Elementor vs. Gutenberg vs. Agency Design
Are you looking for a suitable WordPress theme or haven't found a theme for your website yet? Then you may have heard of Elementor, Oxygen, the Gutenberg Editor and other page builder tools. Many themes even have integrated page builders, but these are usually not as extensive and often cannot be customised. Today we would like to show you the advantages of creating websites with WordPress and whether you should hire a WordPress agency.
Elementor and its Hello Theme
We'll start with the most well-known WordPress page builder with which you can design your website. As a page builder, Elementor is very comprehensive and yet clearly laid out. You can easily create your website with Elementor via a visual interface, as Elementor is a WYSIWYG editor (What you see is what you get). There are many individual design options for your layout, but you also need a theme. Elementor offers an in-house theme, which is very lightweight and harmonises perfectly with Elementor . The "Hello Theme" from Elementor is the in-house theme that is available for Elementor. The theme offers few design options outside of the page builder, it shows its power mainly in the lightweight code - in short: it is loaded very quickly and is not slowed down by the almost obligatory Elementor, but even feels tuned.
The power of the Elementor Pagebuilder
Elementor is already very well equipped in its basic version and offers you a wide range of functions for your website. We prefer the Elementor Pro Pagebuilder, i.e. the premium extension, and recommend it to you especially if you are still a beginner in the field of WordPress. The Pro version offers a wealth of templates that you can use as templates and customise as you wish. Most of the templates are already SEO optimised. In addition, Elementor offers many settings that you can customise individually. This applies, for example, to the layout of the page and also the integration of Elementor widgets such as sliders and galleries. A contact form is also directly integrated here and can be easily integrated into the page using the drag & drop editor.
Adapt CSS and Co. with Elementor
The different layers, rows, columns and the widgets themselves can be individually adjusted via CSS. You can do this right in the visual editor by clicking on a widget, selecting the advanced tab and then going to CSS. If you look at the many drag & drop settings, you will see that Elementor offers a wide range of possibilities to design your website with the editor. Why don't you give Elementor a try? The basic version is free and can be installed in the WordPress Plugin Store directly from the backend interface of WordPress.
WordPress and the new block editor Gutenberg
Admittedly, for experienced WordPress users, but also for those who do not want to work with a functionally packed page builder, they like to fall back on the block editor Gutenberg. And this is also becoming more and more intuitive and no longer has anything in common with the Classic Editor from WordPress. The Gutenberg Editor on WordPress is a block editor that is virtually programmed from top to bottom. You always add new blocks by hovering with the mouse to the top, bottom or side of a block. It is also possible to insert rows with several columns. For us, the Gutenberg editor was a bit unfamiliar at the beginning, as we got very used to the Elementor Pagebuilder and usually created our WordPress pages in a mix of Elementor and individual CSS / PHP programming. Especially in the area of shops, you almost can't avoid customisation.
The biggest advantage of Gutenberg
We have to admit it: as beautiful as Elementor is and as easy it is to design websites in WordPress with it, it is also advantageous in terms of pagespeed and DOM to fall back on the Gutenberg Editor. We have the feeling that the websites with the Gutenberg Editor are tidier and lighter in terms of code. Of course, many PHP code snippets, Java snippets and shortcodes are not needed. Functionally, the Gutenberg Editor is in no way inferior to other page builders, as long as you have programming knowledge in CSS and PHP programming. There are also extensions, so-called plugins, for the Gutenberg Editor, but we have not yet tested them. We will do so later.
Hire a WordPress agency?
Given the abundance of interesting page builder systems, WordPress nowadays has the reputation of a construction kit in some forums and groups. In principle, that's not a bad way of putting it, even though the possibilities for designing websites with WordPress are much greater than with the usual construction kit systems. If you don't have any experience with programming WordPress sites and don't know what CSS and PHP mean, you should probably use a WordPress agency.
You save time and money when you hire a WordPress agency
A professional WordPress agency ensures with its know-how that you get a clean and responsive website. You can state your wishes and the WordPress agency will then create the website exactly according to your ideas. This not only saves you a lot of time, but also money. Another advantage is that the agency also plans suitable content marketing campaigns, so that your website will then also be interesting for Google and other search engines and rise in the ranking relevant to the topic.
Why is that?
While you are lured with dumping prices for modular systems, professionally created WordPress sites cost significantly more money. A one-pager at provenseo.de, for example, starts at 450 € including live placement and optimisation by the same SEO agency. Of course, this is much more money than with a modular website, but your business will thank you for it. You can do much more with WordPress than with construction kits and a WordPress agency can also programme exactly what you want. You also have the possibility to set support orders afterwards, so that your website will not only be online quickly, but also safely for a long time.
Conclusion:
The Elementor page builder is and probably remains the favourite of both experienced WordPress designers and beginners. We asked some WordPress beginners on Facebook what they think of Elementor and the opinion in terms of simplicity and usability is clearly on Elementor's side. The Gutenberg editor looks very tidy and functionally provides everything that a good blog page really needs. Even a news website based on WordPress can be created much better and faster with the Gutenberg Editor than with Elementor. However, if you want to create a business website with landing pages and various templates, you should definitely use Elementor.
Last but not least, our opinion as a professional WordPress agency: we definitely recommend that you take a closer look at WordPress and try it yourself. Even if you have no experience in the design of WordPress websites or even SEO , you will learn quickly with a page builder. There is also the possibility that you can take part in online seminars on WordPress topics - take part in WordPress training courses and then be smarter than the others.
However, if you want your website to be more complex or you simply want and need to focus more on your business, then we recommend that you contact us. We will advise you individually on your website project.
