But without experience, the adventure is not as easy as you think, and bad choices are made unconsciously. So thankfully, the community has built numerous extensions (plugins) that break this barrier with the lack of knowledge. Elementor is one of the players who is making the most noise in the WordPress community (and the one who does the most marketing at the same time).
Admittedly, writing a negatively sounding article is not fun, but it seems important to us to Restoring the truth on certain aspects that may be blocking your growth.
Use a builder to building a website is a path full of pitfalls. Creative, flexible and scalable, this is the promise that we are often sold. But what is behind these builders?
If you have already used a builder, like us you have probably used several page builders before you find one that's right for you. And even the one selected rarely brings you complete satisfaction. There is a good chance of having the Feeling limited, of not achieving your goals or of creating critical errors without knowing it.
Elementor is able to make a difference, and has convinced millions of users. If you are reading this article, you are probably using it on a daily basis to manage one or more sites. But is it really the right choice?
So, let's get to the heart of the matter, let's start with What you get starting with Elementor, and continuing with What you probably don't know using Elementor.
On paper, Elementor for WordPress seems to be a great solution for building a site, and launch a digital business.
Comparable to other editors like Wix or Squarespace, the experience is similar with Elementor. You can start with a pre-designed theme, or with a blank slate.
You can connect Elementor to any WordPress theme, magic isn't it? You get a completely new editor, more intuitive than the native WordPress one.
You edit your pages directly on the front-end. You have a real-time overview of the evolution of your page, and you have the power to change the design of your sections.
Indeed, there are other builders who will bring you the same advantages as those mentioned in the previous sub-part.
But you won't have as many options with the free plan, as many themes available, or access to the same support that the Elementor community has developed over the years.
Without needing to be a designer, it's easy to approve the work that Elementor does to simplify the ability to create a professional site.
You will probably have the same site as thousands of others. With your colors and your photos, it will already be a bit more unique and you will have saved a lot of time to design your site, with a very low budget.
If the choice of a theme does not suit you, you can use the “blocks”. They are simple sections that you can easily copy into your page.
Some are free, others are chargeable. The choice is quite vast in the part offered, but you will quickly be limited if you have needs that go beyond a “standard” framework.
To be effective and avoid reproduce existing games in the site, you can save sections in your Elementor space.
In particular, you can export your templates and use them on other WordPress sites that use Elementor. This is a great feature when you manage multiple sites, and You took the time to build unique sections.
Yes, it's true that the editor gives you control of all the elements on a page. You can edit almost every detail that makes up your page, be it content blocks, widgets, images, columns, divs, etc.
In the advanced editor, you can be specific. You can use pixels, percentages (even if we recommend rems), fix items on the page, change the spaces between columns, add hover effects, etc.
In short, you have your hand.
Useful and practical, get a rendering of your pages on the mobile and the tablet. From this space, you can modify the same elements as the desktop view, but assign values only for the size of a device.
But the responsive does not happen by itself, if you start with a blank slate, you will have to change all the elements on each device to be sure that everything is displayed correctly on the screen.
We recommend using rems, and percentages to save time when adapting on mobile. Fixed pixel values may make you nauseous when you have dozens of pages to manage.
Sometimes, two or three rollbacks are not enough to redo the “attempted” changes to a section. Without Elementor, it's sometimes A disaster since you don't have the option to cancel your changes.
With the “History” panel, you visualize all your changes and you have the control to restore the entirety of your old page (at the risk of other changes that were valid).
Once all these points have been stated, it's quite tempting. But these benefits are only the Visible part of the iceberg. It's time to list almost all of the side effects of these features.
No tool is perfect. All the tools we use on a daily basis have drawbacks and sometimes require adjustments in relation to our needs. So, let's be honest, and tell us what you need to know about these builders, and more specifically Elementor.
When using a builder like Elementor, you can't Do not change your pages without going through their publisher. When you're building with the editor, you're stuck in that space, and you don't have There's no way to go back to another builder. The only solution is to do it all over again. Most builders also don't allow code to be exported, which means thatno correction is possible in the HTML files.
Losing the ability to access the code means losing the ability to be reactive quickly in case of a problem.
When designing a site, the best practice is to write a consistent code, reusable, and efficient. With Elementor, you get the opposite since the builder allows you to add style in all directions on all elements and this generates an incalculable number of classes.
As a reminder, when you specify that a title should be bigger, you are using a class. If you want to put the sub-description in another color, that's another class, and so on.
All the changes you make in the Elementor editor will add to your code, and therefore the weight of the page.
If branding is a key topic for you, you're rushing into a wall with Elementor, or even another WordPress builder. When you want to change something across your site, it's a nightmare.
You can make unlimited changes on each page, but you won't be able to set up a global style without a paid plan. Again, you're stepping out of the free plan to counter this problem.
Recently, we migrated a site designed with Elementor to Webflow, the observation is distressing.
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Elementor is not optimized for search engines. It is more difficult to position yourself in the first pages (SERP) with this builder. Elementor is not designed to generally optimize your WordPress site. You will need to connect others SEO tools to achieve your goals.
