When building and managing websites on WordPress, Elementor has emerged as a leading page builder amongst a range of similar page-builders.
Elementor is famed for its user-friendly drag-and-drop interface, extensive widget library, and flexible design options.
However, Elementor may not always be the best fit for those embarking on projects requiring a significant amount of customised development work or bespoke functions.
Page plugins like Elementor are designed to try and do everything you need for your site – from layout to functionality.
Whilst this might seem like a great way to get your site off the ground, you can run into problems if your site starts to grow in terms of content and required functionality.
Here are some of the concerns that we have about using Elementor, or any other page builder, for sites that plan to grow and expand.
1. Performance Concerns
One of the primary concerns with using Elementor (or any page builder, for that matter) on a WordPress site is its impact on performance.
Elementor adds extra CSS and JavaScript files to your site, which can increase page loading times.
This plugin chucks out a serious amount of code and CSS to accomplish even the most basic of layouts, and again, this is down to its ‘everything and the kitchen sink’ approach.
There is only so much that can be done to optimise page builder plugins without breaking them, and unfortunately, you only find out you have a donkey of a site when it’s finished, and you run Google page speed insights on it for the first time.
The trouble is that by then, it’s too late.
This can be a significant drawback for projects where performance and fast loading times are paramount.
A custom-coded WP site, though possibly more time-consuming to develop, often results in faster, more streamlined websites.
Bespoke code is built from the ground up to do what you need, not thousands of things you don’t, so it’s lighter, easier to build upon, and more optimised.
2. Limited Customisation Beyond the Interface
While Elementor offers many design options and widgets, there can be limitations regarding deeply customised or unique functionality.
The plugin is fantastic for what it’s designed to do—simplify web design—but when projects require specific, tailored functionalities that go beyond the scope of Elementor’s offerings, developers may find themselves wrestling with workarounds or needing to inject custom code, which can defeat the purpose of using a visual builder.
Any code added to a page builder to customise it risks breaking something else on the site.
These page builder plugins have such large code bases that even installing a basic plugin can cause things to break.
3. Dependency and Long-term Flexibility
Building your site with Elementor creates a dependency on the plugin for your site’s design and functionality.
This can be a concern for projects that anticipate significant evolution over time.
If you decide to move away from Elementor in the future, it can be challenging to migrate designs and content without losing styling or facing compatibility issues.
This is one of the other key issues when starting out using a page builder and then realising 18 months later that you should have gone for the bespoke route.
Then, someone will have to try to unpick all your content from the page builder and recreate it properly—this often takes more time than simply throwing it away and starting again.
This potential lack of flexibility in the long term is a critical consideration if you are planning to make serious money from your website.
4. Bloated Code and SEO Implications
Elementor, like many visual builders, tends to produce bloated code, which can negatively impact your site’s search engine optimisation (SEO).
As previously mentioned, this code can be a nightmare to optimize for SEO (if at all), and you will trigger endless LCP errors in the Search console.
It’s important to remember that all this code slows down both humans and search bots, so a page build is not for you if you plan to get a large site consistently crawled.
Clean, concise code is easier for search engines to crawl and index, which can help improve your site’s visibility.
For custom projects that strongly focus on SEO, the additional code and potential slower page speeds with Elementor could be detrimental to achieving optimal search rankings.
5. The Cost of Extensibility
While Elementor Pro offers an extensive range of widgets and features, achieving certain bespoke functionalities will require additional plugins or custom development, which can add to the project’s overall cost.
Investing in extra plugins for specific features—each with its potential compatibility and performance issues—can complicate project management and increase website project costs.
6. Ownership.
WordPress is open source, so it’s yours; this is not true of Elementor and other similar plugins as you are tied into the company that builds the plugins.
Page builder plugins don’t just add a little functionality to your site; they become your site, so you are now using an open-source CMS with a non-opensource plugin to build it.
WordPress does not need Elementor to build pages, but when tends to happen is that inexperienced developers learn Elementor (et al.) and, therefore, push it to potential clients as the best solution for your website when this is not often the case.
To take away…
While there is nothing wrong with using the right tool for the right job, we see far too many clients with websites that should never have been built on a page builder like Elementor in the first place.
As mentioned above, this choice is often outside the client’s remit. After all, you have engaged a professional WordPress agency to build you a site, and they suggested Elementor, so you took their advice.
Building a website with a page builder plugin requires learning to use the plugin, not learning to code WordPress, so unfortunately, you initially selected a developer that, well, can’t develop WordPress.
Plan ahead or retrofit.
If you are planning a new website, a bespoke approach will provide something lightweight, fast, and easy to maintain and update.
It will last you well, and you won’t have issues with it moving forward regarding updates and adding new functions.
If you already have a large site built on a page builder plugin like Elementor and want to move to a customised WordPress install, we can help you do so, minimising the hassle and removing all the excess markup and scripts.
David Foreman
Dave is the MD at Toast and has been building bespoke WordPress sites for over 15 years. He currently gets involved in the scoping and planning of new sites together with content and SEO strategy to get sites ranking.
