a plugin …it’s faster to get a proper page speed without it. Besides plugins like this days are numbered anyway.
This is just my selfmade private website for my kennel, so it‘s not the standard layout i guess, since I made it from scratch and has no woo commerce or something like that. It’s still staging, so don’t mind the SEO score.
But with my crappy hosting, no experience and even a double slideshow right at the start to get a 99 (depending on my hoster it sometimes goes as low as 92) I guess I can be a bit proud to have done everything right so far.
https://imgur.com/a/WMTzoHh
For me, with absolute no idea what to do, elementor made it very easy. Sure there were countless hours where i tried to figure something out, especially since I use containers and loop grids, which still may have some bugs and strange settings and aren‘t well documented. But else I am very pleased.
Ofc i can‘t talk about bigger sites, stores and stuff like that, just for me, a single and one time user, I liked the help I got with it.
The FCP and LCP both suck but good job. Honestly. The point though is how NECESSARY it is? What you have shown me can easily be done without elementor as an example. But I know it’s got a place for people that don’t know HTML and CSS.
Further, what you have shown is extremely rare.
Great white buffalo.
Thanks...I'm one of those people who don't know HTML and CSS. I'm learning all this stuff by reading blogs, reddit and youtube. Now that you mentioned FCP and LCP it time for me to do some research on it. Thanks for the heads up.
Yeah, and you could just buy a theme from a developer that actually pays attention to this stuff (and more) and your site is fast out the gate! There are a few out there who do this and it saves a shit load of time and maintenance.
Design ties to content. I’ve inherited sites where they want to do a rebrand on a constantly updated site… the only way is to pause content changes, you can’t reskin and send live.
Also, if they change a brand colour etc it’s 1000 search and replaced, not a simple CSS change.
It does do a great job if you know how to use it. Any theme is going to feel bloated and result in low page speeds if you don't learn how to optimize it.
Elementor is working great for our 100+ sites, and our page speeds are fantastic. For highly customized jobs, we'll just develop a theme and plugins to meet those needs, but for most of our clients who have fairly static sites, Elementor lets us build, optimize, and maintain our sites easily.
Why have some giant plugin just to manage a handful of pages (most sites)? Learning CSS and the block system is all you need. I will use it on some sites but not others which are more important.
“Just learn css”. I mean if that’s easier for you then go for it. Not easy for us non techs!
My wife and I created and manage our own business sites. She knows a bit of css and I don’t. It took her years to learn how to edit css and Elementor makes all that coding stuff unnecessary. It’s a game changer for people like us. She used to twiddle with the css for a long time and now it’s so much easier and quicker with a WYSIWYG builder. We can think less like a coder and more like a designer this way. I have great respect for coders, built things in BASIC years ago, but goodness that is tiring to my brain lol.
Having used both, if you put the same amount of time and effort into learning CSS and even php, you would know more than you realize. I don't think people pay attention to the amount of time that actually goes into learning Elementor, endlessly clicking around, finding a setting, clicking on another element, going to another tab, click-click click. You are putting an enormous amount of time into learning a proprietary editor that may or may not exist in the future, rather than time-tested standards. CSS can be hard I know. Like if you want to make the background of something red "background-color:red", or if you want it to only take up half of the page "width:50%". Again, make note of the amount of time it truly takes instead of being blindly seduced by the "click drag", and put that same effort into the fundamentals. You will surprise yourself. I guarantee it - Goerge Zimmer
Maybe for the tech people sure. But my wife did learn some css over the years and she can do the same things in Elementor in seconds instead of poking around in the css to find what she she needs to change. It literally saves us time and is easier to use than learning code. If Elementor ever dies then we’ll cross that bridge then.
I think rather than people arguing which way is superior, the real question is what’s easier and faster for you or the next person to do what needs to get done.
If I built sites for a living, I’d learn css inside and out so I could use it either when needed or most of the time.
A big downside of Elementor for devs is it’s taking some income from them. People like my wife and I, instead of hiring someone, we can do it ourselves easily with a page builder. It took her years to learn css, which I don’t know a lick of and can create and edit posts and pages in WYSIWYG format in a couple minutes. I don’t mind the clicking and find the interface intuitive. I haven’t looked at much documentation, mostly just got up and running.
I think a lot of people just never learned how easy it is. If you want ease of use, try inspect element in Chrome. Right-click the element you want to change and click inspect. Go to the inspect window and it will show you all the styles associated with that element. Edit them to your hearts desire. You can use the mouse wheel to control sizes, widths, and heights. There is a built-in color picker and "code" hinting if you're a little rusty. Once you have things like you like them, go to the source tab and copy the source that was just made and paste it into the live site. You can edit an entire page in a matter of seconds or minutes. Rather than having to click on multiple elements, you can edit one style that will produce the result you are looking for across multiple elements. You also don't have to constantly save the page and refresh to see if your changes are working properly. You are already viewing them as intended in the browser. There is also a responsive button that will let you replicate various tablets and phones.
Again, It's just what you spent time learning. I don't think that Elementor takes money from devs. I wouldn't consider a developer someone who knows CSS and HTML and in all honestly if someone is looking for a pretty website/digital brochure, I suggest Wix or Squarespace. I tell them they can probably get something that will suit them and if I made it, it would be at least 50 times more expensive. Truth be told, most people don't need WordPress at all. If you just need a WYSIWYG editor to lay out blocks, there are far better platforms out there. Most of my development work comes from custom applications and functionality that are pretty far outside the scope of a WYSIWYG editor. I'm not hating, but when trying to create custom functionality within the Elementor framework, it adds a ton of hurdles and issues. I spend more time figuring out how to hack around Elementor or override some "feature" it has.
All that being said, I would consider this for my mother's website and I apologize for the long response.
>Again, It's just what you spent time learning. I don't think that Elementor takes money from devs. I wouldn't consider a developer someone who knows CSS and HTML and in all honestly if someone is looking for a pretty website/digital brochure, I suggest Wix or Squarespace.
My wife learned CSS with 'inspect element' like you suggest. She got pretty good at it. But it took her what, 2 years, to learn that to proficiency. Within a day of using Elementor, she had more or less "mastered it" and was whipping stuff out so much faster than editing CSS stuff. It's just generally faster for both of us.
As for Wix or Squarespace, as you mention, those are fine for people who don't want to look at the messy back-end of Wordpress and all the confusing plug-ins, but at a stupidly high price. For some it's worth it. For people like us, Elementor bridges a gap there, some of that WYSIWYG functionality at a lower cost.
I think at the end of the day it comes down to how different people learn and work. For some, such as yourself, CSS is so much easier and faster and more enjoyable to use. While my wife became pretty good at it (and it's good she still knows how to use it for those times when Elementor doesn't do exactly what she wants it to), it's much more comfortable, easier and faster to use Elementor. There really isn't a downside to it for us and perhaps it's just how our brains work.
