- Elementor for Photographers and Artists
Overall Rating
- Elementor is arguably the best page builder for WordPress in terms of ease of use and functionality. The visual drag-and-drop interface with live preview makes creating custom designs for your website straightforward. Several hundreds of ready-made templates and blocks speed up your workflow immensely. The basic version of Elementor already takes you a long way. But with all its additional power features, Elementor Pro is an incredible value for all artists who want to take their website to the next level.
Elementor for Photographers and Artists put to the test
(With An Elementor Pro Review)
Elementor is a website builder plugin for WordPress. I’m using the OceanWP theme for this WordPress site, and I’ve built every single page, portfolio item, and blog post using Elementor!
Elementor is hands down the best WordPress page builder that I’ve seen so far. It’s super-easy to use, it’s intuitive and easy to learn, and it offers a WHOLE BUNCH of features for all purposes imaginable.
I’m a digital artist and photographer myself. Still, I built each and every page of this website – from scratch – using Elementor. No coding skills required.
So if you’re wondering, ‘Is Elementor for photographers and artists?’, then be assured: yes, it is!
But let’s figure out together why that is…
Why is Elementor for photographers and artists?
Elementor has lots of great widgets for photographers and artists. Alone its Gallery Widget, which I have used for all my art galleries, is worth switching to Elementor Pro!
The Elementor Gallery Widget is more versatile and customizable than many other paid gallery plugins for WordPress. It comes with Lightbox and zoom functionality, download and social sharing options, as well as heaps of different design possibilities.
I’ve made a couple of tutorials on how to use the Elementor Gallery Widget that you can check out below:
From my experience, can I recommend Elementor for photographers & artists?
Elementor Pro costs as much as some other Gallery-only plugins for WordPress. But when you buy Elementor Pro, you do not only get the Gallery Widget, but a whole lot of other fantastic features to create more advanced designs on your website.
It comes with lots of other goodies for visual artists, such as the Image Slider, Flip Box, Media Carousel, and Portfolio Widget. The WooCommerce integration is super-handy if you want to sell art prints, downloadable images, or services on your website. The WooCommerce Widgets make it easy to display your products and create custom sales pages.
There are also third-party plugins that work with Elementor. For example, I used Essential Addons for Elementor to create the image accordion that you see on the front page, on DESKTOP only – yes, you can make all pages mobile-friendly! More on that later in this post.
I’ve also published a tutorial on how to create an image accordion for you to check out.
Is Elementor good for WordPress?
Elementor is a drag-and-drop editor that allows you to edit your site from the front end. That means you see all changes on your page in real time – exactly the way visitors will see your page in their browsers. In terms of Elementor vs. WordPress, there’s no need to first save the draft and then switch to the preview – contrary to WordPress’s native editor.
Believe me, this saves so much time and is so much more convenient to work with. If you switch from the WordPress editor to Elementor, you’ll notice that every tiny change in the WordPress editor takes so much longer than in Elementor.
But Elementor is not only a huge time-saver, it’s also so much more powerful than the standard WordPress editor (and many other editors that you can download for WordPress as well…).
There were many times when I saw some design or layout on another website and I thought to myself: ‘Aww, I’d like to have something like that for my site, too!’
It’s all easy with Elementor. You can basically recreate any design and layout that you spot on another website. If you see a nice way of displaying an art portfolio – you can recreate it with Elementor! If you see a great call to action or product presentation you want to use for your blog – you can recreate it with Elementor!
Elementor offers a whole range of premade templates that you can use for your site (more on that later). But if you want to have total control over your design, you don’t even need to use a template – you can build everything from scratch, exactly to your personal liking!
Either way – Elementor will help your website stand out, be more appealing to your visitors, and your sales pages be more converting.
Does Elementor slow down your site?
There’s quite some concern going around among users that Elementor might slow down your website. Elementor is a slim page builder that produces clean and stringent code. That’s why Elementor alone won’t slow down your site.
Some sites that use a lot of plugins or whose theme is less flexible and more stout in terms of file size may experience performance issues.
Elementor works with all WordPress themes (as long as you have WordPress 5.0 or higher). That means you can keep your current theme – no matter which one you opted for.
A good Elementor theme, however, should be lightweight in terms of file size, and modular – that means you can pick only those features you need. There are a couple of themes that are known to be highly performing and to work particularly well with Elementor. These include:
These four themes are also highly recommended by Elementor themselves.
