The short answer is it depends.

What is Elementor?

Elementor is a website builder that allows WordPress users to create and edit websites with a responsive drag-and-drop technique similar to Wix, Metaconex, or Webflow. Although it’s technically quite different from these website builders, it achieves the same outcome: letting WordPress users build their pages themselves (including styling) without needing to code or being stuck with WordPress’s Gutenberg builder.

WordPress powers about half the websites on the web, and Elementor is used by about 10% of those websites (different sources give a slightly different number). In other words, it’s a very commonly used tool.

Why do people use Elementor?

The main reason why people use Elementor is that WordPress is really just a content management system (CMS), and, like most CMSs, it uses a standardized stylesheet that effectively prevents users from making design changes. This is mostly deliberate to ensure pages are consistently stylized.

However, with the rise of “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) editors and drag-and-drop builders like Wix, users started to expect that kind of functionality with WordPress.

Although WordPress does allow for different kinds of modules (or “blocks,” as they call them) so you can have different functionality, those modules still inherit the style from the stylesheet.

With Elementor, you get pretty well full control over what goes on your site and how everything looks.

So in short, people use Elementor because it lets them make their own sites and have control over the look and feel.

What are some problems with Elementor?

The biggest issue with Elementor is that the free functionality is very limited. To get the vast majority of features, you need to upgrade to Pro. That being said, the cost of Pro is much lower than paying somebody to custom build a site.

The next biggest issue is that Elementor decreases your website’s performance. Elementor adds a ton of extra code that increases your page sizes and decreases performance. For many people with simple marketing or personal sites, that might not matter too much, but if you value quick load speeds and have a lot of traffic, Elementor is not the best solution.

Elementor’s greatest strength is also its most annoying weakness: there are too many customizable options, but it isn’t always clear how to do what. As a result, you can spend a lot of time on what may appear to be the simplest thing to do. As such, if you’re really proficient with Elementor it can save you time, but if you are new to Elementor, it can take an eternity to figure out how to do basic updates. To further complicate things, each template you use for Elementor does things a little differently, so each new template comes with its own learning curve.

Finally, that same strength also removes WordPress’s greatest strength: consistency. Because you can edit and customize pretty well as much as you like, you can end up with an inconsistent site. That could be minor issues, like different page margins or different padding between sections. Or it could be more drastic, with every page looking completely different — which might hurt your brand. Whereas with WordPress, because every page created uses the same stylesheet, the site will be on brand. 

So is it better to use Elementor, Gutenberg, or develop custom?

That really depends. If you have an incredibly simple site that is just meant to have a consistent look and feel and you don’t plan to add a lot of new page types, you can just use WordPress’s out of the box Gutenberg functionality. But for most sites, that won’t be enough.

If have a tight budget and want to have full control over your site, Elementor is probably best.

If you want a high-performing site with elements or functionality that Elementor doesn’t offer, then custom is the way to go.

We always recommend custom (check out this post for more on why), but we’re also well versed in Elementor and can quickly and cost effectively set up your Elementor site. We’ll do all the hard work, and then you can just maintain it.

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