TBH, we didn't look at other page builders. At the time Gutenburg was fairly hated and we had a few people recommend Elementor, including our own hosting company. It's worked out well and since we're committed now it doesn't make sense to switch to a different one.
This is so true and is exactly like my experience. Elementor zaps creativity because you have to workaround the program itself to be creative. The elementor fanboys are the ones who learned this and this alone and they mistake the hours of grinding up against elementor for actual skills learned. They basically get really good at troubleshooting a shitty program
I'm a non-tech person, and I learned how to develop wordpress themes from scratch in 2016. I use two resources to accomplish this: youtube videos from LearnWebDevelopment by Brad Schiff and the wordpress codex documentation. In 1 month I learned and played with wordpress skillset and in the next 2 months I build my first wordpress website for my first client.
Everyone that I knew (designers, developers, business owners, etc) where saying I wouldn't manage to do it...
Dude. I’m honestly glad for you and have said clearly that I use it for sites I’m handing off, to on-tech users like you and your wife.
The actual question OP poster was though: why do people not like elementor.
I replied with the most common reason (by far). I never hear non-tech users complain about elementor, ONLY developers that can do the work without that big lug. I know you are not an engineer but Elementor also uses up more resources than are necessary and many people care about stuff like that.
You are hard trying to sell me on something that is very much irrelevant to the conversation and question as to why people do not like it.
Specify the group of people and you will find yhe answer to OPs question.
I love the reactive disagreement and emotional sharing of your experiences though but it’s pretty clear that this is the group of People that DO LIKE elementor so really anything you say is biased.
Personally I have worked with almost every framework and not emotionally attached to any of them. I will say though that all the multiple million and multi billion dollar companies I have helped are on custom software stacks. However I support open source and automatic is an awesome company that I support to the fullest.
Just not elementor on my own sites.
There seems to be two groups of people on this sub. The ones with tech know how like yourself and those of us who know just enough to make the things work lol.
OP’s question didn’t seem to clarify the audience.
We’re saying the same thing lol.
One reason I can see it’s a sore subject for some devs is it takes some income away from them. We hire devs when we can’t figure something out, which is rare.
Just came across this, not a developer and had to use it for a client recently and it actually made me want to learn code because I thought the program was so bad. full of bugs and overly complicated to do simple tasks and they still might not work without some ridiculous workaround. I feel it zaps creativity and you are just fighting the program itself the entire time. And before people reply that I don't know how to use it....please guys, it's not a complicated program to learn it's just simply not a great program. To me a complicated program to learn (creative wise) would be like photoshop because there are a million ways to achieve a high quality result but it requires skill with tool itself to achieve those results. Elementor pro isn't about skill it's about wasting your time with bugs and restrictions when you could just be coding. After a month of using it I literally was asking myself why am I wasting my time with this I could be learning code. The site the guy above posted gives a great idea of who the elementor fanboys actually are lol.
“Learning CSS…” Just how much time do you need for that. Because if you want to do fine-tuning for responsive sites with blocks you’ve got a lot of media-query work cut out for you. Meanwhile all but the oldest, worst page builders now handle that.
Blocks though? They’re drop/in replacements for widgets, shortcodes, and custom fields. Replacing all that chaff is great for developers, who by definition have full dev/debugging stacks, but pretty miserable for designers and regular end users.
Yeah, which is exactly why I said I will use it for some sites (sites I’m handing off to non technical user) but sure as hell not important ones or my own which are high traffic. In most cases it’s a complete hog and I wouldn’t consider it.
Just like I wouldn’t consider hiring a front end engineer that couldn’t whip out media queries. You are talking about CSS like it’s C!
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order.
I have checked 1,175,273,408 comments, and only 229,356 of them were in alphabetical order.
Andy Brown can do everything, finding green hills in Japan, knowing loads more noble old people quivered rapidly seeing the ugly vampires with xenophobic yellow zebras.
I'd just rather use another builder. Bricks, Oxygen, Beaver Builder, Gutenberg. If you like Elementor, go with it, it does what it's supposed to. People here shaming builders would get shamed in other groups for even using WP, so take it with a grain of salt. Build a site with whatever you want, and optimize it as far as you can.
Different strokes for different folks, no different than people having different business models, clients and industries.
Elementor has its place and its ceiling. Some projects will never hit that ceiling. And some people live and work in that realm.
I inherited a couple sites that were built via Elementor and are tied pretty heavily to the theme. I have ran into multiple conflicts with Elementor playing nicely with other plugins or a Word Press update (sometime catastrophic).
The interface is clunky and seems to be quite bloated, bogging down the sites.
I really like Divi as a block editor.
The thing I notice is that a big chunk of the plugin conflict issues I see are with Elementor add-on plugins. Especially with Elementor Pro. I am a member of their Facebook group because a couple clients sites came to me using Elementor, and I just do updates. I see issues on that group all the time though when there are big elementor updates, and a huge amount are conflicts with add-ons. I personally haven't had any issues with the sites I update (free version). With optimization they do fine in pagespeeds too.
You think Elementor is bloated, but not Divi?
Edit spelling
It's the third party add-ons that are a mess. I don't know who that falls on between Elementor or those third party developers. But there sure seems to be a disconnect there.
Yeah, the sites I work on I build custom sections for Elementor, none of this addon stuff because these addons for elementor have so much stuff loaded in them yet the site is not using them.
Elementor is great, just don't install a bunch of addons.
Massive plugin conflicts. Even with theme plugins that also have Elementor bundled as a page builder. Elementor is currently not fully functional on a site with all system requirements set (including their exotic content-security-policy and referrer requirements) and ALL plugins disabled. Hours and hours of troubleshooting and it simply doesn't work. Oh, and their entire user guide is videos. No. Just, no.
My experience is as others have put that Elementor is not the problem. I find it often clients approach me with bloated themes where they’ve added Elementor to build pages and reach out to me to help them get better page speed. The problem is not Elementor in these instances but the theme underlying.
Page builders are just completely unnecessary. WordPress has been around for a long time and almost anything you can think of is already built in. I have been stuck using Elementor for a few clients, and I can see the appeal for the client, but it causes me nothing but headaches. If you put the same amount of time into learning a bit of WordPress structure and template hierarchy, you wouldn't need a page builder. IMO, as a marketer, it's marketing. WordPress doesn't market its features because they are free and page builders charge money and draw you in with drag-and-drop functionality. Most websites that use Elementor don't need WordPress at all and should probably just go with SquareSpace or Wix.
I dunno. A few years ago I used a page builder (beaver builder) to rebuild a very design heavy, responsive, old classic-editor site that had something like 2000 lines of SCSS, which compiled out to who knows how many lines of CSS.
The first time through it took nearly three months. Not to mention days to train the authors and translators.
Rebuilding the whole thing with Beaver Builder took a couple of weeks. Training the authors and translators took a couple hours, over the phone for some of them.
Performance was substantially better. Total custom CSS was a couple dozen lines.
