A Complete Background Check on Elementor [Interview with Ben Pines, CMO of Elementor]

Ben Pines: Back in 2006, I started working in a small SEO company. After a couple of years, I quit it to build my own company which did affiliate marketing. I built several WordPress websites, and this was a small business just me and my partners so I had to do pretty much everything. Those were my first steps.

Ben Pines: I probably don’t get as updated as I should, but I am trying. I don’t just limit myself to learning SEO and content marketing. I think this is a common mistake that people believe that are SEO professionals just subscribe to the SEO blogs. Insights don’t necessarily come from your specific niche. I’m trying to find the most important information in terms of content creation, writing, and marketing. There are lots of streams that I follow.

Ben Pines: When we got started there were just a few of us. When I joined the team it had 5 members. And now there are over 20 of us, so it is a huge growth. It was just 18 months ago and it's amazing to see how a community has grown as a team and as a product.

Ben Pines: This form widget is one the most popular in Elementor PRO. The form is a vital part of every site – it gives you conversion and a connection with customers. Working with forms and designing them visually was very popular among our users and we received a lot of feedback. That’s why we extended this widget. We added upload, so users can submit their own files. There is also an acceptance field now, which is important if your user needs to accept your terms or give consent to receive emails from you. We added a few more features so that the form widget is much more powerful and convenient for our users. One plugin less to worry about, you know.

Ben Pines: You know, there is an endless number of things you can work on and add as a feature. Currently, we are working on the next generation of Elementor. This is a big project of ours, and we have been working on it for several months. Elementor deals mostly with the content of the page and now we are going beyond that. You will be able to use Elementor to design your headers, footers and other areas of a website. It will introduce new challenges to Elementor, but will also make it more amazing than it is now.

Ben Pines: Every week both we and our competitors turn out a new feature. Every company faces this situation, so we are trying to improve the factors we consider the most important for page builder. The first is speed - clients need everything they do to work fast. Even a second of waiting is important from the users perspective. The second thing we're working on is design. We wanted our users to create not only regular pages, but also something more like professional designers do, like shape divider or box shadows. The third is to give users an opportunity to do all the changes live. Previously you had to flip between the back-end and the front-end. Now you don’t have to as everything is on the front-end. These are three things on which we are focusing and which will guide our vision. I think that going beyond page elements will make a huge difference between us and our competitors.

Ben Pines: We’ve been keeping a close eye on the Gutenberg project because we want to promote it. We think it is important for WordPress to have a visual side of content creation that we already see on Medium or Squarespace. We are working on the compatibility of our products and recently removed an issue that occurs when switching between Gutenberg and Elementor. It’s hard to tell now how it will influence the WordPress core, but in my mind, it was a good move on the part of Matt and WordPress to go in this direction.

Ben Pines: Certainly there is an opinion that Gutenberg affects the page builders and theme providers. I have to say that I’m sceptical that a real threat exists. I mean, you always have users’ preferences. Even now people use different page builders and some of them are much worse than Elementor. I think users have their own thoughts about what to use.

Ben Pines: I recently checked the TemplateMonster templates and there were thousands of them. They look pretty cool and professional and I was pleased with the result. That means I have also seen some freelancer templates and they were hideous. That was long ago when we had just started. When the Elementor was launched we had adopters that were not necessarily professional designers. As time passed by and we grew, it became totally different. Now we have top designers with whom we work. Our template library already has over 130 templates, dozens of which are free, so we are a good starting point for beginners. However, if a user needs a template for some specific niche it’s great to have an external theme provider like TemplateMonster.

Ben Pines: There are tens of thousands of themes available. We post templates that we have  checked and recommend on our website. What I would suggest, if you encounter some problem with a theme, is to check if the issue is really inherent in the theme. If the problem is within the template – contact the theme provider and try to solve it. Sometimes there is just a small issue that can be easily solved. However, most of the themes are working normally with Elementor. There are even theme providers like Astra Theme and Theme Isle that contact us and say that they want to switch to Elementor. They customize their previous themes and make new ones that are completely compatible with our page builder.

Ben Pines: First of all, it is advisable not to use too many plugins. The fewer plugins you use – the faster is your website. Elementor has actually replaced the need to use some plugins. We have a built-in maintenance mode feature, sliders and slideshows, form builder and menu builder. However, security is a big issue. Personally, I would install a plugin to monitor if people are trying to hack your website. Yoast SEO plugin is one that I always use and WooCommerce too. It really depends on what site you are trying to create. One way or another you would need some caching plugin and one for security.