Elementor vs Bespoke: Which is a better fit for your company?

Elementor vs Bespoke: Which is a better fit for your company?

A well-designed website is incredibly important for marketing businesses and individuals. Choosing the type of site that you build also impacts how you can market your business.

You may want to consider the following two examples of site builds.

Elementor, a leading drag-and-drop website builder for WordPress, is currently used by over 9.7% of the internet (8.8+ million websites). The builder has emerged as a game-changer, offering unparalleled ease of use and customisation options.

Alternatively, a bespoke website offers customers a more personalised website building experience, as developers can create websites built to your exact specifications.

Elementor

Providing an all-in-one platform for building your website, Elementor is one of the best all-encompassing website builders available on the market and one of the best value options.

It allows users to create websites using plugins (which help to build, customise, and enhance your WordPress website) included with elementor. These plugins enable users to create a website that is as “bespoke” as a website builder can be.

Here is a list of benefits that Elementor provides:

100’s of widgets regularly updated: The installation of Elementor includes over 100 free widgets (widgets are a really handy core feature that lets you add content to certain areas on your site, such as your site’s sidebar or footer) to give you the freedom to design your website, allowing you to create as simple or as in-depth of a website as you would like.

The widgets allow you to save web space on your website by not requiring you to install a whole plethora of plugins that would achieve the same result as the widgets provide.

This means that the website will be smaller and should, therefore, run as smoothly and load as quickly as possible to help increase its chances of ranking in the major search engines.

Over 50 languages available: Elementor supports over 50 different languages, enabling businesses all over the world to take advantage of this tool.

Lightweight & Minimal: Elementor is a very lightweight framework that minifies CSS and JS used on the site to retain the site’s speed while giving you the highest-quality website to showcase your business. You have total design freedom for your website while maximising its speed, which is key to a great user experience and ranking.

Global Settings: The ability to set up global settings on the site is a key part of any website. Maintaining the company’s look and feel across the website is vital to impressing your customer base and retaining everything that makes your website and company unique. Consistent use of fonts, brand colours, and many other design elements is critical to giving the website a high-quality feel; no one wants a website that looks disjointed and all over the place.

WooCommerce functionality: Not all companies are just looking for brochure websites that provide customer information. With over 6.6 million websites using WooCommerce (an e-commerce plugin), it’s important that if you want to have an online shop, you pick a framework that works seamlessly with WooCommerce, which is a must for most companies. Using the drag-and-drop feature to edit the WooCommerce templates makes creating your website and giving it a unique feel compared to the competition.

Elementor is a great framework for companies that need a website created quickly or on a smaller budget but want a high-quality end product to display to their customer base.

Bespoke

Bespoke websites cater to companies that want a fully customised website that meets their exact requirements. This allows full control of your site’s web design and development aspect to create a one-of-a-kind website.

There are many benefits to having a bespoke website, such as:

Full Design Process: When creating a bespoke website, a full design process is the first step to ensure you can visualise the website design.

Creating designs and then having rounds of feedback to look at the finished design before it has been coded is pivotal to ensure the coding process is not only hassle-free process should also go smoothly since a visual concept of the website that is being built.

Streamlined HTML, CSS, JS & PHP: When coding a bespoke website, it is important to ensure all files on the site are streamlined and minified to ensure the fastest website possible. By ensuring no code repetition and removing empty spaces where you can, the files can be read much quicker and allow the site to load much faster.

Minimal plugins and additions slow down the site: Creating a fast-loading website is key for the consumer. The maximum load time for any page on a site should be 7 seconds, with optimal load time between 3-5 seconds. Creating a fast website means more retention from customers browsing your website, whether for content on a brochure or for purchasing your products on an e-commerce website.

Seamlessly works with Gutenberg block editor: Creating a visual website but being able to make the changes whilst seeing the changes being made is an important factor in creating a bespoke website. Drag and drop builders offer this feature, but so do bespoke websites built to work hand in hand with the Gutenberg block editor on WordPress. Using the Advanced Custom Fields (AFC) plugin to create blocks, and PHP to code what information goes into the blocks, these blocks can then be added to any page. Here, you can make edits to the site as you add more bespoke coded blocks to the website in the future.

Conclusion

Both Elementor and bespoke websites are great at what they do; they offer SEO capabilities to maximise Google rankings, and provide a personalised interface that promotes your business.

The main factor to consider is the budget available for website development. Bespoke websites are generally more expensive, but that is down to personalised moving parts within the site that are unique to your site and your site only.

Bespoke web development is also a longer process. Still, you get a full design process with the ability to make changes before being taken to coding, offering full creative control over the project as a company head.

Make sure to get in touch with Link Digital to discuss how we can help with your website needs, your available budget, and the best route for you with your website project.