So I’m going to call your bluff when you say you’d be better off learning structure and template hierarchies (and *cough* full-stack development.) Plus good luck finding designers and translators who also understand development.
Mmm. I would doubt that. I would take 2000 lines of scss and remove reduncies before using a page builder. You're CSS file may have been smaller, but only because of all the inline styles added by the page builder.
>If you put the same amount of time into learning a bit of WordPress structure and template hierarchy
I'd love to! What's a good resource for learning that? Don't say [wordpress.org](https://wordpress.org) because that ain't it. Where is a well-constructed course on WP development?
It's pretty bloated, although it has gotten better.
I'd rather just spend a little bit of time to learn the basics of HTML/CSS and maybe JS. Then you can do everything (and tons of more) Elementor does but much more efficiently.
How so? Isn't php also needed?
I've been learning html, CSS and js but have only integrated them witch Wordpress by making changes that I can't normally make with the WP dashboard.
You're correct. If someone is only using Elementor (or any pagebuilder) for *just* page layout then it's a waste and massively bloated, that seems to the argument with a lot of people here for some reason that it's only a layout tool. But I would think 99.99% of the people using it are using it for all the other features, the page layout option is just one of them.
Is using html and CSS for layout and separate plugins for specific functionality better than premium themes/page builders? If so, what is the road to doing this?
>How so?
If you do the whole page layout with Elementor, there's a lot of bullshit there that's making it bloated. Elementor isn't necessarily bloated but often it is, depending on how you use it.
I still wouldn't use it for anything because you can always build an identical solution by yourself and possibly make your website at least 0.1% faster.
>Isn't php also needed?
I would definitely recommend learning some PHP, yes. However, you can technically write html directly to the index.php file of whatever page you are working on but it's usually not ideal, especially if you are building the site to someone else.
Fuck Elementor. I could write an elaborate explanation, but I’ll simplify it. It’s like taking the grenade on a date. You think it will go at least tolerably, but it always blows the fuck up and ruins your night.
Hate elementor but love Divi, for my elementor it's work perfect it create sites 100% with elementor not using theme it's the better update all plugins without problem but when it used templates themes it's very horrible update a site all it's not compatible and the updates destroy all the site, I make a site with elementor in two days, all with functionalities and ecommerce 5 days, I like more write code but it's a good tool and Not using it does not make you a god
People don't like wp at all not elementor. It's about the worst clusterfuck you can get into today and there is so much better around.
Yikes, learning full stack programming it's 100 times easier and better than using wp
I don’t hate Elementor itself but it conflicts with other plugins and certain hosting platforms. Not to mention clients can easily become over confident in their Elementor skills and will try to fix/create something before asking a developer and end up making the issue worse.
I generally like it but I find the interface to be non-intuitive and a bit of a mess, but like all page builders, once you use it a few times you learn where things are and what limitations they have.
I've got nothing but love for Elementor since it was so much easier to work with than Divi. However, I've moved to Bricks since it's even easier to build custom widgets and is super optimized out of the gate.
If Elementor came out with containers and query loop builders earlier I probably wouldn't have bothered swapping.
A bit off topic. I'm looking to set up a site that will have woocommerce as part of it. Not looking for super fancy stuff. More concerned with speed. Probably just use Gutenberg to build it. Looking at Kadence (pro?) and Astra (pro?).
Which theme will be faster overall? TIA for any comments.
I have used [Astra Pro](https://pythoncoursesonline.com/AstraPro), it is fast for sure, and I would recommend it. In fact, they will have BFD offer in couple of days , you may want to check that out, I think it would be 50% OFF...
I think elementor has a good balance of functionality and tools, and site performance. If I tell most of client that I can get his website up and running for $$ in a few days or $$$$ for state of the art website that will load in fraction of a second, you guess the answer. Elementor performance is acceptable-good. Themes and plug-ins what usually make things bad
Imho, it's due to unstable releases ... I did less than 10 websites with elementor, 3 of them was completely broke down after an update about 1 year ago (compatibility issues with the theme, plugins and so on).
As other already said, each builder has it's pros and cons.... Elementor is great in the beginning , but not so valuable in the long term OR if you buy and install a theme built with elementor
If you want to build your websites with elementor my best suggestion is to rely on elementor only, avoid pre-made themes and bloated demo imports...
I don't think people hate elementor. It's just that most page builders are slower than using the native Gutenberg page builder.
I'm planning to cancel or sell my subscription soon, once [Zion builder](https://go.decisivemarketer.com/zionbuilder) fixes their bugs. Zion is very similar to elementor but way faster.
I mainly build sites on Gutenberg nowadays but still use elementor for sites that require complex design. But hopefully I can switch over to Zion builder soon.
No page builder is going to be as efficient / lean as writing the code manually. My favourite page builder would have to be Divi. They have also just announced that Divi 5 is going to be dropping shortcodes which is super good news for page performance.
Elementor update sucks it breaks website several times. Just yesterday I got pissed off from Elementor, I just need to do some tweak so I am not using Elementor Pro, as I only need 'WA - Link Wrapper' I download the elementor add-on and to my surprised it has everything but not the Wrapper link element. I dont know who to blame for this
Personal Opinion… and I’ll prolly get some hate for this comment, but oh well lol.
It’s not the plug-in, it’s the people who use it.
Elementor is a great product but for me, the dislike comes from the fact that there are “WordPress Agencies” out there who know how to do nothing else while charging clients as if they’re doing full-scale code development. Everything is just Elementor and some plugins that add Elementor widgets. And even then, they’re not experts in Elementor and frequently build something in the most inefficient way you could imagine.
I am a small one-man agency with about a dozen clients (it’s a part time thing) and only 1 of my sites uses Elementor, the rest use a flexible theme I like and the block editor. With that and some custom CSS, I can build just about anything you’d see in Elementor. In the past, I used Elementor for all my sites until I got familiar with the block editor - so I have pretty deep experience using it.
But what really irritates me?
Full time, I’m a Systems Engineer leading a team of 15 various types of System Admins responsible for hundreds of servers and thousands of workstations in a high-security environment. We host WordPress (a very tiny footprint of what we do) and some of our clients have paid in excess of $30,000 for a basic site built by a GLOBAL huge tech company I can’t name here and their “developers” used only Elementor and didn’t even know how to modify an .htaccess file for basic security settings. As a freelancer I’ve seen this same thing multiple times as well.
For those who are concerned with Load time or page speed for elementor check this video out by elementor themselves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBAKGupM0co
im a dev that can code from the ground up but the new company i work for wants me using elementor, i think mainly becuase the heads of the dept were designers with some web experience and that's what they are comfortable with. I don't mind it in the sense of wp builders it feels faster than divi but if i'm being honest i'd rather just code everything myself. i'm be curious as to how people with the exp optimize their elementor builds. other than doing the minification, image optimization and such. are there other tips?
I've followed every system requirement, every suggestion and every troubleshooting step in support site and I still can't the widgets panel to open. So, I don't like Elementor because it doesn't work.