When you use Elementor to build pages, you're not using WordPress's maximum potential for SEO. Indeed, Elementor generates its own HTML markup, this interferes directly with native WordPress tags.
Without knowing it, Elementor will massively add code to your pages. To display a simple block of text, Elementor will add between 6 and 10 divs, while the bare essentials are a single div. This has a direct impact on the charging time since your code is heavier and therefore less efficient.
There is no need to remind you of the impact of load time on SEO. Since the update of Core Web Vitals, Google even more favors sites that are ultra-fast, and that meet its criteria.
If SEO is a real topic for you, and a promising channel for your business, you should stay away from the Elementor extension.
There are other builders, and CMS that provide much better performance for SEO. Our big favorite, and the one we use for almost all of our customers, is Webflow.
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There are modules in Elementor that are not optimized for the natural referencing. And without specific expertise in this field, it is quite normal to miss this information.
But why?
Google uses the DOM (Document Object Model) to understand the content of a page. This allows scripts to examine and interpret what's on the page.
And the problem comes from the fact that Elementor displays the DOM in the code only after an interaction (clicking on an icon for example) on some modules. Since it's not in the code initially, Google can't find it, and So it doesn't index this part.
Imagine for a moment, you are using a module like the pop-up generator for your main menu. That would be a very big Error for SEO, since we know that the main menu and the footer have a positive impact on pages, so beware of Elementor modules.
An even more questionable subject is that Elementor distributes tutorials on its blog or help center to perform certain actions with the modules. At first glance, that's good. But in reality, they do not explain at any time thenegative impact on SEO of these actions.
Which is impossible for a beginner on this part, impossible to verify. The team should warn its users about the impact of certain practices on a site. If not, it is a serious mistake on their part.
The problem with some builders, like Elementor or Divi, is that they were not designed to be very efficient.
The hidden part of these builders is that they automatically add a lot of useless code in the HTML code. Themes and plugins already do this naturally, which means that with a builder like Elementor, you will multiply your code by 5 or 10 potentially.
Unwittingly, when you use Elementor, you get this:
And all of this will have a huge impact on the loading time and code quality of your pages.
A quick reminder of the importance of loading time:
You should know that not everything is the fault of the builders, it is also the fault of the users. Since they have the ability to add numerous widgets, and can make changes to almost any element.
They will, without knowing it, add rich content everywhere, change the style excessively sometimes, and as a result, the page will naturally be slow. And that's not to mention forgetting to search for optimized images and lightweight videos for the web.
The worst part of all of this is that even if you are aware of the impact of your actions, you will not have the hand to correct it. So yes, you can add HTML code freely into your page, but you cannot edit the one that is present thanks to their WYSIWYG editor.
The way to understand this is very simple, as soon as you add an element to your page, you normally add a few lines of code. And each additional line will have a negative impact on the Code weight.
Elementor prioritizes the interface forfront-end editing, and does not give the possibility to clean up the HTML code. So unfortunately, to add a simple text field, you will sometimes unwittingly add 10 divs, when in reality you only need one.
If you take an entire page that contains a video, dozens of images, animations, titles, texts and dynamic elements, you will have thousands of lines of code, which is very problematic.
We had the opportunity to migrate an Elementor site to Webflow in 2022. The observation is obvious, here are the results.
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The charging time of the site in question went from 8 seconds to less than a second, with more animation and the same design. And that with a more coherent responsive between each page at the same time.
Elementor has been available on the market for years. And nothing has really shown over the years that the extension was going to take a turn in the way it worked.
In fact, the opposite is true, over time, the extension evolves and they continue to add new features that come make the operation of sites more cumbersome. The average user does not need these features, and yet they still load and make pages heavier.
While doing some research on Elementor, we found lots of sites that take more than 10 seconds to load in full. This problem concerns almost all sites designed with Elementor, if no optimization has been done.
It is true that there are solutions for optimize the loading of a site WordPress built with Elementor. But at what price?
That said, we can still give you ways to improve if you have come this far to do so:
We deliberately did the simplest thing since that is not the subject of this article, but what do you think?
A short question, is it your daily job to build a website? If the answer is no, it's not up to you to do that. And you have no interest in learning all that except wasting time and money.
Oh yeah, we forgot to tell you something. Once you have optimized all these points, you will encounter Another problem : use fewer extensions on WordPress to maintain good performance.
It's the snake biting its own tail. You have to install extensions to optimize performance, but when you install plugins, you degrade performance. Smart.
If you are using WordPress for manage your site, there is no need to recall the impact of an update or the risks you take each time you click the buttons to upgrade a version.
When the team that maintains Elementor rolls out new versions with major changes, they generate Unwittingly bugs which have a more than harmful impact on the instances of their users. And unfortunately when that happens, you don't always have the right backup at hand for get your site back up and running quickly.
It is easily readable on the web, the community welcomes the new features, but they strongly criticize the lack of care by the team that manages Elementor.
