Websites can grow quickly, so you must choose the right platform.
Much of our business here at Toast is rebuilding sites previously created in Elementor.
While nothing is against this page builder, it is not right for every website.
The flexibility you get from a page builder when you start your site can quickly become an issue as your site grows and organic and technical SEO becomes more important.
It’s important to understand how Elementor works.
Elementor is a great page-builder plugin, but it’s a trade-off because what you may save in budget by being able to build something yourself, you will end up paying more for when you eventually need to get a bespoke WP theme built when you outgrow Elementor.
Elementor is very clever, but people do not understand how it can make it very difficult if you want to move to a bespoke site as your content and business grows.
As all your content gets entwined into the plugin’s code, stripping it all out when you move to bespoke can be time-consuming.
Elementor generates a lot of code, even for the most basic content management sections, and when you re-theme to another off-the-shelf or bespoke theme, all this code often has to be manually removed.
Some plugins can help remove the shortcodes generated by the plugin, but this still requires manually cleaning up every page of your site.
Why use Elementor in the first place?
If you start with a tight budget, Elementor can be the perfect choice for your small site; after all, you can install it, add some pre-built web page designs, and in very little time, you can have a working website (albeit one that looks like thousands of other sites).
This makes it an attractive option for entrepreneurs or bootstrapped small businesses, but there is a time for Elementor and a time to get a bespoke site built.
When should you consider moving away from a page builder like Elementor?
The more pages you create on your site, the more time it is going to take to migrate your content, so much so that some businesses often stay on Elementor at the cost of their SEO – the thought of moving away becomes too painful, so they stay with a theme that is costing them search placements.
The best time to invest in a bespoke WordPress site is right from the start of the project—if you simply need a basic site to get started, a bespoke build will cost less than you think.
If you currently have an Elementor site and you don’t seem to be able to optimise it as well as you like, or you can’t achieve the rankings you want, no matter how much time or budget you throw at SEO, it’s time to move.
The process of moving from Elementor.
As all your content is baked into the plugin, there is no easy way to move everything; it’s usually a manual copy-and-paste job. However, some plugins can help, and AI also comes in handy for cleaning the dirty shortcodes that result from turning Elementor off.
Here’s an outline of the process:
- Export all your current content.
- Import into a clean, bespoke WP install and theme (this retains all your links, SEO data, pages, posts, CPTs, etc.
- Clean the Elementor content by removing all the markup and code.
- Repurpose your content into your new bespoke-built blocks.
Moving your content might take 10 minutes per page for simple pages or an hour per page for more complex content, so you can see how this will add up if you have a larger site.
We can build bespoke blocks to match everything you created in Elementor, and the design does not have to change if you are happy with it.
So you end up with a site that looks the same, is structured in the same way and retains the brand equity but is built on a solid WordPress theme that will last years and creates a solid, optimised foundation to grow your site and improve your SEO.
What makes a bespoke theme better than a non-bespoke?
The more code you add to your site, the slower your site gets.
A bespoke theme starts with a few generic blocks (like columns) and is purpose-built for your content and objectives.
All the styling is set in the CSS, so there is no endless fiddling around with settings, and the theme only loads the code required to render the page.
This means that a bespoke site can be better optimised, faster, and easier to develop, and your team can add new content much quicker.
Own your own website.
Another factor that people often forget is that if you build your site on Elementor, it’s not your website; it’s theirs.
If they decide to shut up shop (unlikely) or get bought by another company, you are at the mercy of what they decide to do to their plugin.
If they make updates that don’t work with your site or cause issues with a plugin or a piece of your code, they will not change their platform to suit you.
The sites we build at Toast are developer-friendly and don’t use code outside of the WordPress core. We develop within WordPress’s ethos, which means any developer who knows WordPress can work on any site we build.
Once you’ve paid our fees, the site is yours; there are no ongoing fees unless you want us to provide support, which is for our time, not our theme.
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.