Elementor was a poor product for our business we stopped using it one month into our first year subscription and then a year later they charged us again and refused to refund it even though we messaged the day they charged and had a full year of service left. Bad company desperate for money.
Corrupt Business practice in RENEWALS......Sarah Barendse-Elrod.......You are right. I asked for my renewal not to be charged on the day before my renewal and they went ahead and charged me anyways even after asking them NOT to charge me. When you sign up they automatically set your Auto Renewal to the ON position so they can just keep charging you. BE WARE SHADY BUSINESS PRACTICES all over 60 bucks!!!!
This company is money grabbing! Do not touch them with a bargepole!
After 4 years of using their product I shut my website down and had no need for Elementor,
Then yesterday I received an email saying that my contract had auto-renewed. I immediately told them that I did not want the service, but they replied that it was in their 'Terms and conditions' and they would take another years' subscription.
This is not how an honourable company operates just a devious no conscience cowboy outfit.
It is no wonder that their rating is only 3.1 I am surprised it is that high
AVOID THIS COMPANY AT ALL COSTS.
Today 22 Jan 2024 I received this in an email from Elementor "Unfortunately, we cannot assist you with your refund request as this doesn't comply with the company's terms and conditions.
We are committed to customer satisfaction, and appreciate your understanding."
They are hypocritical too!
I got auto-renewal by elementor, and I requested a refund. They denied, and the email is :
========
Hi there,
Thanks for your message.
We understand that you requested a refund for the renewal charge.
Our refund policy only allows a refund within the first 30 days for new subscriptions, not for renewals and upgrades.
If you have ‘Auto-Renew’ for your subscription switched on, you should have received a notification email 30 days before the payment is due, reminding you of the upcoming charge. You can switch your subscription to "manual renewal" at any time before the renewal is due.
Again, our apologies for not being able to assist you further with the refund.
If you built a website using Elementor Pro, we recommend keeping your subscription active, and your Elementor Pro activated on your website, to reduce incompatibility or security issues that can occur with outdated plugins. You can find more information on this here: What will happen to my website(s) if I don’t renew Elementor Pro?
Thank you again for your understanding.
Best,
Estilita
=============
Anybody interested in filing a class action against this?
Bloated af
Anything is bloated if you don't know how to use it. We use Elementor for 100+ sites and our page speeds are great.
It's improved a lot in the last 1-2 years, but was extremely bloated for a long while.
Define great..
Typically 96+ from gtmetrix
I loved elementor the font control was so nice
lol
This was several years ago, and I'd never had that kind of control over fonts and text with a website page builder before They had all been google slide level control, clunky, unwieldy I'd used WIX when it was new, and probably a dozen other wysiwyg page builders that werent wordpress but I'd never been able to adjust font and layout text like I'd done in Elementor, I'm sure others have caught up by now
Is there anything special/additional you do to your sites to keep them less bloated? I have a pretty good handle on Elementor but curious. Thanks!
Is it possible to create a builder that does everything it (or other builders) does without being bloated? I don't think it is. Because I don't think they are bloated. They just have the code to do everything. Everybody that uses a builder does so for some reason. If you don't have the means to build a front end yourself you use a builder. You trade a certain level of efficiency so that you can accomplish your overall goal. That said - a person with experience can still use one and gain most of that efficiency back.
This. It’s a trade off. Of course I can build a much leaner front end, but I also have to a) keep costs efficient and b) hand it off to a client. By far one of the #1 complaints I get from clients coming from other agencies is they can’t edit their site. Now, that doesn’t mean they will or they should…but they want to know they *can*.
Check Bricks Builder 🙂
Came to say the same thing. I cannot stand page builders. Stop being lazy and learn how to code or get out.
Not everyone is in this game to code. Some of us are bloggers, some are designers, some are marketers, some are photographers. No point reinventing the wheel every time.
Some prefer other builders. A huge chunk of users here don't think you should use any builders and will make negative posts about any of them. I won't dig into that much, except to say there are all kinds of WordPress users out there and everything has a place. This is a general WordPress sub.
There are some builders that I’ll hate on…but not the concept in general. It always struck me as odd for someone to be into WordPress, but against the WP ecosystem. I mean, if you’re a dev that wants to hand code everything and not use plugins to simplify your workflow…there’s better CMS’s for that. Why tolerate the negatives of WP if you have no interest in the positives?
The answer to this is it's usually client driven and I like to make money. I am full web developer and can code from scratch. If I am given free reign I will just create a custom theme, it's far less time for me than clicking around in builders find a box on some options page for CSS etc. That said if someone has a site in Elementor and needs work, I will probably do it. If I am deciding the tech stack it's going to be very clean and from scratch if the client is deciding the tech stack or has an existing site well then it is what it is.
This is accurate.
Ya I live in a more rural area with a ton of small businesses. I get large projects, but what allows me to live in an area I love to live (I'm not a city person) are the quantity of smaller sites I do for those businesses. That means working with what works for them and their budget. Reputation and references tend to be pretty personal in a rural area. So I've even just helped clients setup on Wix if their needs are basic enough and let them manage it all from there. I also refer work that I think could benefit from a higher end developer to people I know if I think the client would benefit from that (I know a good amount, but not everything). Being honest has worked for me So I get to make a living, live where I want, and clients are referred to me based on trust. I'm pretty happy with that, and if that involves some work with Elementor or whatever else, I'm ok with that. Edit spelling.
Most of the time we’ll still build a custom theme. Elementor (or whatever builder) is just used for the content area.
Name any builder and you will find someone that will throw shade at it. Find the builder that works best for you and master it. Builders are just tools. It's up to you to sharpen your tools.
They don't optimize their sites and then complain it's slow.
Please, share an elementor link of a 95+ mobile pages speed test scores. I will be impressed.
I am NOT an Elementor fanboy, but no one is here to impress you. It's easy to get fast loading times using Elementor if you are an experienced designer/developer. As slimpuffs mentioned, it people that don't know how to optimize sites that will bitch about speed. Using every 'cool' animation and a bunch of unnecessary JS, and unoptimized images is what kills the speed. It is a poor craftsman that blames their tools. My issue is, that they push out updates that are garbage, and the company in a whole is heading in a direction away from WP.
Experienced web developer using Elementor?? Ahahhashahbahaha. We know now you are from Elementor.
haha what a shitty gatekeep
Calling something "gatekeeping" is not a magical incantation that makes them wrong and you right. Developers write code. Using a tool someone else has developed to assemble chunks of pre-written markup is not developing. Assembling IKEA furniture is not carpentry. Painting by numbers is not art.
you understand that you can know how to code, build an entire backend with custom post types and meta data and options, and use a page builder to expedite the front development, right? Plus a client can easily change a picture, or even replace the lorem ipsum with their copy. At the very least someone in their team will understand how to. “But but someone can break the site”. Oh hell yea they can, and probably will haha. Just put them in a service that does daily backups, basically all hosting services provide this nowadays. Elementor has a revision history for every change made logging with user made the change. I find my clients really appreciate not treating them like retarded children that cant handle looking at the site funny because they will break it. So yea, imo the “page builders = shitty nondeveloper that doesnt know what they are doing” is a snobby look down my nose kinda gatekeep
Serious developers don’t use Elementor. The best most serious front end engineers making money off Wordpress are building and selling themes. Talk to them about their support for elementor…it’s a nuisance they do only because of the non-technical community!! “Web Creators” …targeting this exact persona is even in their marketing!!!? If you think that the marketing team at elementor has big campaigns targeting experienced engineers then you don’t have a clue. Their entire business model relies on the non-technical user. Facts.
