Is Elementor bad or can it be good?

Sunshine

Sunshine

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I'm starting my website, and I only have 3 posts [still in the draft], I'm using Elementor Pro but I don't know if it's a good option, I see some comments here on BuSo that say that the elementor is very heavy and consumes a lot of unnecessary stuff and it's good to remove it as soon as possible, and others say that if you configure it right you can use it without a problem or that you never had a problem with performance, what do you say?

Generate Blocks seems like a good alternative, Gutenberg seems a bit complicated.
 
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Don't do it, it's impossible to make fast.

A lot of people like Generate Blocks.

Gutenberg blocks with Advanced Custom Fields Pro is pretty easy if you can code basic stuff in php and style with css and then its free. I did this and it works excellent.
 
You already answered the question. It's full of bloat and will make your site slower due to the amount and size of new files you'll have to load on every page view. Those who know better are telling you not to do it, and those who know how to optimize crap like this should still be telling you not to.

I could walk into a fire. People have said not to do it, but others have told me to go ahead because my body will heal from the wounds anyways. That's the kind of logic anyone telling you to build your site with Elementor is thinking with. It's obviously dumb when you use an analogy.

And since you don't know how to do any advanced page speed optimization work, you'll either not get it done and have a slow site, or pay someone to do it and have a site that's still slower than if you just hadn't used it in the first place.
 
Ryuzaki said:
It's obviously dumb when you use an analogy.
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@Ryuzaki is spot on here. Things seem like a good idea until you're stuck with some broken mess you can't fix, can't make faster etc etc. Believe me I've made the mistake with another builder and it's just been a disaster including not being able to really fix our main website without totally redesigning it from scratch which we're going to have to do but wouldn't have had to if we'd made less lazy choices upfront...
 
Steve Brownlie said:
Believe me I've made the mistake with another builder and it's just been a disaster including not being able to really fix our main website without totally redesigning it from scratch which we're going to have to do but wouldn't have had to if we'd made less lazy choices upfront...
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It was good that I learned this early, I removed the element and had to redesign all my posts from 0, there were few so I didn't have much problem, anyway I already learned that it doesn't matter to have a theme all decorated, it can be simple and obvious it needs to be fast, mobile friendly, and SEO friendly, anyway mobile users don't see all those heavy frills. Not to mention that when I include the ads it will get even heavier
 
I just have to drop in here to say how much I both love and hate elementor.

Why I love it:

  1. I have tons of websites, and use many different content uploaders. These content uploaders are cheap, so not super skilled. Elementor gives them the ability to upload content quickly while making it look professional. The content uploaders love it.

Why I hate it:

  1. It slows my sites down which in turn hurts my SEO and conversion rates.
  2. It's constantly the reason why tons of my sites get infected. I'm not a programmer but from what I understand, it constantly has vulnerabilities to exploit. I use SEO hosting for some of my sites, and when one of them gets infected - other sites on the same server seem to follow. Lately I've been dealing with issues where my htaccess files are updated and wp-config files are repeatedly emptied with permissions changed - all thanks to elementor. The sites go completely blank until I get one of my developers to fix which is a quick and easy process, but I lose money every time this happens.
  3. Once you are 'stuck' with elementor, it's a big time and money investment to get away from it IF you have a site that has a lot of content.

So for me - love and hate relationship and I think the bad outweighs the good. If I could go back in time I'd tell myself to run far away from this crap.
 
As stated above by other members Elementor is good tool to get a website live quickly, it's perfect for people with little to no coding skills. It's pretty simple to learn and also has a pretty good amount of customisation for a site builder. I also think it all depends on the purpose of the website you are building. I have clients that actually prefer their website to be built in Elementor due to the fact it makes it easier for them to customise themselves rather than using a coder. For a simple smaller business I feel Elementor is very good.
 