Elementor Overview
In 2016, a group of web experts set out to develop a WordPress plugin that would make designing web pages easier and faster. They were frustrated with the extremely slow and tedious process of creating pages with the WordPress editor.
Now, five years later, Elementor is the world’s leading WordPress page builder with 5,000,000+ active installations and a 5-star rating on around 6,000 reviews at wordpress.org. Quite impressive.
Do professionals use Elementor?
Elementor is being used by more than 5 million people worldwide – web professionals and ‘normal’ people alike. Many professional web designers appreciate Elementor because it allows them to develop website rapidly, even if the layout is complex. Plus, WordPress sites built with Elementor are easily manageable by their customers, who are not necessarily the techy kind of persons.
I mean.. dude… 5 MILLION people all around the world – this just goes to show how popular and how easy Elementor is to use.
Do you need Elementor Pro?
Elementor comes with a free and a paid version. Unlike the free versions of other page builders, Elementor delivers 30+ powerful features with its free pack that are sufficient to build a basic, good looking website.
So if you’re just getting started with your WordPress artist website and don’t want to dish out any money yet, the free version is a great starting point. However, as you’re progressing and looking for more advanced features, then it’s worth considering upgrading to Elementor Pro.
Besides stunning styling, layout, and design elements, the new Elementor version (incl. the free one) allows you to customize your entire WordPress theme – without leaving the page you’re currently working on.
For example, you can change the default link colors for your entire WordPress theme – with just a couple of clicks right in the Elementor sidebar. Super practical.
But now let’s dive a bit deeper into the ins and outs of Elementor. This review will tell you exactly if Elementor is for photographers and artists – or rather not. So let’s see what you can expect from page builder, Elementor templates and building blocks, user experience, and other features.
Further down this post, we’ll take a look at the paid version in the Elementor Pro Review to let you know whether Elementor Pro is worth getting and what value you can expect for your money!
But now, let’s jump right in and start with the page builder!
Page Builder
Elementor Review: The Page Builder
1. Front-End Page Builder
Elementor is a visual, drag-and-drop front-end page builder.
… and it’s exactly for this reason why I can recommend Elementor for photographers and artists.
Visual. Let’s see what exactly that means.
A visual front-end page builder means that when you design your web page, you see it exactly what it looks like in real time. There’s no guesswork and switching around between draft and preview involved.
That’s why a front-end page builder is so much better than a back-end page builder. The standard WordPress editor is a back-end page builder. You can’t see what the changes you just made look like before hitting ‘Update’ and then switching to the site preview.
This is an extremely slow and tedious process that you can avoid by using a visual front-end page builder like Elementor.
In its editing interface, Elementor gives you an immediate real-time preview of the changes you make. Whether you add a button, make a heading larger or smaller, move around some sections, or insert another column to your layout – you instantaneously see your website the way visitors will see it.
This makes it way more fun to design your website and also much more time-efficient!
THAT'S WHY building a website is so QUICK & EASY with Elementor for photographers and artists...
Drag-and-drop editing means that you can move around the design elements just the way you like – by dragging and dropping them wherever you need them to be!
Once you start editing a page with Elementor, you’ll see the Elementor sidebar on the left side of your screen. The sidebar contains all elements that you can add to your website, i.e. headings, images, text blocks, buttons, videos, spacers, dividers, galleries, and many more.
All you need to do is grab one of these elements – or widgets – with the mouse and drag & drop it onto your preferred section of the website. From there, you can edit and customize it just the way you want!
The free version of Elementor offers you 30+ widgets that you can use to build your website. Elementor Pro rolls out another 50+ more advanced widgets that are paid.
You can also access WordPress’s native elements via the Elementor sidebar, or add other Elementor plugins, such as Essential Addons for Elementor or Ultimate Addons for Elementor, to extend the editing functionalities.
Depending on your requirements, you might be able to achieve the look and functionality you desire using only free widgets from Elementor, WordPress, and third-party plugins.
One thing I’ve noticed about the Elementor page builder is that it can get a lil’ buggy, especially if you’ve installed a number of third-party addons and your pages get longer and more complex. The sidebar can take long to load and updating your page doesn’t work smoothly at times.
