10 Ways to Speed Up Your Website Creation Process with Elementor

Website design it is one of the key factors to attract visitors to stay on your website. There are very many people who want their sites to be live and  functioning well and they do rely on the designers to do a perfect job on how the site should look. Workflow optimization is very vital as entails having a better UI and UX design and the final design should have an overall aesthetic feel that is appealing.

It is due to this reason that web developers have come up with a simpler way to achieve this, and that is through the use of page builders. It is no secret that most people and beginners alike are opting to use page builders as their preferred way to come up with a well designed site.

What is Elementor?

Elementor is one of the most used page builder for WordPress as it has unique features and it is easy to use for everyone willing to give it a try. With Elementor you do not have to think of writing any code to achieve a nice design for your site. This is why it is considered to be the best and friendly page builder.

Even so most users may face a lot of challenges when it comes to designing their website. Page builders like Elementor are developed to speed up the design process of a website. However, most users often take long when it comes to having the final design. The workflow tends to be way lengthy while it could take a few minutes to get completed. There are many ways unto which users can create pages and customize them using Elementor without going through too much hassle.

In this article, we shall walk you through several ways under which you can implement to improve your workflow process within a short period of time. As you well know, Elementor has got very many customization features that help users design a nice website. However most users miss out on some small features that may help them achieve a final design in a shorter time frame. We will briefly discuss some of these features and also suggest some third party plugins you may use to help you on this. 

Quick Walk Through!

Use of Premade Templates
Save Sections for Reuse
Export/Import your Designs for Reuse
Use of Elementor Shortcuts
Use Elementor Finder Search Bar
Applying a Custom CSS
Define your Color Palette
Use Navigator
Apply Copy/Paste forRepetitive Sections
Use Custom Dynamic Fields
[Bonus] Start using Elementor Add-ons

Using Premade Templates

Templates are pre designed web pages with various layouts on each page. They basically help designers and users insert their own content much easily. Premade templates can therefore speed up your workflow as you design your website rather than designing it from scratch. Coming up with a layout with no defined template may consume a lot of time before having the final design. Additionally the design you create from scratch may not be as perfect as the one from a template. Most of the time you encounter other errors along your design process such as maintaining responsiveness for the site. With Premade templates most of these errors are already solved for you and all you need is to plug in your content.

Elementor comes with a very resourceful template library that has all kinds of layout designs. These templates can easily be imported to your site’s page with no hassle and help you put in your content. Elementor templates do support the use of a whole page template and also the use of section part templates. Users can easily implement both through exporting them to their preferred page of design. By doing this you get to design your website at a much faster pace than doing it from scratch using its drop and drag mechanism.

Save Sections For Reuse

Elementor comes with various layouts that designers can implement while building their site. The layouts are made of different sections that are often repetitive. This does not matter if you chose to start your site from scratch or if you are using a premade template. Sections can always be saved in the Elementor plugin and used in another site’s design. This saves the designer a lot of creation process that he or she would have gone through in case they built the same section from the start.

For instance a section such as a row that contains several elements within it can be saved and used in another part within the same or different website. This gives the users the flexibility for quick access to their designs and also guarantees building the entire site at a much higher speed than before.

Export/Import Designs For Reuse

For users who create their own designs or those who customize premade templates they can use the export/import feature. This can be implemented in case you want to use the design in another page or even site. It is also different from the saving technique discussed above. However your template needs to be saved first for this method to work. In this case, your template gets downloaded in a sample zip file to export it and one can later upload it in a different site to import it.  

To achieve this technique, simply head over to the templates page then save templates. You then need to hover onto your preferred template then click onto the export template. Similarly to use an exported template simply go to the templates page and on the top right section you can click on the “Import Templates” button and select the template you need to use for your design. This technique becomes really useful while designing websites for a client from the local host whereas you would need to export it to the client’s live site. It minimizes any errors that would be caused to the client’s site and also reduces the time for the design process.

