What is Elementor?
Elementor is a free WordPress page builder, that helps you create beautiful and responsive WordPress websites, quickly and easily.
It is a front-end designer, which means you see exactly what it will look like on your live website. Making it easy for even the most technically challenged to create a beautifully optimised website.
What theme should you install on your WordPress site?
With any WordPress website, you will need a theme to control the appearance and layout. And with over 20,000 WordPress themes out there, it’s so easy to get overwhelmed by choice.
I now exclusively use the Hello theme from Elementor as it is lightweight and quick to load and it comes almost empty of styling and scripts so is the perfect base for you to build your website exactly as you want it using Elementor.
So, to install you need to come down to ‘Appearance’ and then ‘Themes’. As you can see on my website, I’ve got the Twenty Twenty-One theme installed and this is the one that comes default with WordPress.
If you’re working on an existing website that’s already got a theme in, it’s probably best not to install the Hello theme because that is going to change the way your website looks completely. So if you’re starting from scratch, then definitely use the Hello theme. If not, then just keep the theme that you’ve got and see how you get on.
So click on ‘Add New’. Type ‘Hello’ in here in exactly the same way we did in the plugins and this is it, the one with the palm trees.
How do you install the Elementor plugin to your WordPress website?
Once you’ve got your website theme installed, then it’s time to install the Elementor plugin so that you can edit the layout and design.
To do this go to your site and click ‘Dashboard’ and then down to ‘Plugins’, and click on ‘Add New’. Then you can search for Elementor. And there it is, the Elementor Website Builder.
So click on ‘Install Now’. And that’s installed and then I click on ‘Activate’ to activate it on my website.
How to use the Elementor page builder to create a WordPress website
So, once you’ve done this, you will see that your website doesn’t have any styling at all, apart from this pink color and it’s ready for me to create everything I need using Elementor.
So, now to get started using Elementor.
If you want to create a new page, then go to ‘Pages’ and click on ‘Add New’ – and type ‘Home’ into the top. You can just save this to draft if you don’t want it to go live yet, or you can click publish if it’s a demo site.
And then at the top, you can see this button that’s called ‘Edit with Elementor’. So if I click on that, then it’s going to take me into the Elementor Page Builder. And I can see my website exactly as it looks.
This is the Elementor workspace. On the left-hand side, you’ve got different controls and in the middle, you can see where it says drag widget, these are your widgets.
When you first start a page, you’ve got two options. Firstly, you can start it from scratch by adding a new section, so let’s take a look at that first. You’ve got loads of different options, and you can just drag and drop different widgets into the section. All these widgets have their own individual setting that you can edit, so you can change things like the font colour and typography.
Most of these widgets are free, however there is Elementor Pro, which at the time of this recording is $49, and this includes some paid-for widgets that allow you to get a little more creative with your sections.
It’s a very visual designer and you can see exactly how it’s going to look on the website.
How to use Elementor templates on WordPress
Starting your website from scratch, probably isn’t very time effective, so what I suggest you do is utilize the templates provided by Elementor.
When adding a section, click on the little folder template and then you can choose from different types of templates. You can add ‘blocks’, which are just sections of a page or you can also use a full-page template.
The free Elementor comes complete with some templates, the Pro offers a few more. You can preview each of the templates before adding them to your page. You can filter them and choose which one is most appropriate for your industry and needs.
This will make it look very professional, quickly and it will be very easy to edit.
How to edit a WordPress site using Elementor
So, once you’ve set up the templates, you’ll need to edit it to make it suitable for your business.
Each page is made up of multiple sections, which can all be tweaked and edited to suit your needs. If there was something that you didn’t want, you can add or remove or change images, text, colours or widgets you can do all of that easily.
You can also add additional sections into templates, you just scroll down, click on the folder and click ‘add template’, and choose what type of block you want to add in. So for example, if you don’t have a newsletter subscription in your template, then you can add in a block that will allow you to gather emails.
Just be careful, that if you are using templates, plus multiple blocks that you ensure the fonts and colours are all consistent. You just might need to alter them.
I hope that now you’ve got a clearer understanding of what Elementor can do for your website.
It’s an excellent tool and I use it within my websites and also use it to teach my students in the Website Formula course. I’ve only just scratched the surface of what you can do with Elementor in this video but I will be releasing lots more tutorial videos on it in the future.
