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Pro Website Template or Elementor Pro? This is What Your Website Actually Needs

HEDONISTIT'S EXPERT DREAM TEAM

Guest post by Anna Gelfman, owner of G Digital, website building and automation expert.

Congratulations! You’ve decided to build your very own WordPress website, all by yourself! Great choice 🤗

Your next concern will most likely be whether you should use a free website template, or spend the money and purchase one. 

The details between a free and premium template have previously been written up here, by Tamar, in this in-depth guide, which you’re welcome to dive into 🙂

If you’ve decided to purchase a template, you have two options –

  1. A pre-designed premium template
  2. An Elementor Pro template

It is for this precise reason that I have written this article, to help you understand the pros and cons of each of the options so you can make a smart decision.

So, shall we?

WHAT IS A WEB TEMPLATE?

Picture yourself opening a new Instagram account – the account itself is a technical tool, but what will be its style? 

If you’d like to keep a cohesive, professional look you need to select exactly which colors and shades will appear in your feed. This is a template, also known as a “theme”.

Same goes for your web template – when choosing a template for your website you select a style ahead of time that you would like to use to represent your site. In fact, the template can define very clear boundaries for any content you wish to upload to your site. 

Sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it? Well, this choice does have its pros and cons… 

THE BENEFITS OF A PREMIUM TEMPLATE

#1 Easy, simple installation

The template is pre-designed and saves you any need for unnecessary thought. The entire site comes with sample pages in uniform structure and specific design.

 

#2 A single payment

You’ve purchased the template, and that’s that. You will only be required to pay one single payment – and it’s yours for good.

blogging tips for beginners - Get started with WordPress & choose the best template for your website - Elementor guide

THE DISADVANTAGES OF A PREMIUM TEMPLATE

Despite the comfort and attractive price, this choice has several clear disadvantages:

#1 Inflexibility

When you opt for a final product – it doesn’t leave you much flexibility. The theme is fully developed and fixed, and that’s great while you use it – but what happens when you want to make a small change? It could be a real headache… 

Going back to our Instagram account example, you may not want a certain shade of blue you once defined in the past to affect any future photos you publish. 

You want to be capable of having ultimate control over each and every new post. You want to be able to play around with a certain shade and adjust the image design to the blue shade that suits it best.

Similarly, even in the template you install, every time you want to act “outside the box” you’ll need to rack your brains and follow a million different template guides to try and understand how exactly to go about changing what you'd like to change. 

 

#2 Impact on loading speed and abandonment rate

Just like any other website or blog, a WordPress website works a lot like an application. I’ll spare you most of the boring technical details, but it is important for you to know about storage limits and the weight of the software. When you purchase a domain, you also purchase web storage. The storage is the one that determines how “heavy” your blog can be. If you exceed the site's storage size then your site will collapse because the volume exceeds the limit.

A pre-designed template or theme will naturally be very heavy because it contains a finished product with everything that the template developers have decided to include. This includes elements you may not need or be interested in for your blog, and have no choice but to “store” these irrelevant additions simply because they’re part of the template.

Any additional plugin you’ll install to add a function to your blog will add to the weight of the website, and your blog will eventually become super heavy. Meaning it will upload extremely slowly causing visitors to lose patience and abandon it. 

 

#3 Update frequency

WordPress and its plugins are frequently updated over the years {with extensions and upgrades} which is why your template should be suitable for the latest versions. Premium templates do update more often than free ones, but just like with any other finished product, you're dependent on the template designers to update it accordingly. The problem is that the speed and quality of a template upgrade depend on its popularity and the team of developers.

What could happen, is that the template developers will stop updating a certain version because they have more popular templates to work on, or for other reasons.  So the situation is that one-day {let’s say, in a couple of years from now} you’ll be at home with an old template that creates bugs on your blog. 

If you still decide to get the pre-designed pro template I recommend opting for a popular template with a high rank which will presumably be updated often.

Now that I learned the pros and {quite long} list of cons of this template, it’s time to tell you about the new star in town, enter – Elementor 🌟

WHAT'S ELEMENTOR?

A few years ago, a number of Israeli web developers and builders reached the conclusion that it doesn’t make any sense to rack your brain over and over again every once in a while and install a personalized template fit to meet a client’s needs. It is ineffective and each template then comes with a set of its own problems that take hours to solve, and once the product is complete it is difficult for the client to take control of it. These problems led the developers to search for a smart solution, and led them to create “Elementor”.

Elementor is a tool that transformed  WordPress site-building into something simple and easy – just like building a Wix website.