Using Elementor Shortcuts

This is one of the most effective ways to get your design process completed as fast as possible. If you are doing your website design with the usual use of a mouse it could be among the reasons why you’re taking a lengthy time to complete the site design. We do recommend you spend some time with your keyboard too learning the various hotkeys provided by Elementor to achieve various practices for the design process. Elementor have of late come up with a number of shortcuts that users can use to improve their workflow. Not just the simple ones like copy and paste but other shortcuts that take a lot of time to perform like doing a preview for your site. 

However it may be hard to recall all the shortcuts provided by the page builder. This is why it comes with an easy way to access them in case this happens. To simply open the shortcuts reference page you just use the “Cmd/Ctrl + ?” control command shortcut which displays all of them. Elementor comes with two types of shortcuts which are based on action users take and access shortcuts. Below are the tabulated shortcuts Elementor provides:

Action Based Shortcuts

Undo	Ctrl / Cmd + Z	Undo any change made on the page
Redo	Ctrl / Cmd + Shift + Z	Redo any change made on the page
Copy	Ctrl / Cmd + C	Copy a section, column or widget
Paste	Ctrl / Cmd + V	Paste a section, column or widget
Paste Style	Ctrl / Cmd + Shift + V	Paste a section, column or widget’s Style
Delete	Delete	Delete a section / column / widget that is edited
Duplicate	Ctrl / Cmd + D	Duplicate a section / column / widget that is edited
Save	Ctrl / Cmd + S	Save your page to the revision history

Access Based Shortcuts

Panel / Preview	Ctrl / Cmd + P	Switch between the panel and preview view
Mobile Editing	Ctrl / Cmd + Shift + M	Switch between desktop, tablet and mobile views
History	Ctrl / Cmd + Shift + H	Go to the history panel
Navigator	Ctrl / Cmd + I	Opens the navigator
Template Library	Ctrl / Cmd + Shift + L	Opens up our template library modal
Keyboard Shortcuts	Ctrl / Cmd + ?	Opens up the Keyboard Shortcuts Help window
Quit	ESC	Opens up Settings and jumps to Exit to Dashboard

Use Elementor Search Bar Finder

A design process may take a lot of processes. At times you may want to access another section from a different page in order to get or confirm something. Elementor page builder has the Finder feature that enables users to easily navigate to other sections, pages, settings and other places within the page builder. By doing it the manual stepwise way you end up consuming a lot of time before getting what you what.  Talking of the manual way it involves steps like saving your page then going back to your wordpress dashboard and selecting the page to open. Some even opt to search for it. This could be a cumbersome method that involves getting you out of the page builder interface.

Instead we recommend using the finder feature on Elementor that allows users to search for whichever element, page or settings they need while still within the builder’s interface. Elementor’s Finder can easily be accessed by use of the hotkey shortcuts discussed in the previous step. Specifically using Cmd/Ctrl + E keys anywhere within your WordPress dashboard will take you directly to the finder feature.

Applying a Custom CSS

First time using custom CSS may not significantly improve the speed of designing your website  with elementor. The reason for that is because the user may not be familiar to do that or perhaps because the CSS has not been used elsewhere. By using a custom CSS you have used before it reduces the time unto which you are to consume building your design. If you apply the custom CSS on every page rather than create or customize the styling of a page with the elementor builder you will hasten the design process. Styling with the elementor may take quite some time. However Elementor only lets you add a custom CSS if you have the Pro version of the plugin. This feature is not available in the basic/free plugin. You could simply get the Pro Elementor from their website or follow this alternative which could save you some money.