When you have millions of active installations as is their case, it is mandatory to test all impacts possible before deploying the version to the general public.
So yes, you can set up a safety net to avoid having “critical” problems. Here are some best practices:
For the first two points, you should have enough technical skills to perform these tasks. It is nothing very complex, but if you are not comfortable with FTP access for example, you may lose hair.
We're not used to using Elementor on a daily basis, so we can't say much more about it. But, after doing some research, we quickly notice that the support is sometimes insufficient.
And this point should be put on hold since in fact, if you deploy an update that prevents the proper functioning of the sites, all affected users will contact support, and they will no longer be able to handle incoming requests as quickly.
They have had a lot of problems in the past, and the comments are often related to these bad times. It must be said that with more than 5 million installations, you must be able to set up a support that is more than effective in keeping all users at the same time. Level of satisfaction.
If support is an undeniable option for you, it will be necessary to take a professional plan to get feedback more quickly.
As fast as it is, the editor is not always as reliable as it is effective. Elementor is not the best student on this point, and you won't need to spend hours on it to realize that it bugs at times.
If you have a problem, you will probably have to force reload your page or leave the editor to come back later. This doesn't happen every day, but blocking can be more complex than a simple +R command.
We've compiled a short list of the main issues that the community sees quite frequently:
This is not the subject of this article, but to correct each of these problems, you have several possible options:
For a beginner who is starting with WordPress, the learning curve is not that obvious. Like all the tools that you start using, it is important to take the time to master them.
The problem with this learning curve is that beyond taking time to understand how to use the extension properly, you can unwittingly create many errors that will be harmful to your natural referencing, the coherence of the site or its performance.
To avoid this, you can watch tutorials on YouTube. Buy an online course on Elementor, or hire a freelancer to help you start the project. Hoping that this same person is comfortable doing it as cleanly as possible, otherwise it will cost you More expensive to do everything again later with an experienced professional.
Although the number of builders available is considerable, 3 actors dominate this market on WordPress: Elementor Builder, Beaver Builder and Divi Builder.
It is true that these builders are the best on the market in terms of features, but None is better one than the other in relation to all the problems mentioned above. The only difference between these editors will be mainly on the user interface, and on the price. Elementor is the most competitive, which is probably why it is also the most used.
If you are looking for performance, that the SEO is an important subject for you, and if you care about the management of your site, these builders will not bring you complete satisfaction.
As you can see, this article highlights a lot of flaws and drawbacks about sites that use Elementor.
But if Elementor has so many users around the world, it's because websites don't have all the same issues. Indeed, when the objective of the site is to be a pretty window, simple to present the company with no real digital development challenges, then Elementor is an appropriate solution for all the reasons mentioned above.
However, if you are concerned with the technical quality of your site, as well as the development of your business via digital channels (SEO, Search Ads, Social Ads, etc.), you should stay quite far from these builders who will only do you wasting time and Some money over the long term.
The real opportunity to achieve speed and performance is found in more personalized and tailor-made solutions. We strongly recommend that you take an interest in the topics of Headless CMS, and Webflow (our favorite is the CMS we use for manage the site of our Angular agency).
With these solutions, you will have professionals in front of you who know write code neatly, with SEO practices in line with the expectations of search engines in order to develop a performance-first structure. All of this while putting your business objective first.
Do yourself a favor and let your competitors make that mistake.
At Angular, we offer you to get the free Technical score of your website. You will have access to simple information on its performance, and enough precision to judge the quality of its code.
Knowing your site's score is important for a number of reasons. Among other things, it allows you to understand what your limits are, to obtain areas for improvement to improve the performance of your website, but also to assess your potential future.
As you can imagine, if we talk so much about performance, we have to be a good student. So the technical score for this page is 99 out of 100, a score of 99 out of 100 for the quality of its code, and an onload timing (loading of all resources) which is 340 milliseconds.
Knowing the score of your site is the first necessary step to assess the overall quality of your site in terms of performance, security, natural referencing, but also for the user experience.
However, this information won't be enough for you to make bigger decisions in the long run. Sometimes it is necessary to carry out an SEO audit to better understand your environment and thus act accordingly.
It will help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your current SEO strategy. You will thus obtain axes to improve your positioning in the search results.
Over the past years, we have carried out more than 250 audits, we have developed our own method to understand and act according to your resources.
You will have understood it if you have read this article or even several other articles on our blog. We are strong supporters of Webflow since it is the first CMS that has brought us so much satisfaction from the start.
It has become our reference for creating small sites, larger sites, but also for internal projects. When technology gets complicated, we couple it with Next.js in Vercel, and so we can do wonders. But Webflow does not meet all expectations either, we can help you find out if this CMS is made for you or not.
However, if you are looking to stimulate your growth, to do SEO to gain positions in Google, and to acquire more generally, the CMS is for you. With its advanced features, flexibility, and ease of use, it offers a complete solution that allows for efficiency and high performance.
If you want to know more about reasons to use Webflow, we have written a fairly extensive article on the subject.