Why we use Elementor

We often get asked why we use—and continue to use—Elementor as our preferred page builder; there are so many options to consider, and Elementor has gotten a bad reputation over the years, in some circles.

We’ve been using Elementor since 2017, and we won’t sugarcoat it: there have been problems. But we believe in a guiding principle of using the best until it isn’t the best anymore.

And we believe Elementor is the best (right now).

If you look around on the WordPress subreddit or other WordPress communities, it’s easy to find many complaints and criticisms of Elementor:

We’re not going to deny it: many of these complaints were true.

Elementor went through a bit of a rough patch a few years ago that left room for competitors (*cough* Bricks *cough*) to enter the market and make a splash. Competition is good for innovation, though, and Elementor was pushed to make significant changes to improve their product.

That rough patch paved the way for a real glow-up for Elementor. 💅 

At the time of writing this post, we can typically get A speed ratings for mobile on our new site builds. Elementor has pushed container/flexbox updates and optimized the code written while designing. We’ve also seen significantly less bugs with the editing experience. V4 of their editor is releasing later this year (2025) and bringing even better performance and developer tools, which we are very excited about. 🤩 Their recent changes have also allowed us to ditch practically every third-party add-on pack that we previously needed! (We still often use PowerPack for third-party forms, but we often don’t use other widgets unless it makes sense to.)

We’ve found the changes they’ve made enough to convince us they’re still the best choice (right now).

Back when Elementor was struggling, we did test a number of other builders and considered our options for switching. Here’s a breakdown of why we didn’t switch to some of the most popular alternatives.

While it’s not a bad builder, we find it lacking in terms of active development. There are more accessibility issues than other builders, and they only recently started rolling out containers/flexbox.

We find Elementor’s loop and carousel grids much easier to work with for CPTs and posts. When it comes to global colors and fonts, we prefer Elementor’s approach.

If you jump on Reddit or a WP community, you’ll quickly find Bricks in a completely opposite position from Elementor: everyone seems to love it! Some of the comments will give you the idea that THERE IS SIMPLY NO OTHER CHOICE.

Bricks is often referred to as “the developer’s page builder,” and this honestly gives us pause. We love convenience in development, but we always prioritize ease of use for clients. Bricks also ranked lower in terms of accessibility (see below), though they have made improvements recently.

Many die-hard WordPress devs insist that the best page builder is WordPress. Even though it does rank the highest for performance and accessibility, it has one major drawback: bad user experience.

What Elementor might lack in performance and accessibility that causes it to score lower can be remediated and, to us, a bad client experience cannot be ignored.

We found Divi lacking in several really substantive ways: performance issues, a lack of CPT post/grid builder, and accessibility problems. They have recently announced a new version that finally removes their shortcode approach, but the problems are enough for us to move on.

Do we need to do this? We didn’t think so, until Ben started seeing TikToks of trendy designers pushing this page builder again. We’ll never go back!!

Elementor has done a lot to improve performance issues. Here’s a highlight reel. 🎞️

With the Flexbox Container, Elementor integrated CSS Flexbox into the Editor. Users are able to design more advanced and responsive layouts with leaner markup, improving website performance.

By introducing element caching for all its widgets and compatible third-party widgets, Time to First Byte (TTFB) saw an average 50% improvement and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) saw an average 40% improvement.

Elementor refined its CSS loading strategy to only load styles for the widgets used on a page, and JavaScript files were reduced from 331KB to 163KB with code duplications being eliminated. Optimized asset loading FTW!

Document Object Model (DOM) was also streamlined with removal of unnecessary wrappers from widgets and a simpler carousel markup. With DOM size reduced, pages render faster and Lighthouse scores improve.

We love Elementor and think it’s the best option out there, but even we were surprised when Elementor came in second place in a leading accessibility development agency’s comparison of different WordPress page builders in 2024. 😮 Other builders quickly responded to the feedback and made changes soon after these findings were released, but the good publicity was a definite boon to Elementor’s reputation.

Elementor hasn’t stagnated though: they have also released improvements in the time since, and there are more planned improvements to accessibility noted on their roadmap that promises an even brighter future.

As for the remaining issues that Elementor hasn’t patched, we’ve worked hard to figure out our own remediations. We never promise that our sites are 100% accessible or perfect, but we do feel really good about the progress we’ve made and Elementor’s ongoing commitment to accessibility. Our starting point is enough to make us feel confident that our sites are more accessible than our competitors’ right out of the box.

As we’ve mentioned before, it’s always been important to us that clients can maintain and change their websites easily. Page builders generally offer a better experience for clients over WordPress, and our experience shows that most folks can adapt to Elementor pretty easily.

When possible, we combine Elementor with ACF/CPTs to utilize templates which further streamlines the editing experience for end users. Elementor’s global site settings also ensure that site styles are consistent and easy to use. No client wants to be overwhelmed trying to sort through settings for every widget in order to duplicate something!

What we can’t set with globals, we utilize custom classes for, a feature that is slated to get some improvements with the upcoming version 4!

As things stand, we believe Elementor offers the best experience for our team, your team, and your clients. Until something else proves to be the better choice, we’ll be sticking with Elementor.