Luckily, this is quite easy to fix. If you encounter the same problem, you can check out my blog post:
→ How To Fix The Elementor 500 Internal Server Error In WordPress
Probably the best thing about Elementor’s front-end page editor, though, is that is gives you full control over every single tiny detail on your website. You can configure color, font family, weight, style, letter spacing and line height of every single widget that includes text.
You can create multi-column layouts, insert images, align them vertically and horizontally, add borders, and round off their corners. In short, you can customize everything to your heart’s content!
Don't miss the free advanced editing options for all widgets...
As if that wasn’t enough, there’s an Advanced tab available for every widget that’ll allow you to:
- Set margins and padding in pixel, percent, and EM
- Add custom widths to images, columns, sections, and other elements
- Align all widgets such as text, images, background images and videos within columns (horizontal and vertical alignment options)
- Define fixed page positions for elements
- Adjust the width, height, and space between columns
- Add hover and motion effects (e.g. scrolling effects and entrance animations with set time delays)
- … and much more!
2. In-Line Text Editing
In-line text editing is new with recent versions of Elementor. This is only a small detail as compared to the other features we’re talking about here. Still it’s worth a mention, because it makes your life so much easier!
In-line text editing allows you to edit texts on the preview area itself. That means you do not necessarily have to go back to the widget settings in the sidebar, when you want to type text into a heading or a text block.
This is just a nice little extra touch that makes using Elementor even more easy and fast!
3. Responsive & Mobile-Friendly Design
Responsive and mobile-friendly websites are EXTREMELY important nowadays. More than 50% of all website traffic comes from mobile devices. Plus, Google favors mobile-optimized pages in its search results. A mobile-responsive website automatically ranks higher if the search comes from a mobile device.
So responsive layouts are not only key for a good user experience but also for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)!
Fortunately, all layouts that you create with Elementor are automatically mobile-friendly. That means they automatically scale in a way that looks good on desktop, tablet, and smartphone.
If you want to be sure that the page you’re building looks as good on tablet and mobile as it does on desktop, you can quickly launch a tablet and mobile preview inside Elementor’s user interface.
No need to get out your smartphone and call up your website from there to make sure things look good. A single click on the ‘Tablet’ or ‘Mobile’ icon right next to the Update button will let you know how things are looking.
Related: → Is Elementor Easy To Use? – Elementor Tutorial For Beginners
Fully customize your Elementor photo site for mobile use...
What’s even better is that Elementor also lets you show and hide specific sections on different devices. All you need to do is click on a toggle.
For example, I’ve created an image accordion for my front page where I’m showing works of my Lip Service Collection.
As I found that the image accordion doesn’t look as good on smaller devices, I’ve hidden it on mobile and tablet and replaced it with an Elementor Pro grid gallery.
If you visit my website with your phone or tablet, you won’t be seeing an image accordion on there. Only if you use your desktop computer will the accordion be visible to you. Try it! ☺
It’s worth noting that the changes you make in one mode do not affect the other modes. For example, if you make a heading smaller for mobile view, it will not decrease the size of the heading on desktop and tablet mode.
All your formatting for the individual devices is being preserved.
4. Full revision history & easy undo/redo
Elementor’s full revision history and the easy undo & redo functionality is something you will appreciate when you create your own designs or start editing templates.
This is how it often goes: you create a design, you adjust things here and there, change a color, tweak a spacing, … and then you notice that what you had some minutes ago looked much better than what you’re having right now.
This is where Elementor’s full Actions History comes into play. Every single action that you do during one editing session is logged in the history tab and can be reverted, if needed.
So there’s absolutely no problem to undo your last couple of actions and revert them to an earlier point that you liked better. You can play around with the layout of one entire web page – just for experimentation.
If you don’t like the result, one click is enough to switch back to where you got started!
Switching to the Revisions tab, right next to Actions, gives you full access to all revisions you’ve ever made on that specific page.
You can choose to revert your document to any previous version, or to even go back to the very beginning.
No version you saved of your page ever gets lost!
Templates & Blocks
Elementor Review: Templates & Blocks
This is huge. Elementor offers you 300+ ready-made templates and 200+ ready-made blocks that you can insert into your website and customize to your liking.
Elementor’s templates and blocks make it easy for you to create stunning, professional-looking websites.
Page templates are full-length pages designed for different purposes. You can find Welcome, Contact, About, Blog, Product and Services page layouts in Elementor’s Template Library.
