How to Build a WordPress Website with Elementor

Elementor is the most widely installed page builder plugin for WordPress, and for practical reasons. The free version gives you a full drag-and-drop editor with more than 40 widgets including text, image, button, video, counter, testimonial, and form elements. You can build a professional-looking site without purchasing anything extra.

The design process works visually from the front end of your site. You click on any element to edit it directly – change the font, adjust the padding, swap the color – and the change appears instantly. There’s no save-and-preview cycle. What you see in the editor is what visitors see on the published page.

Elementor also ships with a library of pre-designed templates covering common page types: homepage, about, contact, services, landing page, and more. If you don’t want to start from a blank canvas, import a template and replace the placeholder content with your own. This gets a first version live quickly, which you can refine over time.

For more advanced needs, Elementor Pro adds a Theme Builder (for designing headers, footers, and archive pages), WooCommerce widgets, popup builder, form builder with integrations, and a larger template library. Most small and medium sites work well on the free version, with Elementor Pro becoming useful when you need the site’s entire design to be controlled from the builder rather than from theme settings.

One more practical point: Elementor works best with a lightweight theme. Hello Elementor (from the same team) and Astra are the most popular choices. Both are free, load quickly, and hand full design control to Elementor without a conflicting theme design underneath. If you’re comparing Elementor to other builders, see our Divi theme review for a direct comparison of the two approaches.

Before opening any dashboards, line up three things so you are not stopping mid-build to make decisions. First, a budget: a domain runs about $10 to $15 a year, and shared or cloud hosting starts around $5 to $15 a month, so a basic site costs very little to keep online. Second, a name: have two or three domain ideas ready in case your first choice is taken. Third, a short list of pages you actually need at launch, which for most sites is a home page, an about page, a contact page, and one or two service or product pages.

The build runs in eight steps, from registering the domain through publishing your first blog post. Steps 1 and 2 cover the domain and hosting accounts and take the longest, though they involve choices rather than technical work. Steps 3 to 6 install WordPress and Elementor, and Steps 7 and 8 are where you design your pages and posts. If you already own a domain and hosting, jump to Step 3; if WordPress is already running, start at Step 6.

Start by registering your domain. A domain is your site’s address, the text people type into a browser to reach you, the online equivalent of a street address for your business.

Many website owners have lots of domains that they own, but then they point to one domain. Usually, this is to prevent others from using a similar name to get traffic from users who aren’t entering the right domain.

For instance, you could have the domain that is example.com. However, users might enter example.us or example.co and if someone else bought those domains and used them, they would get the traffic.

Therefore, people tend to buy the domain they want with all the TLD they can (i.e. .com, .org, .net, etc.).

Domains can’t technically be bought. They are registered for a set period, after which you would need to reserve them again. Typically you can reserve a domain name for about one year to two years. There are sometimes options to register a domain for 3-5 years or even up to 10 years. But this is rare.

Before you register a domain, a few practical checks will save you from common mistakes:

• Go with a .com if at all possible. It is still the default extension most people type and trust, and it is easier to say in conversation without needing to spell it out.
• Keep it short and easy to spell. Aim for two or three words at most. If someone has to ask you to repeat the domain, it is probably too long or too complicated.
• Avoid hyphens and numbers. Both cause confusion when spoken aloud and are associated with lower-quality sites in many people’s minds.
• Say the domain out loud before buying it. Check for unintended words hiding in the string, and make sure it sounds like the brand you want to build.
• Do a quick trademark search before registering. A domain that closely resembles an existing brand can create legal problems later, even if no one contacts you at first.
• Check social media handles at the same time. If the matching handle on Instagram or X is already taken, you may want a different domain so your brand is consistent everywhere.

Every website lives on a server, a computer that stays online so visitors can load your pages. You could run your own, but for almost everyone a hosting service is cheaper and far less hassle.

Many hosting services are available across the world. You have such a wide range of hosting as well. There is shared hosting, VPS, dedicated servers, cloud hosting, and more. And some are specific such as green energy hosting, WordPress hosting, and others.

What you need to do is choose the host that is going to help you have the best website. You need something that provides you with a mixture of speed, ease of use, cost, and other elements. Hosting is paid on an annual or monthly basis.

Sometimes hosts can offer you the domain at the same time, but this ties you to the host, and if something goes wrong, then you can find it challenging to move the domain.

Keep in mind that your Elementor page designs are stored in the database, so you can always change your WordPress theme later without losing any of your page builder work.

Not all hosting plans handle WordPress and Elementor equally well. These are the criteria that actually matter:

• Choose a server location close to your main audience. A server in the US serving visitors in Australia adds latency that no amount of caching fully fixes.
• Check that the host supports PHP 8.1 or higher. Elementor and most modern WordPress plugins require recent PHP versions, and older versions are no longer receiving security updates.
• Make sure a one-click WordPress installer is included. Most reputable hosts offer this through cPanel or their own control panel, which gets WordPress running in minutes without manual file uploads.
• Free SSL should be standard. Any host that charges extra for SSL is behind the curve. HTTPS is a ranking signal and a basic expectation for visitors.
• A staging environment is worth paying for. Being able to test Elementor changes or plugin updates on a copy of your site before pushing to production prevents a lot of headaches.
• Cloudways ticks all of these boxes and lets you choose your cloud provider (DigitalOcean, AWS, Google Cloud) at a reasonable monthly cost.
• If you want to compare options side by side, read reviews of all hosting platforms before committing.

Most hosting plans include a one-click WordPress installer. Look for it in cPanel under “WordPress” or “Softaculous,” or in your host’s own dashboard if they have a custom control panel. The installer asks for a few basics: your site title, an admin username, a password, and an admin email. Fill those in and click install. The process typically completes within a few minutes.

