Why aren’t we using Elementor, and who is it really for?

At Airfleet, we’ve spent the last eight years building everything from sleek event minisites to sprawling B2B websites with millions of active visitors. Along the way, we’ve tested and supported multiple website platforms for our B2B technology clients, delved deep into WordPress concepts—experimenting with themes, plugins, and customizations—and even explored headless CMS solutions.

Quick aside: Those of you wondering what a headless CMS solution is can stop envisioning Sleepy Hollow or even more macabre visions. It’s a separate technology used to host content collections from the main website. Marketers sometimes elect to avoid their website platform’s default options because of missing features and functionality.

This post shares why we choose not to build websites on Elementor (tried it – wasn’t for us!) and pulls from our experience managing and refining Elementor websites built by others. If we can save just one marketer from the frustrations of choosing the wrong solution for their situation, this post is worth the effort.

So, is Elementor for you? Let’s find out.

What is Elementor?

Elementor is a page builder plugin for WordPress with a point-and-click visual editor for creating and modifying pages.

By default, WordPress Core covers only the essentials: a basic Gutenberg editor, limited formatting options, and a few content blocks—enough for simple pages but not nearly robust enough for high-performing marketing sites.

While WordPress Core provides a framework for content management, Elementor offers no-code widgets that let you build and launch pages quickly. While we wouldn’t go so far as to say that Elementor eliminates the need for a developer (more on that later), it is a big improvement from WordPress Core or out of the box options.

A WordPress tech tour (without the jargon)

To understand where Elementor fits, it helps to see how it complements the broader WordPress ecosystem. WordPress Core lays the foundation, handling the basics of content management, but Elementor adds design flexibility to take your site further from a visual design standpoint.

Let’s break down the world of WordPress to show where Elementor fits in:

WordPress Core – The Foundation It’s the backbone of your site, handling content management (CMS) but offering limited design tools.

Themes – Pre-set Layouts Themes shape your site’s look and function. Some require a template kit, or third-party plugins, to manage the content while others require a knowledge of CSS to modify the design elements.

Plugins – Added Power Plugins extend functionality. For example: Yoast SEO: Optimizes for search engines. WPRocket: Speeds things up with caching. WPML: Makes your site multilingual.

Elementor: A Plugin Elementor is a plugin that lets you design via drag and drop visuals without (much) code.

In summary, WordPress provides the structure, themes offer layouts, and plugins add extra power. Elementor is a plugin that enhances the usability and design of your WordPress theme.

What’s so great about Elementor?

At first glance, Elementor feels like the perfect solution for someone who wants a beautiful website without relying on a developer. It lets you control almost everything—styling, adding components, and editing content—all from a simple admin interface. The ability to click and change what you need makes it stand out.

But Elementor isn’t just a visual editor. It also offers an ecosystem of widgets and add-ons, like carousels, accordions, and tabs.

What’s not so great about Elementor?

When you sign up for Elementor, you also sign up for a lot of third parties that Elementor partners with to outsource and speed up the development of certain components. This can introduce additional security risks because it’s up to these third parties to practice rigorous maintenance of these apps to ensure they are secure and compatible with newer versions of WordPress and other Elementor third-party widgets. Even Elementor has experienced a core vulnerability, so this makes us nervous.

The amount of features and embed capabilities that Elementor brings to the table can slow down your page speed. It has earned a reputation of being “bloated,” or containing inefficient and even conflicting code. 

It can also introduce issues when it comes to responsiveness across device types and sizes. While you can customize the mobile design, the way the design is adjusted does not follow modern CSS standards, causing even more bloated code or worse – a bad user experience.

While technically you can export Elementor pages as-is to another site, if you just want to export use a different style or theme with the same content, it’s basically impossible to do with Elementor. Native WordPress or ACF (Advanced Custom Fields plugin) are much more friendly in that regards.

Finally, people complain that styling changes to some widgets may cascade unexpectedly to other elements.

How Elementor works

Websites rely on three essential languages:

• HTML: Defines the structure (think headings, paragraphs, and images).
• CSS: Controls styling—fonts, colors, and layouts.
• JavaScript: Adds interactivity (like buttons that do something when clicked).

When you build with Elementor (or other visual builders like the Airfleet framework), everything you design through drag-and-drop gets automatically converted into HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—the building blocks of your website.

Unlike Elementor, pre-made themes are manually coded for specific layouts. While they aren’t as flexible as visual builders, they generate cleaner, more efficient code—which means faster performance for your website visitors.

With Elementor, every time you nest elements—like putting a container inside a column, inside another container—it creates deeply nested code layers. Developers, on the other hand, would simplify that same structure with CSS grid or flexbox, keeping things lean and optimized.

In other words, nested elements can make Elementor slower and buggy across devices or screen dimensions.

Without solid development experience, creating new pages and new styles on Elementor can be tricky. It’s challenging to get things right, maintain them properly, and keep everything responsive. An inconsistent approach can also trigger unexpected visual bugs—and fixing those bugs can turn into a time-consuming headache.

Why we don’t aim to become Elementor experts

Remember when we mentioned our experience building with Elementor from scratch? In our view, there’s a big catch—if you need to be a skilled developer to really make the most of Elementor, it kind of defeats the purpose. 

If you have high standards for performance, visual design, usability, and brand identity; custom development is often a better choice, delivering a more tailored, efficient, and high-performing site right from the start.

For novice developers, Elementor can feel a bit like a trap—especially when working with a pre-existing site built on it. The advanced features can get overwhelming fast, leaving you with designs that don’t fully hit the mark. Experienced developers, meanwhile, can often skip the hassle, building custom layouts faster—and cleaner—without relying on Elementor.

So who’s Elementor for?

As much as I’d like to say how awesome we are and why no one needs Elementor, there’s no doubt there’s a huge market for Elementor. There are big agencies and endless freelancers using Elementor to successfully launch a lot of websites, including some big names.

Elementor might be right for you If:

• You have a designer-developer who’s skilled with Elementor and can work quickly within it.
• Your site design is relatively simple and easy to implement with Elementor’s tools.
• You’re tech-savvy and enjoy experimenting with different design elements.
• You don’t expect to make frequent changes and appreciate having a user-friendly admin interface for easy edits.
• You plan to handle most site maintenance yourself, including adding new pages and sections.
• Your site already uses a commercial theme built on Elementor.
• You’re interested in testing different style concepts and don’t have the budget for custom development.

Consider custom development over Elementor if:

• You need a consistently responsive experience across multiple screen sizes and resolutions.
• You want a foolproof setup where simple styling changes won’t risk breaking your site.
• You have a strict style guide covering typography, sizing, and spacing that needs to be applied throughout.
• Your designer has a pixel-perfect approach and expects precision in translating designs.
• You rely on custom integrations with third-party platforms that require seamless frontend compatibility.
• You’re concerned about introducing security vulnerabilities through behind the scenes third-party plugins.
• You need perfection when it comes to device and screen resolution responsiveness.
• You’re aiming for a minimalist, high-performance site optimized for Core Web Vitals.
• You want to future-proof your migration capabilities in the case of a redesign or style update.
• You plan to outsource most of your site’s maintenance and updates to a professional partner, rather than handling it in-house.

Bottom line

We’ve seen some really nice websites built with Elementor, but if you’re looking to create something truly standout, we’re here to help. We hope this article helped clarify your decision.