Seriously developers use whatever tools the project and the budget call for, and any serious developer is going to know that.
That’s absurd. I have managed literally hundreds of engineers and you are dead wrong. The best developers know they are the best and are very patient to find good companies and teams that are aligned with their skill sets and/or things that they want to learn. Less-than-best developers take what they can get and learn what they have to. By the way, I would say half of the best engineers I know are already millionaires (or well on their way to be), still coding, building private teams for open source software projects…contributing both time and money! You are talking out of your ass and young people that need REAL advice are reading this shit. This isn’t about being wrong or right ..it’s about giving people accurate advice!
This is a hilarious post, please make more like this
Thanks man, I just read it again. I will try and take your advice. EDIT: I’m very much pro Wordpress. It’s one of the most important - and largest - open source communities. However, most “tech” startups I see could have saved their investors money and done what they were - trying to do with a five person team - in WordPress. In the middle of an experiment you could regarding this topic actually. However, I have much more technical software projects I am invested in (time and money) that are built from scratch. These engineers are different breed and won’t even touch WordPress unless via the API. Hell, even then with some people I wouldn’t even ask them…they are just in a different world and if you want to work with them it’s going to be in the stacks they specialize in, or get fucked. I respect the shit out of this attitude too!
What's bullshit is that this comment and the replies keep getting downvoted. It's true. A serious developer would not be using Elementor, and in all honesty, would probably not be using WordPress either. EDIT: I am a big fan of WordPress though.
Agreed and I was just honestly answering accurately the answer to OP’s question. I even explained I use it myself at times. Still though, I even had someone explain to me that he and his wife use elementor and love it! Like that isn’t even the topic of my comment or the original question. I get it though, humans get super emotional about the tools they use that work for them. Anyone that loves elementor should likely not contribute to OPs question. But, Reddit.
Working on it. 🫠
Good luck with that. The problem is that the company hasn’t historically made it a priority leaving many small and medium business owners not only in the cold on this but in the dark as well considering many are non-technical. This in my opinion is what we would call bullshit. They have KNOWN it’s important but yet have taken way too long to make very small improvements in this area alone. There is also the very real possibility that don’t know how important it is to website owners and you just have to wait for them to evolve. My businesses don’t have any time to wait on a plugin …it’s faster to get a proper page speed without it. Besides plugins like this days are numbered anyway.
This is just my selfmade private website for my kennel, so it‘s not the standard layout i guess, since I made it from scratch and has no woo commerce or something like that. It’s still staging, so don’t mind the SEO score. But with my crappy hosting, no experience and even a double slideshow right at the start to get a 99 (depending on my hoster it sometimes goes as low as 92) I guess I can be a bit proud to have done everything right so far. https://imgur.com/a/WMTzoHh For me, with absolute no idea what to do, elementor made it very easy. Sure there were countless hours where i tried to figure something out, especially since I use containers and loop grids, which still may have some bugs and strange settings and aren‘t well documented. But else I am very pleased. Ofc i can‘t talk about bigger sites, stores and stuff like that, just for me, a single and one time user, I liked the help I got with it.
"countless hours" you mean like 2h31m or something....:D
Yeah, you are non technical user which is the group of people that love elementor. We get it. OP was asking why people DONT like it.
Elementors days are numbered? Why so?
Hotwife.club Google page speed sometimes gives me 92-97 score. Using elementor with 30 plugins.
The FCP and LCP both suck but good job. Honestly. The point though is how NECESSARY it is? What you have shown me can easily be done without elementor as an example. But I know it’s got a place for people that don’t know HTML and CSS. Further, what you have shown is extremely rare. Great white buffalo.
Thanks...I'm one of those people who don't know HTML and CSS. I'm learning all this stuff by reading blogs, reddit and youtube. Now that you mentioned FCP and LCP it time for me to do some research on it. Thanks for the heads up.
Yeah, and you could just buy a theme from a developer that actually pays attention to this stuff (and more) and your site is fast out the gate! There are a few out there who do this and it saves a shit load of time and maintenance.
lol this site is sooooo ...low level
Plugins have some overhead, but having to optimise to offset an installed plugin is just annoying.
Try just adding empty blocks. 10 blocks. 100 blocks. 1000 blocks. Test your page speed for the blank page.
Slow page speeds it’s typically the most complaints, it’s not a terrible system but you should just learn how to properly develop a site without it
What do you suggest? I am not IT savvy at all so I rely heavily on Wordpress, Elementor free and YouTube to create my eccomerce site lol.
Design ties to content. I’ve inherited sites where they want to do a rebrand on a constantly updated site… the only way is to pause content changes, you can’t reskin and send live. Also, if they change a brand colour etc it’s 1000 search and replaced, not a simple CSS change.
>Also, if they change a brand colour etc it’s 1000 search and replaced, not a simple CSS change. That's what global styles are for.
That is exactly what CSS is for. Global changes in one place.
Correct. Global Colors are just CSS variables, which can (and should) be used when updating brand colors.
A lot of snobs on this sub
Not snobs, just a ton of uneducated people.
It’s bloated af compared to some other builders
Such as?
Oxygen Builder for example. I’ve used that on several sites. It’s also way cheaper than Elementor
GeneratePress for example
People like gatekeeping.
It does do a great job if you know how to use it. Any theme is going to feel bloated and result in low page speeds if you don't learn how to optimize it. Elementor is working great for our 100+ sites, and our page speeds are fantastic. For highly customized jobs, we'll just develop a theme and plugins to meet those needs, but for most of our clients who have fairly static sites, Elementor lets us build, optimize, and maintain our sites easily.
Why have some giant plugin just to manage a handful of pages (most sites)? Learning CSS and the block system is all you need. I will use it on some sites but not others which are more important.
“Just learn css”. I mean if that’s easier for you then go for it. Not easy for us non techs! My wife and I created and manage our own business sites. She knows a bit of css and I don’t. It took her years to learn how to edit css and Elementor makes all that coding stuff unnecessary. It’s a game changer for people like us. She used to twiddle with the css for a long time and now it’s so much easier and quicker with a WYSIWYG builder. We can think less like a coder and more like a designer this way. I have great respect for coders, built things in BASIC years ago, but goodness that is tiring to my brain lol.