Sunshine said:
I'm starting my website, and I only have 3 posts [still in the draft], I'm using Elementor Pro but I don't know if it's a good option, I see some comments here on BuSo that say that the elementor is very heavy and consumes a lot of unnecessary stuff and it's good to remove it as soon as possible, and others say that if you configure it right you can use it without a problem or that you never had a problem with performance, what do you say?

Generate Blocks seems like a good alternative, Gutenberg seems a bit complicated.
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I actually found buso because I did the same thing as you 3 years ago... I even remember the exact search query: "does elementor prevent you from getting featured snippets". and someone actually was talking about it on here and as soon as I got rid of elementor I started catching featured snippets.
Glad I got rid of elementor – what a mess, made my site so slow and is totally not needed with the new gutenberg advancements over the years.
 
I rebuilt my site in like 2017 with Elementor. Before then I had made my own custom themes.
I never liked page builders because of the massive code bloat. But Elementor was easy.

Last month according to GA my site had 32k visitors. And I rank pretty well against large corporations with big marketing budgets for my chosen keywords.

And we hate it.
The code bloat is disgusting. It's hard to optimize for speed. It's annoying to make any modifications.
But I have a lot invested in the current setup so I'm slow to make changes to something that's working relatively well.

So if I was going to migrate my site to a different architecture, what would this community recommend?
 
Generatepress or Kadence are great!
As a non-dev, Kadence was easier to get a modern look and desired functionality though. Would be interesting to hear people’s thoughts on ghost or Trellis. The scrollable horizontal related posts bar at the header on Trellis (especially if you can use it to display money pages) looks promising for increasing pv and directing traffic.
 
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@r00st3rsauc3 my first site was built with WIX... even on the blog posts where I only write text and add in images without doing ANYTHING extra, the site speed scores were horrendous.

New site is on WP with generatepress. I don't do anything for it and all the pages all score above 90 for speed. It's super lightweight.
 
r00st3rsauc3 said:
So if I was going to migrate my site to a different architecture, what would this community recommend?
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Just using the raw Gutenberg (where I also remove extraneous features and blocks I'll never use within functions.php) is fantastic. I also deenqueue the CSS and JS that it comes with on the front end (but you need it on the back end). From there (and better if you're grandfathered in before they went to annual pricing) using Advanced Custom Fields Pro to create custom blocks in PHP rather than JS is nice, though you can just learn to do it the native way too.
 
If you want to stick with page builders - Oxygen is probably the fastest out of all the bunch. Depending on site scope might be a good compromise.
 
uzz said:
If you want to stick with page builders - Oxygen is probably the fastest out of all the bunch. Depending on site scope might be a good compromise.
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"Compromise"

Oxygen is significantly better than Elementor and it's not even close. Literally any site you can build with Elementor, you can build better with Oxygen.
 
thisishatred said:
"Compromise"

Oxygen is significantly better than Elementor and it's not even close. Literally any site you can build with Elementor, you can build better with Oxygen.
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I meant vs no page builder like generatepress/blocks.
 
Thanks for the replies everyone!
I started this site in 2010 and for many years was a one-man show. I did all the custom themes.
At this point in my business, this is no longer work that I do personally myself. This is something I would have to hire someone to do. That being the case, is any of these options a clear winner where I could put out an RFP? Is anyone here interested in taking on this kind of project?
 
Ryuzaki said:
Just using the raw Gutenberg (where I also remove extraneous features and blocks I'll never use within functions.php) is fantastic. I also deenqueue the CSS and JS that it comes with on the front end (but you need it on the back end). From there (and better if you're grandfathered in before they went to annual pricing) using Advanced Custom Fields Pro to create custom blocks in PHP rather than JS is nice, though you can just learn to do it the native way too.
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Yeah, I really can't stress enough how much worth it, it was for me to create my own Gutenberg blocks as suggest years ago by @Ryuzaki.

Massive improvement in speed and not least upload speed (Elementor is slooow in this too).

