Elementor Website Builder Plugin
One major downfall with WordPress is that when creating or editing content the editor is not a ‘WYSIWYG’ (What You See Is What You Get) display. This is because any styles specific to the theme are not applied in the editor. Thus what you see when viewing the website page is very different from that shown in the editor. This can cause confusion, irritation and frustration.
There are several plugins that address this issue, the most popular being ‘Elementor Website Builder‘. If fact, at the time of writing it was the third most popular plugin in use on WordPress websites, with over 5 million active installations. We can see this by viewing the available plugins sorted by popularity:
The plugin functionality can also be expanded by many free extensions which can be seen by searching for ‘Elementor’ in plugins.
Plugin Issues
Before using the Elementor plugin there are two issues that should be considered.
1. Slower loading times. As with every plugin, for every website page that is loaded – regardless of whether Elementor was used to create / edit the page – a load more files will be loaded by default. This slows loading times and can negatively affect your SEO.
2. Plugin deletion. If in the future you decide to longer use Elementor, all styling on your pages will be lost. You would have to rebuilt all your pages again.
The plugin in great for anyone with very limited WordPress skills or need to work more visually. Otherwise we’d recommend just using the built in WordPress block editor, it may take a bit more work to get your pages created but has many more benefits in the long term with better flexibility and better rankings on search engines. If you need help or guidance with creating your content, with or without the Elementor plugin, Nerd Crossing can assist.
Getting Started
The first step will be to install the Elementor plugin. If you need instructions on how to do this there is a tutorial on adding plugins. Once the plugin is installed we can take a look at the basic interface.