Block templates contain individual elements that you can add to a full-page layout. For example, an FAQ section, a call to action, a testimonial carousel, or an image slider.
Let’s start with the page templates.
1. Page Templates
Photography templates pre-designed by Elementor for photographers and artists
The easiest way to start building your artist website is to use one of Elementor’s pre-designed page templates.
Currently, Elementor has 300+ full-length page templates and counting. Around 40 templates are available for free. The others are accessible with Elementor Pro.
If there’s a downside to the available page templates, it’s that you can’t search for free templates only. Once you go to the Template Library, all templates come up and you need to figure out whether a template is free or paid by the small ‘Pro’ tag in the upper right corner of each template.
However, the good thing is that Elementor offers so-called Template Kits that you can use to build your entire website. Kits are a bundle of pages with the same design for different purposes.
Elementor themes for photography and art
If you’re looking for an Elementor photography template, then check out the Photography Kit.
It includes eleven pages for you to combine on your website, including About, Contact, and Home page, plus nine gallery pages to beautifully display your photography portfolio in Elementor. It’s a premium template kit, which you can obtain with Elementor Pro.
Page templates are a huge time saver and a guarantee that your website will look good!
You can go to the Template Library by clicking on the Folder icon at the bottom of the canvas. This will open a scrollable window where you can choose a page template that you like.
→ Elementor Tutorial For Beginners – All You Need To Know About Elementor
Once you’ve made your choice, simply click on ‘Insert’ and the template will fully load into your page.
All templates are editable and customizable. You can add and remove sections and elements, or re-arrange the layout. You can also insert other templates or blocks into the same page and combine them to create your own custom design.
You see, Elementor’s page templates are super-flexible and a fantastic workflow booster!
2. Building blocks
Apart from full-page templates, Elementor offers you more than 200 ready-made block layouts.
Just like page templates, some pre-designed blocks are free and some Pro blocks are paid.
Blocks can be best described as premade sections that you can load into the preferred area of your web page.
There are content blocks for all kinds of purposes: about, contact, testimonials, calls to action, FAQs, feature lists, restaurant menus, pricing tables, portfolios, and more.
Adding a block to your site is as simple as adding a page template. Just click on the same Folder icon as before. But instead of clicking ‘Pages’, this time click on ‘Blocks’.
If you have a clear idea what type of block you’re looking for, click on ‘Category’ to view a list of available categories in the dropdown menu.
Documentation & Support
Elementor Review: Documentation & Support
Elementor offers detailed documentation in form of written online helps and tutorial videos – both on their website and YouTube channel.
There’s a huge Help Center where you can obtain helpful information on just about any Elementor widget. You’ll also find a comprehensive Knowledge Base on the Elementor website with detailed information, tutorials, and frequently asked questions (FAQs).
What’s particularly practical is that you’ll find a little help icon at the bottom of each widget in Elementor’s sidebar.
That means if you have a question or get stuck on any problem while working with a certain widget, all you need to do is click the help icon and you’ll be taken directly to the specific tutorial.
All this documentation is available for free to all Elementor users – both basic and pro.
Value for Money
Elementor for Photographers and Artists who want premium features
Elementor Pro Review: Premium widgets
The free Elementor widgets are the basic fundamentals you need to create a decent website. However, if you want to take things to the next level and design a really beautiful and feature-rich platform, then consider upgrading to the pro version.
With Elementor Pro, you’ll get more widgets, more templates, and more functionality for a professional-looking website. Plus, you will get new updates and can ask the support team for help.
Is Elementor pro worth getting for photographers and artists?
Particularly interesting about Elementor for photographers and artists is the Premium Gallery Widget that enables you to beautifully display your artworks.
You’ll get heaps of design features to style your gallery (grid, tile, masonry layouts, filters, overlays, borders, spacings, image titles and descriptions, social sharing, etc.).
If you’re already using the basic Elementor version and like how it works, you can seamlessly upgrade to Elementor Pro any time you want.
The free version of Elementor includes:
- Fully functional website builder
- Live preview front-end editor
- Desktop, tablet, and mobile responsive web designing
- Complete revision history and full actions undo/redo log for entire editing session
- 30+ widgets for images, text boxes, headings, videos, audio files, maps, and more
- 40+ free page templates, including photography themes
- 100+ free block templates for contact, about, FAQs, testimonials, image carousels, sliders, and many more.
