Over 5 million times the page builder plugin "Elementor" has been installed worldwide to date. Since many users have installed the plugin multiple times, it is of course not quite that many users. But with this mark, the plugin breaks all records so far. And this deservedly, because the versatility, the many additional features through add-ons and the ease of use speak for themselves. But even here, the success has certain downsides and also holds certain dangers for users.
If you've been using WordPress for a few years, you might know the early days of WordPress: unstable, easy to hack, pale design, a pure blogging software for students. Then came web developers and designers and programmed vivid templates. But additional features like image galleries, videos, tables, etc. were hardly available. Yes, it was great, but very poor. Above all, you had to live with the given design or at least reprogram the CSS of the website and put it in a child theme, so that the innovations were not lost if you wanted to keep the new design intact.
Visual Composer, the first successful page builder for WordPress
Visual Composer, today called WP Bakery Visual Composer, was a first revolution. For the first time it was possible to create complex pages without programming and design them freely. Surely all beginnings are difficult, not everything went as it should, but the revolution was there and the free design with WordPress experienced a new height flight. But after 1-2 years one had the impression that the company was "fed up", as if the web developers of the time had earned enough and the interest in further development seemed to wane. The support became worse and there was not too much going on with the extensions. This shows a typical problem of WordPress: The web developers of different plugins often enough do not coordinate their software. The result: It does not work as promised and the users are the stupid ones.
Elementor - the start of a new age
As if the guys from Israel had heard, they launched the revolutionary Elementor Website Builder. Unlike Visual Composer, you worked in a working window from the beginning and saw 1:1 changes to the website in live mode. Moreover, Elementor was and is much more agile and customizable than Visual Composer. The width of a block or an element can be easily changed by hand with the mouse, just move the mouse over it and drag. This flexibility was revolutionary. Also, the arrangement of features as a palette on the left sidebar is great, it makes all the work clear and easy.
The dangers of success
If you have created many pages or articles with Elementor like me, you also see a certain danger in the success of a plugin and pagebuilder. What if the development of the pagebuilder is neglected. This is exactly what we had to experience with Visual Composer. Visual Composer became more and more problematic and then Elementor came like a savior. but when you have created several hundred pages or articles with it, you are faced with a shambles. Now all the pages and that means days, weeks of work have to be repeated, because the pages now have to be recreated. And who has the time, the desire, the nerves and the money?
Another problem is evident in Elementor's support. They are victims of their own success. Supporting all customers requires an enormous support effort that Elementor struggles to meet. If only 1% of all users submit a support request, Elementor has to deal with hundreds of thousands of tickets. And the quality of support is also such a thing. Unfortunately, Elementor always tends to counter with standard answers. If there are problems, you are supposed to turn off all other plugins and see which plugin is causing trouble. Also, Elementor doesn't have a recommendation list of plugins that it runs smoothly with. So conflicts and poor fixes to the glitches are guaranteed.
For a whole year I struggled with Elementor's header builder and the Epic News Element plugin, which didn't get along well, plus Elementor's custom created header was lame. I switched to Astra's header builder and replaced Epic News Elements. And such problems are experienced by millions of users and a satisfactory solution is often not available.
The future of page builders
The big question is, will Elementor continue to exist in the same framework or will you have to switch to a new builder soon. The fact is that more and more page builders are coming to the market, and especially builders created from a custom template. The most successful template of WordPress, the theme Avada had already from the beginning its own Paegbuilder. Also the Newspaper Theme from tagdiv started to insist on using its own pagebuilder with every new release. This was very annoying, because the template's pagebuilder clashed with Elementor and co. and caused problems. Such developers ego is more important than the customer.
A great promise, however, are various other and new page builders that score with design variety and improved handling.
- UXBuilder by Flatsome (Theme)
- Nice Page
- Divi
- Beaver Builder
- Brizy
Live Composer seems outdated to me, very similar to Visual Composer. It used to be available through Envato, suddenly it disappeared soundlessly. SiteOrigin's Pagebuilder was around early on, but it never really worked back then.
There is nothing perfect at the moment, but working with WordPress is a lot more pleasant, design-friendly and user-friendly than in its beginnings. A lot of credit goes to page builders like Visual Composer and Elementor in particular. But what does their future look like? Nobody knows. Probably the makers of Elementor are smart enough and know that they have to keep developing their paegbuilder, if not, there are already new providers in the queue. That's why users and designers should always exercise a certain amount of caution when planning, if they don't want to run into a disaster.
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