Once it finishes, you will receive a confirmation email with your WordPress login URL. It usually looks like yourdomain.com/wp-admin. Bookmark it, because you will use it constantly.

At this point you have a working WordPress installation. Some hosts pre-install a few extras alongside WordPress core, such as Jetpack or a spam protection plugin. Check what is active under Plugins and deactivate anything you do not need, as unnecessary plugins slow down your site from day one.

Open your WordPress login URL (usually yourdomain.com/wp-admin) and sign in with the credentials you set during installation. You land on the dashboard, the control panel for everything on your site.

The first things to confirm:

• Go to Settings > General and set your site title and tagline. The site title appears in browser tabs, search results, and the header area, so make sure it matches your brand.
• Go to Settings > Reading and check what your homepage displays. By default WordPress shows your latest posts. If you want a static homepage, change this to “A static page” and assign the page you will build with Elementor.
• Go to Settings > Permalinks and set the URL structure to “Post name.” This gives you clean URLs like yourdomain.com/about/ instead of yourdomain.com/?p=1, which is better for both SEO and readability.
• If your host generated a random admin password during setup, change it immediately under Users > Your Profile. Use a strong, unique password and save it in a password manager.

With those basics in place, your WordPress site is properly configured and ready for the next steps.

Now you need to choose a generalized theme for your website. There are lots of options including themes that are specific to certain aspects. For example, you could have a theme that is designed for car showrooms or one that is designed for social media sites.

Choosing a theme can take some time. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t easy. Themes can cost a small amount, like $50-$100 or they can be free. You do get some free themes with WordPress, but these are very basic and you will want to upgrade soon.

Because you’re going to use Elementor, you’re not looking to choose the design, but rather the color scheme and other elements for your business website. For a closer look at which themes work best and why, our guide on how to add an Elementor theme to WordPress covers the top options and what to look for.

Now you need to consider installing Elementor on your website. There aren’t a lot of steps when it comes to installing Elementor on WordPress. All you need to do is find the ‘Plugins’ on the left-side menu. Then when you open this up you need to click on the option to ‘Add New’.

Once you’re in the ‘New Plugin’ menu, you need to enter the search bar, which is located near the top of the page ‘Elementor’. Then Elementor will appear in the options below. You can then install and activate the plugin.

You can also upgrade and activate Elementor Pro, which will offer you lots of options.

You might also want to register for the Elementor website, which will give you access to all the templates that can speed up the website-building experience for you.

Several plugins are useful when building a WordPress site with Elementor. Here are the most practical ones:

Yoast SEO – Adds an SEO panel to every post and page with fields for meta title, meta description, and readability analysis. Helps your content show up in Google search results with the right title and snippet.

WooCommerce – Turns your site into an online store. Elementor Pro includes WooCommerce widgets; the free version of Elementor also displays WooCommerce products and cart pages without issue.

WP Mail SMTP – Routes WordPress’s outgoing emails (contact form submissions, password resets, order confirmations) through a proper mail service so they don’t end up in spam folders.

UpdraftPlus – Automatic WordPress backups to Google Drive, Dropbox, or S3. Essential before making any major changes to a live site. See our guide on how to backup your Elementor website for specific configuration steps.

Wordfence Security – A firewall and malware scanner. The free version is sufficient for most sites and blocks common attack patterns automatically.

Polylang – For building a multilingual WordPress site so your content reaches visitors searching in Spanish, French, German, or other languages. Free and compatible with Elementor page layouts.

Tidio – Adds a live chat widget to your site. Useful for sites where visitors are likely to have questions before making a purchase or booking.

Smart Slider 3 – Adds image and content sliders to any page. Works as an Elementor widget and handles responsive sizing automatically.

Now you need to create a page for your website. Creating a page on Elementor is very simple. All you need to do is to go to the ‘Pages’ section on the left-hand menu. Then ‘Add New’. What you can do then is use an Elementor template to create the design of your website.

Once you’ve selected the template you can make changes to the template. Just open up the Widget menu, find the widget you want to use, and then drag and drop it into the correct position on the screen.

Once the element is on the page, you can make changes to your element. All widgets have different requirements and options, so explore what you can do.

Remember that you want to have the most important elements on your website at the top of the page, above the fold. This is where your audience will spend most of their time. Half of the audience won’t go below the website.

Before you publish, check the page on smaller screens. Elementor has a responsive mode at the bottom of the editing panel with desktop, tablet, and mobile icons. Switch to the mobile view and look for text that overflows, images that crop badly, or spacing that leaves large gaps. You can adjust most settings (font size, padding, column stacking, alignment) per device, so a heading that looks right on desktop can be scaled down for mobile without touching the desktop version. More than half of all web traffic is on phones, so this check is worth the few minutes it takes.

Now you need to create blog posts. The same process as pages applies to the blog post, but you’ll go to the ‘Posts’ section instead of ‘Pages’. Blogging is vital. The more quality content that you publish, the quicker and higher you will rank on Google and other search engines.

Blog posts should be at least 800 words – long enough to cover the topic properly and give Google something to work with. Focus on being genuinely useful for your audience rather than just hitting a word count. Remember to include links within blog posts to related content on your site, as this helps with rankings and keeps readers on your website longer.

All blog posts should include at least one image with descriptive alt text that reflects the post’s topic.

One setting people miss: WordPress shows your latest posts on the home page by default. If you built a designed home page in Step 7 and want visitors to land there instead, go to Settings > Reading, set “Your homepage displays” to “A static page”, then choose your designed page as the Homepage and a separate page (call it Blog) as the Posts page. That keeps your home page front and center while your blog still gets its own archive.