Elementor is a visual page builder plugin for WordPress, and the most popular one, with over 1 million active installations of its Pro version and many millions of the free one. It replaces the default editing experience with drag-and-drop design: you compose pages from widgets (headings, images, forms, sliders) and style them visually, seeing exactly what visitors will see.
Elementor Pro adds the Theme Builder, which extends visual editing to headers, footers, archive pages, and WooCommerce templates, meaning an entire site can be designed without touching theme code. This is why it’s the standard tool for agencies delivering custom designs on WordPress at a sane budget: full design freedom, editable by the client afterward.
Its main criticism is output weight: Elementor generates more CSS, JavaScript, and DOM nesting than hand-coded templates, so an untuned Elementor site can score poorly on Core Web Vitals. Configured properly (Improved CSS Loading, Inline Font Icons, a lightweight base theme like Astra), Elementor sites reach 90+ mobile PageSpeed scores routinely.
