This afternoon, I took a few hours and built my first client site using Elementor. If you’re in the WordPress industry, you’ve probably already heard the buzz about Elementor, they’ve just hit 2 million installations! My friend Andrew, who operates NetGain Associates, told me about the plugin and I’ve already bought an unlimited license to implement it everywhere!
WordPress has been feeling the heat on its relatively barbaric editing capabilities. They recently updated to Gutenberg, a block-level editor that does provide some additional functionality… but it’s no where close to the paid alternatives on the market. In all honesty, I hope they just purchase one of these more advanced plugins.
For the last couple years, I’ve been utilizing Avada for all of my clients. The theme is elegantly constructed, utilizing a combination of both theme and plugin to maintain formatting capabilities. It’s both well-supported and has some fantastic elements that previously required development or purchases.
Elementor is different because it’s only a plugin and can seamlessly work with virtually any theme. On the site I built for this client today, I just used a base theme that the Elementor team recommended, the Elementor Hello Theme.
I was able to build a fully responsive site with sticky menus, footer regions, customized landing pages, and form integration… right out of the box. It did take a little bit of getting used to Elementor’s hierarchy, but once I understood the templating, section capability, and elements, I was able to drag and drop the entire site within a few minutes. It saved me days of time and I didn’t have to edit a single line of code nor CSS!
WordPress Popup Publishing Rules and Designs
It’s not often a plugin comes with such incredible capabilities, but with Elementor, you can set conditions, triggers, and advanced rules for how you want popups to publish… all in an easy interface:
The designer is quite phenomenal, and they even provide some off-the shelf examples for you to design!
In Addition to the Popup Functionality, Marketing Features Include
- Action Links – Easily connect with your audience via WhatsApp, Waze, Google Calendar & more apps
- Countdown Widget – Increase the sense of urgency by adding a countdown timer to your offer.
- Form Widget – Goodbye backend! Create all your forms live, right from the Elementor editor.
- Landing Pages –Creating and managing landing pages has never been this easy, all within your current WordPress website.
- Rating Star Widget – Add some social proof to your website by including a star rating and styling it to your liking.
- Testimonial Carousel Widget – Increase your business’ social proof by adding a rotating testimonial carousel of your most supportive customers.
Limitations of Elementor
It’s not a perfect plugin, though. I’ve run into a few limitations that you should understand:
- Custom Post Types – While you can have Custom Post Types on your Elementor site, you can not use the Elementor Editor to style those post types. One workaround for this is to use post categories to control the site throughout.
- Blog Archive – While you can make a beautiful blog archive page with Elementor, you cannot point to that page in your WordPress settings! If you do, your Elementor page will break. This is a really bizarre issue that it took me hours to figure out. As soon as I set the blog page to none, everything worked fine. That’s a bummer, though because the blog page setting is used throughout a number of WordPress template functions. It’s not going to inhibit your site in any way, it’s just a strange issue.
- Lightbox Support – The popup feature is pretty cool, but the ability to just have a button open up a lightbox to see a gallery or video isn’t there. However, there is a fantastic Essentials Add-On that provides this feature as well as dozens of others.
Integrations Include
If you’ve ever programmed integrations in WordPress, you know how difficult it can be. Well, Elementor has pre-developed integrations with Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, Campaign Monitor, Hubspot, Zapier, donReach, Drip, GetResponse, Adobe TypeKit, reCAPTCHA, Facebook SDK, MailerLite, Slack and Discord!
Disclosure: I am proudly using my affiliate links in this article!
© 2020 DK New Media, LLC, All Rights Reserved