As a matter of fact, because Gutenberg has such a simple and elegant markup, I was able to create a Python script that converts Markdown (suggest by someone on here) to a fully functional Gutenberg HTML, including my custom blocks, including things like product review boxes, including scaled and overlayed product images (with things like 5 stars etc) from a simple image url in Google Docs.

I run my script and I literally can copy paste a fully finished round up review template with functional resized images and everything else.

This literally saves me about 30 minutes pr. post. It would not be possible with anything but simple Gutenberg markup.
 
bernard said:
Yeah, I really can't stress enough how much worth it, it was for me to create my own Gutenberg blocks as suggest years ago by @Ryuzaki.

Massive improvement in speed and not least upload speed (Elementor is slooow in this too).

As a matter of fact, because Gutenberg has such a simple and elegant markup, I was able to create a Python script that converts Markdown (suggest by someone on here) to a fully functional Gutenberg HTML, including my custom blocks, including things like product review boxes, including scaled and overlayed product images (with things like 5 stars etc) from a simple image url in Google Docs.

I run my script and I literally can copy paste a fully finished round up review template with functional resized images and everything else.

This literally saves me about 30 minutes pr. post. It would not be possible with anything but simple Gutenberg markup.
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i would buy a mini course on how to do this and the details. I use python w/ vscode as well for automations sort of similar to this.
 
AhFreshMeat said:
i would buy a mini course on how to do this and the details. I use python w/ vscode as well for automations sort of similar to this.
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I would be happy to help, but as of now it's way too buggy and specialized to be of any use in general.
 
I'm just getting back into WordPress after using SSGs for years. I've used Elementor in the past and hated it. I'm going to try Kadence, GP, ACF + gutenberg, full FSE from scratch and a custom build with the understrap starter. Anything else I should give a shot? I like to get my feet wet in everything before making huge investments of time into any one method.
 
I've had a bit of a different experience:

I'm currently running both Elementor and Generate Blocks (separate sites). Maybe it's just me but I like the customization, custom templates, and styling that I get with Elementor. But everyone else I speak to swears by Generate Blocks.

But... Elementor is sloooow. And if you don't want it to weigh down your site, you need to perform a lot of optimizations. I was eventually able to get the speed issues sorted, and as far as Google is concerned all the core vitals are now performing good. This includes across long-form image/element-heavy landing pages which I would normally expect to require improvement.

That said, my reasons for using it (and hating it) are similar to @jgw899. It's a fast and easy way to make something look professional. But, it's bulky, buggy, and needs constant monitoring to make sure it's up to date.

In my case, the good (now) outweighs the bad, mainly because all the different templates are already built, the site is optimized, and core vitals are finally performing where they need to be.
 
cmpty said:
In my case, the good (now) outweighs the bad, mainly because all the different templates are already built, the site is optimized, and core vitals are finally performing where they need to be.
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I don't mind using Elementor for supplementary pages such as landing pages or front pages or even categories or search pages. All those pages that don't require ranking in Google or publishing fresh content.

I don't think Elementor is time saving for publishing because everything has to be dragged and dropped. Gutenberg is far easier and faster and because it's code is so simple, it can be automated and converted to from say Markdown.
 
Actually it's deped how much expert you are in mking sites with Elementor. No matter which website builder you are using. If you know to to make a perfect website using any specific builder then that is best for you, So spend time with Elementor and when you know all fetures surely you will like it because you know what you need to do.
 
So is Generate Blocks still great versus Elementor or Kadence?

I need to hire a designer and figure it's better to go with one familiar with these page site builders so I don't get caught with my pants down later on.
 
CCarter said:
So is Generate Blocks still great versus Elementor or Kadence?

I need to hire a designer and figure it's better to go with one familiar with these page site builders so I don't get caught with my pants down later on.
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Others have mentioned it too but look at Oxygen, you can get great page speed results and a lifetime license.
 
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