Elementor Keeps Giving Paying Customers the Middle Finger
This post covers my ongoing disgust with Elementor as a long-standing paying customer.
Elementor continues to ignore its paying customers and all users, seemingly motivated by a single overarching principle: investor satisfaction. Elementor needs to do better.
Disclaimer
I’m not an Elementor hater. In fact, Elementor’s very own Head of WordPress Relations (Miriam S.) stated in a podcast where we both appeared, “I can see your frustrations come from a point of caring.”
Hijacking the WordPress Experience
Upon activation, Elementor hijacks the WordPress experience, running users through portions of its sales funnel. This isn’t very pleasant for those highly experienced with WordPress and Elementor.
It’s an even worse experience for those newer to WordPress and Elementor. This crowd gets completely lost as they struggle to return to the WordPress Dashboard.
Advertisements Everywhere
As you work with Elementor, be prepared to get pummeled with upsells for Elementor AI, Elementor Hosting, Elementor partner add-ons, the Elementor Image Optimization plugin, etc. I would expect this in Elementor’s free version but not for paying customers using Elementor Pro.
To me, this is a bug. It’s not a “feature,” as Elementor claimed in their responses within their GitHub account. That’s because we cannot turn this “feature” off ourselves. Furthermore, it’s causing issues that can only be addressed by developers.
Elementor is not thinking about those of us who create content, which just so happens to benefit Elementor as well. I’ll be in the middle of recording a tutorial only to have to close dialog boxes for AI over and over again. When creating a written guide with screenshots, those same AI dialog boxes must be closed to avoid capturing them.
Elementor Should Take a Page From the Competition
Bricks (one of Elementor’s top competitors) approaches onboarding and advertisements (or lack thereof) better. Instead of hijacking the WordPress experience upon activation, Bricks simply hits you with educational resources. No sales funnel. No upsells. Just education.
In this video, I demonstrate my points above and a bit more (see list below). It’s a high-level overview of the experience of simply installing, activating, and using these solutions at the very initial stage.
- Pricing (Winner: Bricks. Elementor recently pissed people off in this area too.)
- Feature Requests (Winner: Bricks)
- Community (Winner: I’m calling this a tie for reasons outlined in the video.)
- Bug Reporting (Winner: I’m assuming Bricks is the winner here because Elementor’s experience is so awful.)
- Onboarding (Winner: Bricks. Elementor completely hijacks WordPress with its onboarding experience, leaving regular users lost and not knowing what to do next.)
- Upsells (Winner: Bricks. Elementor will try to sell you crap every chance it gets.)
- Notifications (Winner: Bricks. Elementor has far too many notifications. I could reproduce some in the video, but there are more.)
This isn’t meant to be a technical comparison of Elementor vs. Bricks. I’ve only just begun looking at Bricks because I’m fed up with Elementor’s nonsense, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised (okay, not really surprised) with the experience.
Time for Change
When people are displeased with a solution, they often post public threats regarding switching to the competition. Usually, those threats are empty and merely an attempt to rile up the mob to elicit change, but this isn’t that.
Video Walkthroughs
To learn more about these issues and see behind the scenes, please have a look at the following videos.