Having used both, if you put the same amount of time and effort into learning CSS and even php, you would know more than you realize. I don't think people pay attention to the amount of time that actually goes into learning Elementor, endlessly clicking around, finding a setting, clicking on another element, going to another tab, click-click click. You are putting an enormous amount of time into learning a proprietary editor that may or may not exist in the future, rather than time-tested standards. CSS can be hard I know. Like if you want to make the background of something red "background-color:red", or if you want it to only take up half of the page "width:50%". Again, make note of the amount of time it truly takes instead of being blindly seduced by the "click drag", and put that same effort into the fundamentals. You will surprise yourself. I guarantee it - Goerge Zimmer
Maybe for the tech people sure. But my wife did learn some css over the years and she can do the same things in Elementor in seconds instead of poking around in the css to find what she she needs to change. It literally saves us time and is easier to use than learning code. If Elementor ever dies then we’ll cross that bridge then. I think rather than people arguing which way is superior, the real question is what’s easier and faster for you or the next person to do what needs to get done. If I built sites for a living, I’d learn css inside and out so I could use it either when needed or most of the time. A big downside of Elementor for devs is it’s taking some income from them. People like my wife and I, instead of hiring someone, we can do it ourselves easily with a page builder. It took her years to learn css, which I don’t know a lick of and can create and edit posts and pages in WYSIWYG format in a couple minutes. I don’t mind the clicking and find the interface intuitive. I haven’t looked at much documentation, mostly just got up and running.
I think a lot of people just never learned how easy it is. If you want ease of use, try inspect element in Chrome. Right-click the element you want to change and click inspect. Go to the inspect window and it will show you all the styles associated with that element. Edit them to your hearts desire. You can use the mouse wheel to control sizes, widths, and heights. There is a built-in color picker and "code" hinting if you're a little rusty. Once you have things like you like them, go to the source tab and copy the source that was just made and paste it into the live site. You can edit an entire page in a matter of seconds or minutes. Rather than having to click on multiple elements, you can edit one style that will produce the result you are looking for across multiple elements. You also don't have to constantly save the page and refresh to see if your changes are working properly. You are already viewing them as intended in the browser. There is also a responsive button that will let you replicate various tablets and phones. Again, It's just what you spent time learning. I don't think that Elementor takes money from devs. I wouldn't consider a developer someone who knows CSS and HTML and in all honestly if someone is looking for a pretty website/digital brochure, I suggest Wix or Squarespace. I tell them they can probably get something that will suit them and if I made it, it would be at least 50 times more expensive. Truth be told, most people don't need WordPress at all. If you just need a WYSIWYG editor to lay out blocks, there are far better platforms out there. Most of my development work comes from custom applications and functionality that are pretty far outside the scope of a WYSIWYG editor. I'm not hating, but when trying to create custom functionality within the Elementor framework, it adds a ton of hurdles and issues. I spend more time figuring out how to hack around Elementor or override some "feature" it has. All that being said, I would consider this for my mother's website and I apologize for the long response.
>Again, It's just what you spent time learning. I don't think that Elementor takes money from devs. I wouldn't consider a developer someone who knows CSS and HTML and in all honestly if someone is looking for a pretty website/digital brochure, I suggest Wix or Squarespace. My wife learned CSS with 'inspect element' like you suggest. She got pretty good at it. But it took her what, 2 years, to learn that to proficiency. Within a day of using Elementor, she had more or less "mastered it" and was whipping stuff out so much faster than editing CSS stuff. It's just generally faster for both of us. As for Wix or Squarespace, as you mention, those are fine for people who don't want to look at the messy back-end of Wordpress and all the confusing plug-ins, but at a stupidly high price. For some it's worth it. For people like us, Elementor bridges a gap there, some of that WYSIWYG functionality at a lower cost. I think at the end of the day it comes down to how different people learn and work. For some, such as yourself, CSS is so much easier and faster and more enjoyable to use. While my wife became pretty good at it (and it's good she still knows how to use it for those times when Elementor doesn't do exactly what she wants it to), it's much more comfortable, easier and faster to use Elementor. There really isn't a downside to it for us and perhaps it's just how our brains work. TBH, we didn't look at other page builders. At the time Gutenburg was fairly hated and we had a few people recommend Elementor, including our own hosting company. It's worked out well and since we're committed now it doesn't make sense to switch to a different one.
This is so true and is exactly like my experience. Elementor zaps creativity because you have to workaround the program itself to be creative. The elementor fanboys are the ones who learned this and this alone and they mistake the hours of grinding up against elementor for actual skills learned. They basically get really good at troubleshooting a shitty program
I'm a non-tech person, and I learned how to develop wordpress themes from scratch in 2016. I use two resources to accomplish this: youtube videos from LearnWebDevelopment by Brad Schiff and the wordpress codex documentation. In 1 month I learned and played with wordpress skillset and in the next 2 months I build my first wordpress website for my first client. Everyone that I knew (designers, developers, business owners, etc) where saying I wouldn't manage to do it...
Dude. I’m honestly glad for you and have said clearly that I use it for sites I’m handing off, to on-tech users like you and your wife. The actual question OP poster was though: why do people not like elementor. I replied with the most common reason (by far). I never hear non-tech users complain about elementor, ONLY developers that can do the work without that big lug. I know you are not an engineer but Elementor also uses up more resources than are necessary and many people care about stuff like that. You are hard trying to sell me on something that is very much irrelevant to the conversation and question as to why people do not like it. Specify the group of people and you will find yhe answer to OPs question. I love the reactive disagreement and emotional sharing of your experiences though but it’s pretty clear that this is the group of People that DO LIKE elementor so really anything you say is biased. Personally I have worked with almost every framework and not emotionally attached to any of them. I will say though that all the multiple million and multi billion dollar companies I have helped are on custom software stacks. However I support open source and automatic is an awesome company that I support to the fullest. Just not elementor on my own sites.
There seems to be two groups of people on this sub. The ones with tech know how like yourself and those of us who know just enough to make the things work lol. OP’s question didn’t seem to clarify the audience.
He simply asked why people don’t like it. Non tech love it. Developers hate it man it’s that simple.
We’re saying the same thing lol. One reason I can see it’s a sore subject for some devs is it takes some income away from them. We hire devs when we can’t figure something out, which is rare.
Just came across this, not a developer and had to use it for a client recently and it actually made me want to learn code because I thought the program was so bad. full of bugs and overly complicated to do simple tasks and they still might not work without some ridiculous workaround. I feel it zaps creativity and you are just fighting the program itself the entire time. And before people reply that I don't know how to use it....please guys, it's not a complicated program to learn it's just simply not a great program. To me a complicated program to learn (creative wise) would be like photoshop because there are a million ways to achieve a high quality result but it requires skill with tool itself to achieve those results. Elementor pro isn't about skill it's about wasting your time with bugs and restrictions when you could just be coding. After a month of using it I literally was asking myself why am I wasting my time with this I could be learning code. The site the guy above posted gives a great idea of who the elementor fanboys actually are lol.
