Elementor was first launched in 2016 and quickly rose in popularity because of its amazing features. It gives web developers a means to design websites with ease and also offers the drag-and-drop feature. Today Elementor has over 5 million active installations making it one of the most popular page builders in the industry.
The Elementor team has always been improving this builder to give the users the best web building experience. Each and every year, Elementor keeps evolving and improving. For the year 2021, there were three main initiatives of Elementor. These initiatives are:
- Improved Performance – To improve performance, multiple updates were made to reduce page load time. Some of these updates included removal of unnecessary DOM elements, reduction of parts of CSS and JS code calling them only when needed, changing the loading mechanism of Eicons and Font Awesome icons into SVG.
- Streamlined Workflow – As a part of enhancing your web building experience, Elementor has invested in streamlining the workflow. Elementor has removed redundant tasks so that your web development speed will increase.
- Stabilized Environment – A WordPress website operates with different plugins from different development teams. There might be times where your website may crash due to an unstable environment. For this reason Elementor introduced a section called ‘Experiment’. In this section you can activate/deactivate features whose stability might be questionable.
The three initiatives mentioned above were taken by Elementor for the year 2021. As we can see, all of these initiatives have one single goal, to provide the users with the ultimate web building experience.
Top 7 features of Elementor in 2021 according to the community
To ensure the best user experience, the Elementor team conducts surveys. In these surveys the community is given a chance to express how they feel about a certain feature or topic.
Throughout the year of 2021, Elementor had a total number of 10 updates. In these updates 47 new features, widgets, and general improvements were made. In a recent survey, Elementor asked the community what were their favorite features from the year 2021.
The community rigorously responded naming so many different features as their favorites. Among all those features, the team of Elementor selected 7 top features. This a list of those 7 features.
1. Full Website Kit
The no.1 feature of Elementor for the year 2021 is the Full Website Kit. The feature was launched in July ‘21. One of the amazing features of Elementor was that it allowed you to import pages, different sections, pop up, and other templates from a library.
The idea of a full website kit was, it allows you to import a full website including headers, footers, archive page, single page, and more. Every website kit was made of components that had matching designs and styling that goes with the theme. You can also easily customize those components as you wish.
I think we can all agree that the expert design team of Elementor takes web designing very seriously. As the design of each website kit is elegant and modern. By importing a website kit, you can quickly start working on a website project and customize it to your needs. This really speeds up your workflow. We can see why most of the community members chose this feature as their favorite.
2. Form Submission
The Elementor Form Submission feature is an enhancement to its existing Form widget. Now you can get a better look at the information that your visitors are submitting. By collecting the information with Form Submission you can seamlessly access the data, analyze it, or export it in a CSV file.
You can filter your forms by Form Names, Pages, Bulk Actions, or Date Ranges in order to view, edit or delete a submission. Not only that, but you can also collect the data and integrate those data into third-party marketing tools. This lets you step up your marketing efforts.
3. Extended Ecommerce Capabilities
Elementor has multiple eCommerce features that assist you in your conversions and boost your sales. It is the no.3 choice of the people and we can see why. E-Commerce is gaining popularity everyday. The ability to set your pricing and sell your products from the comfort of your home is a thrill that no one could resist.
WordPress combined with WooCommerce enables you to set up your own shop and start your business quickly. With the added support of Elementor, you can take your eCommerce business into the next level. To elevate your site’s shopping experience, Elementor released several updates the past year. Let’s take a look at the features added in these updates:
- Menu Cart Widget Improvements: This gives you the option to style your menu cart so that it doesn’t look so bland in design. The update also introduced a new mini-cart that you can put anywhere on your WooCommerce website. This cart floats at the top right corner of the screen. It creates a more intuitive shopping experience.
- New Cart, Checkout, and My Account widgets: When your customer is shopping on your online store, it is imperative to make his/her experience smooth. With that in mind, Elementor introduced some styling options. These options will allow you to further improve the appearance of the shopping pages. It will also remove unnecessary or redundant buttons.
- Dynamic WooCommerce Tag: This allows you to set tags for your WooCommerce products. With it you can now include data from your WooCommerce to any page in your website. Using this method, you can also showcase products in popups and landing pages. Another advantage of dynamic tags is that you can change the price of a product, and it will be updated across your entire website.
- New WooCommerce Pages in Site Settings: This feature adds a new section in the Elementor Site Settings. From here you can now customize and configure your WooCommerce pages without leaving this screen. This streamlines your workflow and improves efficiency.
- Ajax Loading: The new Ajax Loading feature allows your customers to load additional products from a page and also allows them to adjust their cart without having to reload the page.
- Paypal button: A new Paypal button widget was also introduced which you can use to customize your button and collect payment with ease. You no longer have to use complicated third-party plugin setups.
4. Custom Code
The 4th favorite feature according to the community was the Custom Code feature. Although there is a way, in which you can access your WordPress files and edit the code. But that might be a more complex step as editing the website files could mess up your website. So Elementor gives you another option in the menu where you can add your own codes.
This way you don’t have to make any direct changes to your website files and can keep your own code more organized.
5. Landing Page Builder
Elementor is popular for offering its excellent web-building features. Landing Page Builder allows you to use Elementor’s drag-and-drop feature to create landing pages. We all know the importance of a landing page with good UI/UX. These pages are created to direct the users to take an action. This action could be to offer your products and services, register to a form, sign up for an event, single-click purchase, etc. The landing pages have to be direct and precise. You don’t want to confuse your visitors with unnecessary menus and events.
With Elementor’s Landing Page Builder, you can create a landing page that doesn’t inherit your website’s navigation menu. This helps you to keep your visitors focused on the topic at hand and not bother them with excess details. Elementor has a library of landing pages that you can use and customize. This is really helpful as creating a landing page from scratch could be a time-taking process.
6. Import & Export
Import and Export was my 6th favorite feature. This feature is really helpful as you can not only import/export a part of the website, but an entire website as well. This is especially helpful for clients who want to create multiple websites making slight changes in the design. In this way you can create those multiple websites with a few clicks.
This feature lets you import and export a whole website, a part of the website, custom codes, or marketing assets such as popups and forms into a new project and reuse those. You can create prototypes of different websites. For example, you can create multiple themes of restaurants, hospitals, coffee shops, fitness websites by exporting them for using later. More updates on the way to improve this feature.
7. Custom Breakpoints
At the 7th and final spot, the Custom Breakpoint feature was selected. This is the update of the breakpoints feature of Elementor. In August this feature was released and it adds 4 additional breakpoints to the existing two. This allows you to view how your website looks on 6 different device types.
Adding a custom breakpoint allows you to style your website for specific screen sizes. In this way, you control how each and every section of your website looks to the viewer. For example, the image gallery that displays 4 images in a row on desktops might not be a good idea for mobile devices. Adding custom breakpoints you can now control how your image gallery shows images without having to duplicate each section.
Conclusion
Elementor has always been the plugin that we relied on when we needed to create beautiful websites. The drag-and-drop feature of Elementor combined with its unique user experience and add-ons make it so special. It is refreshing to see that despite being one of the best webpage builders in the market, the team is working so hard to offer even a better experience for the users.
Although it’s early, we’re really excited about this year. What we love so much about Elementor is that they listen to the community.
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