To add a custom CSS without the need of the Elementor Pro users simply need to use the HTML element that allows you to add code to reflect on your site’s frontend. Simply add the widget to the specific page you want to style and add this code as an example:

<style>
/*Your custom CSS code here*/
.elementor p {
color: red; 
font-size: 25px; 
text-decoration: underline;
line-height: 40px;
}
</style>

Define your Color Palette

Every website design comes with a distinct color pattern that is used throughout the entire website. It really had to come across a website with mixed up colors all over the site. Moreso, copying and pasting color codes to your website page design may also take quite a lot of time for you to complete the final site design. Color palettes are distinct colors deployed within various sections of your site and should match across all pages that contain the mentioned sections. They also help users identify features more easily and provide good user interface and experience too.

With Elementor it comes with different color pallets to apply within your websites. Additionally it allows users to create a custom color palette in any case it’s not defined within the elementor’s library. Users can access these configurations in the color picker settings and reuse them anytime you want to style an element from your page.

Using Navigator

Scrolling through every section to find a specific element can really be a waste of time sometimes. This is where elementor’s navigator comes in handy since users are easily able to find elements within the site they are designing very fast. This is considered a very effective tool to hasten your design process with elementor. The Navigator normally displays a navigation hierarchical lightbox which provides easy access to all the elements you have created within your page. This feature allows you to go to where the element is easily and perform all customizations rather than scrolling your way up and down in search of the element. To access the navigator feature you simply need to right-click anywhere within your page and select “Navigator” in the menu displayed. Users can also access it through the elementor’s keyboard shortcut by pressing Cmd/Ctrl + I. 

If you are a web designer who creates lengthy pages with various multiple layers, and also styling features like lengthy padding, negative margins, z-index, absolute position. All these result in making your page longer with the different elements. The navigator can really come in handy when you want to access your modules including the overlay elements.

Applying Copy/Paste for Repetitive Sections

Building sections from scratch may not be a bad idea however it is time consuming and the best alternative is to simply implement copy and paste for repetitive parts. For web designers, I am sure you have come across sections that you need to design in a similar manner within your site. Similar sections within the same page may not make sense but within the same site it may be considered. For instance you may want to use your archive page posts in your front page design. Rather than starting the design from scratch in your front page you can simply copy the posts layout from your archive page and paste it in the section where you want it to appear in the front page. This saves you a lot of time when it comes to reaching your final design.

Additionally some sections may appear similar but they are not the same. They only need some customizations. You can simply copy the section and paste it to the part you need it then tweak or change it to the appropriate design that you prefer.

Using Custom Dynamic fields

Not many Elementor users are aware of this feature as it is commonly implemented by advanced users. Dynamic fields enable users to implement uniform dynamic content across their pages. Dynamic fields help describe a certain post type or content. They can be used on links, buttons, images etc. 

For instance if you want to add a title of a post in a certain page, rather than creating a text widget and entering the title of the post, you can simply use the “Post Title” dynamic field to represent it. The best part is that if you have several other posts like that you do not have to repeat the same steps as the post title will also be displayed automatically in them. When designing a page you can call these dynamic fields in a specific content without the need of any third party plugin. This entirely will save you a lot of time in your design process as it is considered an automatic way of designing your pages.

[Bonus] Start Using Elementor Add-ons

By using Elementor add-ons you increase more customizations within your page design. This also provides you with various ways and alternatives that can help you increase speed on the design process. Add-on such as Jetpack and Powerpack provide extensive use with your elementor plugin. You can make elegant designs with these add-ons and they also come with additional features that help you speed up the design process of your WordPress site.

Visibility Logic Plugin – Hide or show certain site content based on custom rules
BuddyBuilder – Build a social community right on your site. Allow people to interact, make connections and discuss on diferent topics.

Conclusion

Elementor comes with great features within that can help you design a very nice website. By following these steps you will be able to speed up the design process whether you are an experienced or beginner alike to web design. Elementor keep on updating their features daily and it has become a norm for them to deliver what their users ask for. We also do hope to see more upcoming updates that will help us speed up the design process of websites. Let us know your experience when it comes to using Elementor and how you get your designs done much quicker.