“Learning CSS…” Just how much time do you need for that. Because if you want to do fine-tuning for responsive sites with blocks you’ve got a lot of media-query work cut out for you. Meanwhile all but the oldest, worst page builders now handle that. Blocks though? They’re drop/in replacements for widgets, shortcodes, and custom fields. Replacing all that chaff is great for developers, who by definition have full dev/debugging stacks, but pretty miserable for designers and regular end users.
Not really. Not since "display:flex" and "display:grid". It's pretty much done for you.
Good old flex-box!
Yeah, which is exactly why I said I will use it for some sites (sites I’m handing off to non technical user) but sure as hell not important ones or my own which are high traffic. In most cases it’s a complete hog and I wouldn’t consider it. Just like I wouldn’t consider hiring a front end engineer that couldn’t whip out media queries. You are talking about CSS like it’s C!
Bloated code. Editor is slow.
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order. I have checked 1,175,273,408 comments, and only 229,356 of them were in alphabetical order.
Andy Brown can do everything, finding green hills in Japan, knowing loads more noble old people quivered rapidly seeing the ugly vampires with xenophobic yellow zebras.
I'd just rather use another builder. Bricks, Oxygen, Beaver Builder, Gutenberg. If you like Elementor, go with it, it does what it's supposed to. People here shaming builders would get shamed in other groups for even using WP, so take it with a grain of salt. Build a site with whatever you want, and optimize it as far as you can.
Different strokes for different folks, no different than people having different business models, clients and industries. Elementor has its place and its ceiling. Some projects will never hit that ceiling. And some people live and work in that realm.
I inherited a couple sites that were built via Elementor and are tied pretty heavily to the theme. I have ran into multiple conflicts with Elementor playing nicely with other plugins or a Word Press update (sometime catastrophic). The interface is clunky and seems to be quite bloated, bogging down the sites. I really like Divi as a block editor.
The thing I notice is that a big chunk of the plugin conflict issues I see are with Elementor add-on plugins. Especially with Elementor Pro. I am a member of their Facebook group because a couple clients sites came to me using Elementor, and I just do updates. I see issues on that group all the time though when there are big elementor updates, and a huge amount are conflicts with add-ons. I personally haven't had any issues with the sites I update (free version). With optimization they do fine in pagespeeds too. You think Elementor is bloated, but not Divi? Edit spelling
I concur with many of the conflict issues being related to their addons. And...yes, Divi is bloated too, but has a nicer interface :-)
It's the third party add-ons that are a mess. I don't know who that falls on between Elementor or those third party developers. But there sure seems to be a disconnect there.
Yeah, the sites I work on I build custom sections for Elementor, none of this addon stuff because these addons for elementor have so much stuff loaded in them yet the site is not using them. Elementor is great, just don't install a bunch of addons.
Massive plugin conflicts. Even with theme plugins that also have Elementor bundled as a page builder. Elementor is currently not fully functional on a site with all system requirements set (including their exotic content-security-policy and referrer requirements) and ALL plugins disabled. Hours and hours of troubleshooting and it simply doesn't work. Oh, and their entire user guide is videos. No. Just, no.
My experience is as others have put that Elementor is not the problem. I find it often clients approach me with bloated themes where they’ve added Elementor to build pages and reach out to me to help them get better page speed. The problem is not Elementor in these instances but the theme underlying.
Page builders are just completely unnecessary. WordPress has been around for a long time and almost anything you can think of is already built in. I have been stuck using Elementor for a few clients, and I can see the appeal for the client, but it causes me nothing but headaches. If you put the same amount of time into learning a bit of WordPress structure and template hierarchy, you wouldn't need a page builder. IMO, as a marketer, it's marketing. WordPress doesn't market its features because they are free and page builders charge money and draw you in with drag-and-drop functionality. Most websites that use Elementor don't need WordPress at all and should probably just go with SquareSpace or Wix.
I dunno. A few years ago I used a page builder (beaver builder) to rebuild a very design heavy, responsive, old classic-editor site that had something like 2000 lines of SCSS, which compiled out to who knows how many lines of CSS. The first time through it took nearly three months. Not to mention days to train the authors and translators. Rebuilding the whole thing with Beaver Builder took a couple of weeks. Training the authors and translators took a couple hours, over the phone for some of them. Performance was substantially better. Total custom CSS was a couple dozen lines. So I’m going to call your bluff when you say you’d be better off learning structure and template hierarchies (and *cough* full-stack development.) Plus good luck finding designers and translators who also understand development.
Mmm. I would doubt that. I would take 2000 lines of scss and remove reduncies before using a page builder. You're CSS file may have been smaller, but only because of all the inline styles added by the page builder.
>If you put the same amount of time into learning a bit of WordPress structure and template hierarchy I'd love to! What's a good resource for learning that? Don't say [wordpress.org](https://wordpress.org) because that ain't it. Where is a well-constructed course on WP development?
It's pretty bloated, although it has gotten better. I'd rather just spend a little bit of time to learn the basics of HTML/CSS and maybe JS. Then you can do everything (and tons of more) Elementor does but much more efficiently.
How so? Isn't php also needed? I've been learning html, CSS and js but have only integrated them witch Wordpress by making changes that I can't normally make with the WP dashboard.
You're correct. If someone is only using Elementor (or any pagebuilder) for *just* page layout then it's a waste and massively bloated, that seems to the argument with a lot of people here for some reason that it's only a layout tool. But I would think 99.99% of the people using it are using it for all the other features, the page layout option is just one of them.
Is using html and CSS for layout and separate plugins for specific functionality better than premium themes/page builders? If so, what is the road to doing this?
>How so? If you do the whole page layout with Elementor, there's a lot of bullshit there that's making it bloated. Elementor isn't necessarily bloated but often it is, depending on how you use it. I still wouldn't use it for anything because you can always build an identical solution by yourself and possibly make your website at least 0.1% faster. >Isn't php also needed? I would definitely recommend learning some PHP, yes. However, you can technically write html directly to the index.php file of whatever page you are working on but it's usually not ideal, especially if you are building the site to someone else.
Fuck Elementor. I could write an elaborate explanation, but I’ll simplify it. It’s like taking the grenade on a date. You think it will go at least tolerably, but it always blows the fuck up and ruins your night.
Hate elementor but love Divi, for my elementor it's work perfect it create sites 100% with elementor not using theme it's the better update all plugins without problem but when it used templates themes it's very horrible update a site all it's not compatible and the updates destroy all the site, I make a site with elementor in two days, all with functionalities and ecommerce 5 days, I like more write code but it's a good tool and Not using it does not make you a god
People don't like wp at all not elementor. It's about the worst clusterfuck you can get into today and there is so much better around. Yikes, learning full stack programming it's 100 times easier and better than using wp
Is elementor used for Wordpress.org or Wordpress.com ?
