Any Elementor users in the house?

Makes sense! They can actually use other themes as of the newest Divi “builder” but haven’t run into a case yet where the client would want to do that.

Hi ! Yes I have - it has a long way to go, but can see this becoming a great feature for clients. I dont know if you run a webiste design business - but I can categorically say that using E and WP is at least 70% faster from design to publishing. That’s all I need to know.

Thanks, everyone. I had no intention of ever touching WP again - but I just downloaded Elementor and will begin watching some of the videos this afternoon. As much as I enjoy building sites in RW, the code it puts out is just too darn slow for me. 5 seconds to Interactive is too long - and I’ve done absolutely everything I can to speed things up.

Does WP/Elementor work in the same regards to add-ons that RW does? That is, each component (navigation/accordions/lightboxes/etc., etc.,) all cost extra? Or are they built into WP/Elementor? The one saving grace for me in regards to RW is that I own Foundation/Foundry/virtually every stack I can imagine using. Which is great, considering that the costs of new stacks continues to go up and up and up. And, no, I’m not complaining about buying them - they save me a ton of time and my sites function as I need them to. But, the price of existing stacks and new stacks seems to have jumped a LOT over the past year - without a corresponding jump in features. And, don’t get me started on the CMS options - yes - there are some great options out there - but they are expensive and don’t begin to compare with what WP offers.

In addition, I know a major upgrade to Stacks is on the horizon. Based solely on a podcast or two that one of the major developers has been in recently, my guess (and it’s only a guess) is that upgrades to my library of stacks will be costly. So, perhaps no time better than now to broaden my horizons.

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Probably Element is now the most diffused tool for WP
I also use WP and often with Elementor Pro. It’s great!!.
the problem is the longevity of the services in WP. Visual composers and others are in decline and RW (unlike WP) is more reliable over time, this is more important to me.
The choice depends also on the duration of the services and your patience to solving problems over time :)

@dave You’d have to look more closely, but Elementor free comes with a bunch of “stuff” (both like stacks and like preformed templates/formats). Elementor Pro then adds a bunch more tools (i.e. stacks) and templates. Envato has released some free Elementor tools. Others have also. So a lot can be done without buying extra tools.

Depending on your specific needs you probably will need to purchase more tools outside of Elementor. But there are many cases where you might not. Hard to know in advance. From what I can tell I’d need to purchase many fewer tools with WP than with RW. In fact, RW on its own is useless to me. It’s only the addition of Stacks and stack-lets that make it useful. That analogy does not hold with Elementor: you can go much further with the basics.

@Multithemes I don’t think the big page builders are going away at all. With the release of Gutenburg (by WP) certainly the “small fish” with page builders is going away. And there’s very likely going to be few new ones coming to market. But a product like Elementor is far far ahead of what Gutenburg can do. By the time Gutenburg catches up (in say 2 years) Elementor will again be much further down the road. It’s hard to know the future for sure, but it’s not evident that Elementor (or Divi or some others) will be going away anytime in the next 5 to 10 years.

Thanks, @mitchellm! The cost of Business or Unlimited doesn’t bother me, even on a yearly basis. Heck, if I put TCMS into one site in 2019, plus buy one or two stacks, I’m already at the Unlimited price point for Elementor. However, if I were also faced with purchasing a whole bunch of add-ons to make Elementor useful, I’d think twice. Based on what I’ve read here, I’m quite certain that it makes perfect sense to, at minimum, add a new tool to my repertoire. Thank you, @Justin, for posing the original question!

One other request - can anyone link to a site (or more) built with Elementor? The Showcase on the Elementor site says “Coming soon.”

@dave Elementor sends out emails/posts every month with new example websites made with Elementor.

I admit it would be nice to see some things made by Justin’s team as well (@Justin )

Here’s their post from September:
https://elementor.com/blog/showcase-september-2018

Just change month and year in the address to see other months. Hope this helps.

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https://elementor.com/blog/category/inspiration/

We have 6 or so in development (we officially swapped over to E beginning 2019, so not that long ago, although we have been testing for over 6 months). So we dont have many live sites - but this is the first site we ever built with Elementor and Woo-commerce (that’s a proper eCommerce platform that the client can manage lol)… https://doubledboutique.com/ 2 more launching in a couple of weeks.

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There’s hundreds of add-ons specifically for E, some free some not. Some cheap as chips some not. You can pic and choose - some have ‘pro’ versions of free versions - all in all for us anyway its not really an issue. Check out the plugins on this site - 45 bucks as many domains as ya want or a one time payment of 299 https://crocoblock.com/ -

From the E site https://elementor.com/addons/

I can go on and on - best way round is to figure out what ya need and search on the forums… new stuff comes out nearly every week

Note if E did shut its doors, (which It wont), the code is very WP friendly, simple move to a theme or whatever suites.

That links not very clear https://crocoblock.com/jetelements/ takes you to the Jet elements …

This is the best web page on the planet https://justinjackson.ca/words.html, and this is the second best https://demo.bigwhiteduck.com/scribe/examples/onestackpage/, just my 2 cents.

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That says it all really. Valuable observation.

RW as a tool has got expensive enough with CMS solutions costing $100/domain and stacks costing $40 or $50 that RW is no longer the low cost solution it used to be. Looking at the pricing of Elementor, it appears to be a lower cost solution when you need a certain degree of complexity.

@Multithemes “RW (unlike WP) is more reliable over time,” - there have been many breaks in files format - RW6, RW7, RW8.0, RW8.1, etc which are a pain to deal with and support over time.

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I’m no writer as you’ll see - but I churned this out a while back - might be of interest; https://www.easthalldesign.com/blog/blog-post.php?permalink=websites-all-look-the-same-nowadays

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Well written, and I agree.

I don’t have anything against banners, animations etc., but a lot of designers just add stuff to a page because they can. And then when you say “But it takes 6 seconds to load”, they reply “But it looks good”.

I build a lot of sites like everyone else because the client will point me to another site and say they want something like it. But I’ll optimise the hell out of it.

Thanks! Yes agreed.

24 posts were split to a new topic: TCMS License

I am a lifetime subscriber to elegant themes - Divi theme.

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This is often the reality of web design and as much as we yearn to chase design awards and impress our peers, we need the right tool bag filled with a good working set of tools to provide what the customer wants.

I have hit the end stop with several web sites that have proved too much for RW. I keep getting lured back into them with some of the amazing stacks that keep extending the life of RW. However, when a tool starts to compromise your designs because of slow performance, long waits and lack of WYSIWYG, then that gets more and more painful.

PS I wish we were not having these conversations but instead were all in awe at the new stuff released in RW8 and all discussing how we can build better, faster, more pointy webs sites with the latest RW. Sadly not.

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