If you clicked on this article then most likely you are looking to create a website as an individual (or maybe as an enterprise, who knows 🙂). If that is so then you have come to the right place. This article not only talks about the importance of owning a website but also tells you how you can do it in a cost-effective way & depending on when you are reading the article you may also be able to grab a Black Friday 2021 offer (scroll down to know more). If you missed it then don’t worry you can explore certain offers on WordPress, So read along.
To keep the context relevant depending on your current status of owning a website versus trying to improve the one that you already have, The first half of this article will be focussed on people who already have a WordPress site and then the latter half we will discuss options for those who are yet to create a website.
Why Elementor?
But why should you care about spending money on Elementor? Of course, this is not the only product that allows you to create a beautiful WordPress website without any coding skills, There are others and a simple search in Google will give you various options to explore. However, if you must choose an alternative then my recommendation which comes “close” to Elementor, based on my personal experience on this very website where you are reading this article, will be OceanWP. They offer Elementor like extensions that you can use on your WordPress site. They offer themes (Free & Pro), extensions (Free & Pro) and their pricing is less compared to Elementor and they also offer a lifetime subscription (which I use on this website).
However, note that I mentioned it comes close, and initially, I was trying to avoid Elementor as well but then ended up getting the Elementor Pro (Essential) plan as it is packed with options that you need to create various kinds of pages and post. Remember when you are creating the pages and writing articles, the need changes based on the content, and I found severely limited with OceanWP Premium alone and also bought the Elementor Pro plan.
Some of the cool features where Elementor wins hands down are the following:
- Themes
- Landing Pages
- Lottie
- Facebook integration (like button, embedded posts)
- Website load times
Themes will get you started with a cool-looking website in a jiffy and from that point onwards you can customize it to suit your needs. My favorite is Lottie and you can know more about it here if you are not familiar with what is that.
Also, note that it’s not about making pretty websites. Most important is the speed or in other words performance of the website. If you have a good-looking website and it performs poorly then you will not get any or less traffic as the web surfers will abandon your website in no time. People have very little patience these days especially the younger people. Of course with Elementor also you need to ensure that you are not overdoing certain things which will make your website slow anyways but at least the base should be strong. If that is not strong and on top of that if you are also not optimizing the website then you can forget about retaining the web surfers. The topic on performance deserves its own dedicated article and that will be the story for another day 🙂 .
We can go on talking about the features but the best way is to see for yourself and you can do that by going to the blog site of Elementor where every month they publish the top 10 websites using Elementor. The latest at the time of writing this article is October 2021 Top 10 Elementor sites.
Oh! and did I tell you about the customer service? What is a good product without good customer service? This is often overlooked when buying anything but fret not. With excellent customer service, you will not be left alone to deal with any issue that you might be facing. Nothing is God-sent and everything breaks all the time. The focus should not be on adopting something that does not break but should be on the service part that gives you peace of mind that even if it breaks, it will be fixed without breaking a sweat.
If you are convinced then I have the current deals running from 22 November 2021 to 2 December 2021. You can click on the link below and choose the plan that you need depending on how many websites you have. All plans come with 30 days money-back plan with no questions asked. So if you think that this is not something for you, then fret not, you can get your money back.
If you need clarity on what these different plans mean to you then I have described them below. But for most people with just 1 website, the Essential PRO plan would be sufficient.
Breakdown of Elementor Pro subscriptions
Elementor Pro plans are billed annually and they come in 5 options namely;
- Essential
- Advanced
- Expert
- Studio
- Agency
All the plans come with 30-day money-back guarantee. No questions asked.
Don’t have a website yet?
Now that we have understood the Elementor plans and what it can do for you. It’s now time to discuss hosting your website in the first place. This piece of the puzzle is for those who are unable to decide where & how to host the website. Now there are various options but to keep the length of the article to “bearable” limits, we are going to focus on one option only. If you are not convinced with this then you can do your own research on Google.
The best option if you have decided to go for Elementor is to use the plan which offers hosting along with the Elementor pro plan. So you get the best of both worlds and you just need to deal with only one support for both hosting and Elementor related technical issues. The downside is that it may be considered inflexible and you will face what is called “vendor lockdown“. But that depends on person to person how they take it. Some may not like it whereas others may be just fine with it.
Good news is that currently there is a Black Friday 2021 deal on that as well. If you are interested then you can click on the image link below to get started.
To know about the PRO’s and CON’s for Elementor hosting click on the respective tabs in the table below.
Conclusion
To conclude based on my own personal experience, Elementor brings in lot of value if you are hosting your website on WordPress. The Essential plan at the price it comes provides tremendous value if you are serious about your website and worth every penny.
As far as the hosting option is concerned if you are not comfortable with Elementor’s own hosting then you can also do what I have done, which is to take the hosting of WordPress from Namecheap.com and then take Elementor Pro plan as per your need. As the name suggests it’s cheap to host WordPress in Namecheap.com. However, you need to be aware that you will need the following for a complete experience
- Namecheap’s plan for WordPress. My recommendation is the Turbo plan. You will get a free SSL certificate for your website with this.
- Cloudflare CDN if you want something comparable with Elementor’s hosting plan. It will come out as US$5 per month. The DNS hosting in Cloudflare is free. I have moved my DNS from Namecheap’s DNS server to Cloudflare which has better security and it provides good analytics. The Free plan is sufficient but if you want paid plan then you can go for that as well.
Check out the links below if you are interested in hosting WordPress in Namecheap.com. You get the first month free and if you want to continue then you will be billed only from the second month onwards. If you do not like it then you can cancel as well.