Additional modules that will make your life sweeter
Elementor Pro offers more professional and versatile page templates and blocks that will help you build a stunning website in no time.
This includes Elementor themes for photography to quickly create a photo site in Elementor that is highly functional and consistent in design.
The Pro version comes with an additional 50+ widgets that provide more advanced web design features to help you create essential parts of your website REALLY FAST.
Elementor Pro modules include:
- Image galleries (grid, tile, and masonry)
- Image slides
- Media carousels
- Flip boxes
- Portfolios
- Forms (opt-in, contact, and login forms)
- Pricing tables and price lists
- Blog post grids
- Testimonials
- Countdowns
- Animated headlines
- Social share buttons
- WooCommerce features (products, categories, add to cart)
- …. and more!
Apart from that, Elementor Pro gives you the option of saving blocks as Global Widgets.
You customize a Global Widget once to make it fit the style of your site, and then you can reuse it over and over again whenever you need. There’s no need to design a certain block again each time you create a new page.
Let’s say, for example, you use Info Boxes throughout your blog posts many times. You design the Info Box once, save it as a Global Widget, and paste it into every new blog post as needed. Saves a lot of time and helps make your site look consistent!
Elementor Pro Review: The Theme Builder
Easy WordPress Theme Customization
The Theme Builder was added to Elementor Pro only recently. It gives you even more control over the look and feel of your WordPress site.
Now you can create various custom layouts and apply them to different areas of your website, such as header and footer.
Previously, it was only possible to create custom designs for posts and pages with Elementor Pro. Now you can design different header and footer sections to use for your home page, for blog posts, your art portfolio, or a landing page.
This works, like everything else, through Elementor’s visual drag-and-drop front-end editor – with absolutely no coding necessary!
Elementor Pro Review: Pricing Plans
Is Elementor Pro worth it?
The basic version of Elementor is free. Elementor PRO comes with three different subscription plans: Personal, Plus, and Expert. Each plan offers the same set of features. The only difference is the number of websites you can use it for.
If you want to use Elementor Pro for your photography or art website, then the Personal plan will do.
The Plus plan is rather for businesses that run more than one website. And the Expert plan is for web designers who create many websites for their clients.
There’s quite some confusion going around about Elementor’s pricing plans. First of all, there’s no Elementor Pro lifetime license. Each license is issued for one year. Once the license expires and you decide not to renew it, you will lose access to support, updates, and premium templates.
However, while you could continue to use Elementor Pro in the past – even after your license had expired – with version 2.9 and higher, the Elementor Pro widgets are now not draggable anymore.
No worries – your existing website will remain intact, you just won’t be able to make use of the premium features after expiration of your license.
While there’s no Elementor Pro discount or trial available, you’ll have a 30 Day Money Back Guarantee: if you’re not happy with Elementor Pro, you’ll get your money back without hassle.
In short: Zero Risk in trying out Elementor Pro for yourself!
Elementor Rating Overall
Why is Elementor bad ass for photographers and artists?
Elementor is the strongest page builder currently available on the market. And not only that… Elementor is the WORLD’S leading page builder for WordPress. With 5+ million active users and an impeccable 5-star rating, Elementor outruns all other WordPress page builders.
The team at Elementor consistently works on the plugin to make it better and add new features to it. They release frequent updates to keep all widgets up-to-the-minute so you can easily create a website that is in line with the latest design trends.
Whether you need the Pro version of Elementor or can achieve your design goals with the free version depends on your needs.
Elementor is without doubt an asset – no matter which version you’re using. It’s intuitive, it’s fast, it’s easy to use. It enables you to create a layout in no time – the visual drag-and-drop editor makes it possible.
No coding skills required – everything is straightforward and easy to use. Really everybody can use Elementor. If you’re a photographer or other artist and want to build a website to showcase your portfolio – Elementor is for you!
Elementor pros & cons
PROS
- Easy to use
- Visual drag-and-drop editor
- Lots of essential free and paid website elements
- Large selection of pre-designed templates, incl. themes for photography and art
- Time-saving building blocks
- Theme Builder for custom layouts
- Global Widgets for easy reuse of frequently used elements
- Strong support with free helpful documentation and video tutorials
CONS
- Elementor sidebar may take long to load and freeze at times
- Not as many free templates as other brands
- No option to filter free and paid templates and blocks
- Elementor for Photographers and Artists
Overall Rating
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