Elementor provides its users with complete freedom and turns the pre-designed template into something a lot less relevant. All you have to do is select a template that is suitable for Elementor, only that this time the template is neutral and serves only as a “shell” for your website.  

blogging tips for beginners - Get started with WordPress & choose the best template for your website - Elementor guide

WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ELEMENTOR AND ELEMENTOR PRO?

Elementor is a free basic extension that enables you to build a website and has a few more uses as well. The truth is, to build up a professional blog, what you really need is Elementor Pro. The pro version provides you with additional tools such as contact forms, site pop-ups, dynamic content, and more. 

This is very important – one of the most common mistakes made by beginner web builders is buying and installing Elementor Pro and then deleting the basic Elementor. This kills your plugin! Elementor Pro can’t function without its base, so you gotta make sure both are installed!

Click here or the full article on the differences between Elementor and Elementor Pro

THE DISADVANTAGES OF ELEMENTOR PRO TEMPLATES

בואי נשים את הדברים על השולחן, גם לתבנית אלמנטור פרו יש חסרון:

#1 – מחיר מתחדש

השימוש בתוסף אלמנטור הוא אמנם בחינם אבל, כמו שכבר כתבתי למעלה, בשביל להגיע למלוא היכולות של אלמנטור תצטרכי לרכוש את השדרוג “אלמנטור פרו“. מדובר בתשלום מתחדש, שיכול להלחיץ, אבל תאמיני לי! הוא שווה כל שקל, מה גם שאת מקבלת 50% הנחה באופן תמידי מאלמנטור על כל חידוש שנתי.

 זהו! 🙂 אין יותר חסרונות לאלמנטור. בחיי.

Let’s face it, Elementor Pro does have a disadvantage:

#1 Price is renewed 

Using the Elementor extension may be free, but as I mentioned before, to get the most out of Elementor, you’ll need to buy the Elementor Pro upgrade. A price that is renewed could be stressful, but trust me – It is worth every penny, plus, you’ll always get a 50% discount for renewing your Elementor. 

That’s it! 🙂 I swear this is the only disadvantage this software has.

THE ADVANTAGES OF ELEMENTOR PRO TEMPLATES

And what about the advantages? Well, there are some major ones, let’s discuss:

#1 Full flexibility

Once you’ve installed your first “shell” template as well as Elementor Pro – any design choice and adjustment is totally up to you and your creativity. You can build whatever it is you want – the sky’s the limit! You can build and design your menu style, your footer {the strip appearing at the bottom of your website}, and you don’t have to compromise with what the theme has to offer.

 

#2 Regular developments and upgrades

Elementor is one of the most popular and leading web-building extensions in the world, with over 6 million users at the time of writing this article. The Elementor team is constantly releasing updates and upgrades, and the extension is constantly being upgraded to a newer version and adding some pretty amazing tools to your blog – making it just “wow”.

 

#3 Unbelievable building capabilities

With Elementor you can build the site you always dreamed of, and your blog will be the talk of the town. There is no end to what can be done, you can be as creative as you wish. Elementor allows you to design, and had so many cool features that you couldn’t have had with a regular premium template {at least not without penty of coding}.

 

#4 Easyyyy

Building a blog or website with Elementor is as easy and intuitive as can be. The Wix style “drag and drop”, the ability to edit and design each individual category, and all that with no requirements of prior knowledge or technical skill.

blogging tips for beginners - Get started with WordPress & choose the best template for your website - Elementor guide

SO WHAT’S THE BOTTOM LINE?

So that sums up the advantages of Elementor Pro, and by now you could probably sense that I’m leaning more towards one option than the next 😇

By the way, you may think ‘why not both?’ – Well, the reason is that there’s a large overlap between Elementor uses and template uses. You don’t actually need both of them. You can choose one, based on your budget for technical reasons. 

Ok, ready to jump in? How do you build using Elementor? 

You’re welcome to read the full Elementor guide here. Good luck!

Ana Gelfman / G Digital

Ane is the owner of G Digital, and an expert on WordPress site-building and automation. She runs a professional course for building WordPress sites, teaches and instructs how to build a professional website without prior knowledge, quickly and easily, step by step. She also markets digital business, organizes professional conferences on digital marketing, gives lectures, private lessons, workshops, and other courses.

As a member of Hedonistit's expert dream team, Ana shares with us here on the blog guides and tutorials for WordPress and Elementor, and answers questions related to a field in our Facebook community – “The Blogging Babes”.

blogging tips for beginners - Get started with WordPress & choose the best template for your website - Elementor guide

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4 Responses

  1. That’s a great post. The problem that I found common with the pro website template is their load speed. It is better to stick with Elementor templates.

    Thanks & Regards
    Aria Mathew

  2. What a great piece!! Thanks for bring to light this educative and infomative piece. I would love to have recent updates on your blog. Thank you.

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