I used to like Elementor…

For a long time, Elementor was my favourite WP page builder, never skipping a beat – updates ran smoothly and never caused any problems (possibly just by chance??).

I used to only go with themes and templates if they supported Elementor. But in recent months, various updates (somewhere around, and ever since 3.9.x) have caused me to lose so much time, that I’m now avoiding Elementor themes where ever possible, as I’ve become scared to do any updates of the Elementor plugin. Since one of those versions, every time I update the plugin, it breaks almost every page in a site, completely messing up the custom styling I added to the pages for one, plus countless other issues that just don’t make sense (images appearing in a template header that shouldn’t be there – very weird) and the only way I’ve found to get the pages back to how they were, is to install an older version of Elementor, go back to the broken pages, make a small change and re-save them <- this was a solution I accidentally worked out after DAYS of messing around and debugging, trying countless other things recommended in forums etc (none of which worked).

Should I have to run a full site backup before every Elementor update? I never used to, but clearly that’s necessary now, but on a lot of servers and the size of some of these sites, it’s just not worth the hassle. So unfortunately I think I’d rather just avoid it from now on, and just keep the legacy Elementor sites on an older version until I get around to changing them to a different (non-Elementor) theme. It seems to also just be getting more bloated and slower with each new update anyway.

Waiting for that Elementor editor to load on some of the sites is such a time waster, I’m really getting over it. Sure, these sites that had real issues with load times and 500 errors when saving an edit, were on some less that great hosting platforms (GoDaddy anyone? not my recommendation, but some clients won’t listen 😉 ) … but funny how other page builders have no problem running and saving multiple edits on the same platform… Time for me to move on 🙁