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.

Building a WordPress website with Elementor is more straightforward than most people expect. Whether you’re starting from scratch or you’ve used other platforms before, Elementor’s drag-and-drop editor makes the design process visual and hands-on – no coding required.

This guide walks you through all 8 steps, from registering a domain name to publishing your first pages. Each step includes practical tips to help you avoid common mistakes and get your site looking the way you want it. By the end, you’ll have a working WordPress website designed with Elementor – ready for content, an online store, or whatever you have planned.

One thing worth knowing before you start: the steps below take you through the full setup process in order. If you already have a domain and hosting sorted, you can skip straight to Step 3 (Install WordPress) or Step 6 (Install Elementor) depending on where you are in the process.

The first thing that you need to do is to buy your domain. A domain is the address of your website, like the address for your home. It is the written text that a user can enter into their browser to get to your website.

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.

There are several helpful tips for buying a domain that you might want to think about:

• Keep the domain short. The shorter the domain the easier it is for the audience to remember.
• Consider keywords for your industry. Using good keywords within the domain, you will find that your website traffic will increase.
• You should register as many TLDs as you can. The more TLDs that you register and redirect, the more protected your traffic is.
• Reduce the chance of typos within your content. For example, keep the domain short, don’t have complicated words, and try to avoid having the same letter appear more than twice next to each other in the domain.
• Don’t get your domain to resemble another brand in the industry.

Websites need a server, or a computer, to be active and visited by users. You can buy your server and host the website yourself, but this can be more expensive. Another option is to use a hosting service.

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.

There are many tips for choosing a host. Here are some of the things that you will need to consider for your business’ next hosting.

• Many shared hosting plans can be very slow for loading times – and loading times matter, with sites suffering a 7% reduction in conversions for every extra second of load time.
• Cloudways offers a very effective cloud hosting system at a reasonable cost.
• Those on a budget should look at cloud hosting or VPS.
• Look at reviews of all hosting platforms.

The next step that you’ve got to do is to install WordPress. WordPress is the best software package for you to use because the base software is free. What you tend to get is that you will have a one-click install option on many hosting packages. This will allow you to have a WordPress website up and running, sometimes within 10-20 minutes.

In addition to the installation of the WordPress core software, they will sometimes allow you to have premium or other plugins that can help you run your website. Normally included are elements such as JetPack and spam protection.

Be sure to check what you get with your download.

Once the WordPress software has been installed on your website, you will be provided with an email. This email will include the first login information for your website. You follow this link and it will allow you to finish the setup of your website. Part of this will include the logging-in information for your website.

After this, you will be taken through the basic information for your website. You will be asked about the name of the website, information about what you do, and address. There might also be offers for certain aspects of the website.

It should take just a few minutes, perhaps up to 20 minutes, to complete the work. There is no personal information sent to other parties.

Once you’ve completed the process you will be taken to the main dashboard of the website. The backend part of the WordPress website is very simple. There is a menu down the left side of the screen that will include options for you.

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.

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.

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.