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Is Elementor the GOAT?

hey reliable - Brian Checkovich by Brian Checkovich
March 1, 2021
Is Elementor the GOAT?

Chuck D Was Right

Don’t believe the hype, rapped Public Enemy. But today hype pretty much sits behind all the content we consume. Hyperbole isn’t just a literary device, it’s a way of life. The title of GOAT (greatest of all time) gets used at a staggering rate, applied from football players (Tom Brady) to barber shops (too numerous to count).

Which leads to the inevitable question:

Is Elementor the GOAT of WordPress page builders?

Should we (gulp) believe the hype? Chuck D said no…but let’s weigh the evidence.

Years of Winning

To be the greatest of all time, you have to have a long record of excelling. Elementor meets that threshold. It came out in 2016, and the very first Elementor blog post (June 1, 2016) laid down some rather lofty claims: Elementor is “a truly revolutionary live page builder for WordPress,” the company asserted.

Strong words indeed. To be truly revolutionary means you need to blaze a new trail. What Elementor does for users on WordPress is deliver the ability to craft a web page, through a single plugin, that will look and feel like a professional designed it. The free version comes with 40-plus page templates and 30-plus widgets, which for many WP users is more than enough firepower to build a sleek and slick web page.

Because Elementor is open-source, developers can add to the reservoir of cool stuff on there, meaning that Elementor continues to evolve. One example is Motion Effects, added in 2019 to meet the growing demand for animation and transitions. Before, you had to custom-code these effects, but now you can add any background image for parallax scrolling.

Staying on Top

To be a GOAT, you must stay on top. Elementor does this because of how easy it is to use. Even someone who lacks a techie gene can drag-and-drop their way to building a web page that can support e-commerce, capture email addresses, and allow for user comments. Basically, you can boost your business with it…and it’s free.

What’s revolutionary about Elementor, why it has proven to remain one of the most popular WP plugins, why 5 million people have used it, is that it lets you see the edits to your page in real-time. You control the front end of your web page, without having to hunt around for a preview and then back again. Elementor also has a History feature that lets you go back in time to see older versions of your page, just in case you delete something by accident.

There’s a reason for the hype: Elementor is easy to use and bestows powers on mere design mortals that used to require coding skills.

From the Ground Up

Elementor would not be a GOAT if all anyone did was use the preloaded templates and widgets. Those are very important features, but Elementor goes beyond that and lets even novices build pages on their own. They do this through blocks.

You can put as many blocks on a page as you want. Some of the blocks come in template form, but customization is no problem. Elementor comes with 235 different blocks, grouped into 15 different categories like FAQs and Testimonials. Users can arrange these blocks any way they want–again, for free.

If you do upgrade to the pro version, then all the strengths of Elementor increase geometrically. But the basic block architecture doesn’t change, no matter what version you go with.

Mobile and Agile

Over half of all websites are accessed on a mobile device, and this rate will surely rise in the coming years. Many small businesses realized too late that the website they’d designed for a desktop didn’t translate well to the mobile ecosystem. The fallout was a high bounce rate and lost sales.

Elementor, being the GOAT, has a fix for that in its free version. Most of the editable features come with Mobile, Tablet, or Desktop settings. You can preview each of these as you make changes. The background images you pick are device-responsive, meaning you don’t have to mess with those unless you want a different background image for each device.

The objective here is to maintain fast loading speeds and maintain design integrity no matter how your page is accessed. Elementor gives you the tools to do this.

A GOAT Needs Care

Even though Elementor is easy to use, you still might find yourself feeling overwhelmed. You might not know how to install shortcodes or keep up with the latest third-party widgets. Elementor is the GOAT many claim it to be, and you can build a solid web page with it. But if you want to unlock the full potential of this GOAT, you might want to hit us up and we’ll work with you on how to make Elementor work its magic for you. Design is our bread-and-butter, and we love to build things.

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