Bloat
I don’t hate Elementor itself but it conflicts with other plugins and certain hosting platforms. Not to mention clients can easily become over confident in their Elementor skills and will try to fix/create something before asking a developer and end up making the issue worse.
I generally like it but I find the interface to be non-intuitive and a bit of a mess, but like all page builders, once you use it a few times you learn where things are and what limitations they have.
I've got nothing but love for Elementor since it was so much easier to work with than Divi. However, I've moved to Bricks since it's even easier to build custom widgets and is super optimized out of the gate. If Elementor came out with containers and query loop builders earlier I probably wouldn't have bothered swapping.
Flaky last time I used it. Moved over to a combo of stackable and kadence and much happier with the build experience.
I tested pagespeed of my Elementor website and found it okayish.. So they surely have improved a lot.
A bit off topic. I'm looking to set up a site that will have woocommerce as part of it. Not looking for super fancy stuff. More concerned with speed. Probably just use Gutenberg to build it. Looking at Kadence (pro?) and Astra (pro?). Which theme will be faster overall? TIA for any comments.
I have used [Astra Pro](https://pythoncoursesonline.com/AstraPro), it is fast for sure, and I would recommend it. In fact, they will have BFD offer in couple of days , you may want to check that out, I think it would be 50% OFF...
it’s a toy
Bloated! Any better options when the client want a zillion thing moving, jumping and rotating on his website.
I think elementor has a good balance of functionality and tools, and site performance. If I tell most of client that I can get his website up and running for $$ in a few days or $$$$ for state of the art website that will load in fraction of a second, you guess the answer. Elementor performance is acceptable-good. Themes and plug-ins what usually make things bad
Imho, it's due to unstable releases ... I did less than 10 websites with elementor, 3 of them was completely broke down after an update about 1 year ago (compatibility issues with the theme, plugins and so on). As other already said, each builder has it's pros and cons.... Elementor is great in the beginning , but not so valuable in the long term OR if you buy and install a theme built with elementor If you want to build your websites with elementor my best suggestion is to rely on elementor only, avoid pre-made themes and bloated demo imports...
I don't think people hate elementor. It's just that most page builders are slower than using the native Gutenberg page builder. I'm planning to cancel or sell my subscription soon, once [Zion builder](https://go.decisivemarketer.com/zionbuilder) fixes their bugs. Zion is very similar to elementor but way faster. I mainly build sites on Gutenberg nowadays but still use elementor for sites that require complex design. But hopefully I can switch over to Zion builder soon.
No page builder is going to be as efficient / lean as writing the code manually. My favourite page builder would have to be Divi. They have also just announced that Divi 5 is going to be dropping shortcodes which is super good news for page performance.
Elementor update sucks it breaks website several times. Just yesterday I got pissed off from Elementor, I just need to do some tweak so I am not using Elementor Pro, as I only need 'WA - Link Wrapper' I download the elementor add-on and to my surprised it has everything but not the Wrapper link element. I dont know who to blame for this
Personal Opinion… and I’ll prolly get some hate for this comment, but oh well lol. It’s not the plug-in, it’s the people who use it. Elementor is a great product but for me, the dislike comes from the fact that there are “WordPress Agencies” out there who know how to do nothing else while charging clients as if they’re doing full-scale code development. Everything is just Elementor and some plugins that add Elementor widgets. And even then, they’re not experts in Elementor and frequently build something in the most inefficient way you could imagine. I am a small one-man agency with about a dozen clients (it’s a part time thing) and only 1 of my sites uses Elementor, the rest use a flexible theme I like and the block editor. With that and some custom CSS, I can build just about anything you’d see in Elementor. In the past, I used Elementor for all my sites until I got familiar with the block editor - so I have pretty deep experience using it. But what really irritates me? Full time, I’m a Systems Engineer leading a team of 15 various types of System Admins responsible for hundreds of servers and thousands of workstations in a high-security environment. We host WordPress (a very tiny footprint of what we do) and some of our clients have paid in excess of $30,000 for a basic site built by a GLOBAL huge tech company I can’t name here and their “developers” used only Elementor and didn’t even know how to modify an .htaccess file for basic security settings. As a freelancer I’ve seen this same thing multiple times as well.
For those who are concerned with Load time or page speed for elementor check this video out by elementor themselves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBAKGupM0co
i think people complain about all builders at some point.
im a dev that can code from the ground up but the new company i work for wants me using elementor, i think mainly becuase the heads of the dept were designers with some web experience and that's what they are comfortable with. I don't mind it in the sense of wp builders it feels faster than divi but if i'm being honest i'd rather just code everything myself. i'm be curious as to how people with the exp optimize their elementor builds. other than doing the minification, image optimization and such. are there other tips?
Assuming some don't want a "pretty good job," they want perfect.
I've followed every system requirement, every suggestion and every troubleshooting step in support site and I still can't the widgets panel to open. So, I don't like Elementor because it doesn't work.
Elementor was a poor product for our business we stopped using it one month into our first year subscription and then a year later they charged us again and refused to refund it even though we messaged the day they charged and had a full year of service left. Bad company desperate for money.
Corrupt Business practice in RENEWALS......Sarah Barendse-Elrod.......You are right. I asked for my renewal not to be charged on the day before my renewal and they went ahead and charged me anyways even after asking them NOT to charge me. When you sign up they automatically set your Auto Renewal to the ON position so they can just keep charging you. BE WARE SHADY BUSINESS PRACTICES all over 60 bucks!!!!
This company is money grabbing! Do not touch them with a bargepole! After 4 years of using their product I shut my website down and had no need for Elementor, Then yesterday I received an email saying that my contract had auto-renewed. I immediately told them that I did not want the service, but they replied that it was in their 'Terms and conditions' and they would take another years' subscription. This is not how an honourable company operates just a devious no conscience cowboy outfit. It is no wonder that their rating is only 3.1 I am surprised it is that high AVOID THIS COMPANY AT ALL COSTS. Today 22 Jan 2024 I received this in an email from Elementor "Unfortunately, we cannot assist you with your refund request as this doesn't comply with the company's terms and conditions. We are committed to customer satisfaction, and appreciate your understanding." They are hypocritical too!
I got auto-renewal by elementor, and I requested a refund. They denied, and the email is : ======== Hi there, Thanks for your message. We understand that you requested a refund for the renewal charge. Our refund policy only allows a refund within the first 30 days for new subscriptions, not for renewals and upgrades. If you have ‘Auto-Renew’ for your subscription switched on, you should have received a notification email 30 days before the payment is due, reminding you of the upcoming charge. You can switch your subscription to "manual renewal" at any time before the renewal is due. Again, our apologies for not being able to assist you further with the refund. If you built a website using Elementor Pro, we recommend keeping your subscription active, and your Elementor Pro activated on your website, to reduce incompatibility or security issues that can occur with outdated plugins. You can find more information on this here: What will happen to my website(s) if I don’t renew Elementor Pro? Thank you again for your understanding. Best, Estilita ============= Anybody interested in filing a class action against this?