Elementor and existing sites and content

  • Elementor is marketed as being easy to use but like other page builders, Elementor provides little to no documentation for how to use it with existing sites and existing content. Grrr.

    For example, how do you use Elementor’s templates with sites that already have existing pages and content?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Hi @bizstarz,

    With Elementor you can create and edit complex web pages.
    However, you cannot edit with it pages that was built with other page builders or in other methods.

    You might also want to take a look at the growing library of videos broken down by element/feature – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt9kG_EDX8zwGSC1-ycJJVA

    Thread Starter bizstarz

    (@bizstarz)

    Hi @boazpojo and @pingram3541,

    Thank you. Sounds like Elementor, like other page builders, is deceptively marketed to make people believe it’s more capable than it is.

    Technically you can use it with other page builders as long as they don’t conflict for resources or cause issues with libraries that clash.

    Keep in mind this is very convoluted as each page builder loads it’s own css and js on top of your chosen theme which likely has it’s own css and js for building pages either with it’s own builder, shortcode, widgets or just plain base html styling, so you’ll end up with a lot of bloat which is sure to effect performance.

    I’ve converted a few sites using Visual Composer (which I loathe) over to Elementor and did not experience any issues with the 2 plugins being active at the same time. However, I did not mix content where any post/page had both builder’s content. I created new pages and built those out entirely in Elementor and then removed the old pages and updated urls (permalinks) until I could ditch VC entirely, disable it and delete it.

    Elementor is not perfect, even Pro has some caveats, but it is still very young in development and I can say it is the best experience I’ve had with page builders in WordPress.

    How I use it. I use the free _s (underscores) theme to provide all needed functionality or write anything I need myself. No theme css grid except for basic header/footer/sidebar needs, the rest is Elementor which keeps the bloat way down and less CSS/JS conflicts to worry about and I’m not double or even triple stacking resources this way.

    The 3 main issues I see w/ Elementor:

    1) The builder controls are inline w/ the content instead of an overlay layered above the real content. If you do custom css w/ absolute positioning etc. it WILL break the administration capability in the builder with controls that become inaccessible due to css effecting them.

    2) The fact that it must use it’s own css/js grid to provide the same user experience/look/feel means that it also ADDS to what a theme is already supposed to provide. If there was a way to include the Elementor core css grid/js and helper functions for front end rendering we can build themes that use this as well and also have the luxury of disabling the builder while still providing the built content on the front end.

    3) The custom CSS is very limited in that you cannot target anything above the current selector in which you are placing that custom css. This means no page specific or global CSS for styling header menu’s logo’s, footer links, forms etc. So if you need to do custom CSS development you won;t be able to do it exclusively within the page builder which doesn’t improve our workflow and I’m basically in the same boat as other builders jumping between screens again, ungh.

    • This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by pingram.
Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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