Weekly Articles for WordPress Admins – Monday 9/5/2022

WordPress weekly articles for september 5, 2022

We’re making a pretty big shift at my business right now. Since we are lucky enough to work with over 800 WordPress clients, as you can imagine, we encounter a wide range of different website needs. Some sites are relatively simple while others are quite complex. With that, we need a flexible page builder that allows us and our clients to quickly make content updates. Up until now, we’ve been using the versatile The 7 theme alongside the WP Bakery page editor but we’re switching over to just using Elementor with both the Hello Elementor theme and the Elementor page builder. The fifth topic below gives a pretty good summary on why. Actually most of the topics in this post will be centered around Elementor!

This week’s 5 WordPress topics:

  • The Ultimate List of Best Free Elementor Learning ResourcesOpens in a new tab. (Intermediate)
    Whether you’re just starting off or are looking to expand your Elementor knowledge or you’re looking for a specific answer, this list of websites and YouTube channels has something for every Elementor user. Since this article is written by PowerPack, which creates additional Elementor widgets, you’ll see that they’re promoting their own blogs as the second resource.
  • How to Use Elementor: A Complete Guide (2022)Opens in a new tab. (Beginner)
    Provided by Elementor themselves, this how-to guide walks you through the basics of installing and building your first website with the popular site builder Elementor. Including a video, you’ll learn how to create your first page, how to edit, add templates, build for mobile devices, and how to publish. This is only one amazing guide within their Elementor AcademyOpens in a new tab.. You should also check out this second article that goes into more detail on how to use ElementorOpens in a new tab. and includes plenty of screenshots.
  • Loading CSS Into WordPress With Enqueue StyleOpens in a new tab. (Intermediate)
    Yes, there’s a right and wrong way to load CSS into your WordPress site. The wrong way is to just include the link tag to the stylesheet within the head tag, you know like you would into a regular HTML page. The right way is to register and enqueue your stylesheet through a WordPress function into your theme. This allows WordPress to keep track of your stylesheet, and if there’s multiple versions of the CSS (say for example from a plugin) then WordPress can just load one stylesheet on the site, displaying the correct version and media type, if applicable. There’s other cool things that enqueuing the file does for you too – that you can read about in the article.
  • Creating Your First AddonOpens in a new tab. (Intermediate)
    As a WordPress developer, you can build your own Elementor addon. This article walks through a simple example on how to add two Hello World WordPress blocks. After you create these first easy ones, you can tackle harder add-ons to build and extend Elementor. As you get stuck, make sure to check out the other articles too within the Elementor DevelopersOpens in a new tab. site.
  • Gutenberg vs Elementor: Battle Among the ChampionsOpens in a new tab. (Beginner)
    In this corner of the ring, we have the lightweight and quick page builder Gutenberg: built into WordPress, it gives you all the basic building blocks that you need to build and manage your content. In the other corner, we have Elementor – still quick but also packing a stronger punch with a lot more features and more ease of use. If you’re looking for ultimate speed, Gutenberg should probably be your choice (or LiveCanvas) but for its price, Elementor really offers a lot more and allows you to quickly build and manage some great looking layouts. Read through the pros and cons, and make your pick on the right tool for your project!

Even though we’ve adopted Elementor as our page editor at work, it may not be the best for you. On this website, I use Gutenberg with the Otter Blocks plugin because it’s lean and lightning fast, and because most of my visual requirements are handled by the Acabado theme. If you’re looking for the ultimate blend of options, design capabilities, and page speed, I actually recommend LiveCanvas. It’s freakin’ amazing and we use it on several sites that are more focused on speed.


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Aaron Day

Professionally designing and building websites since 2002, I was an early adopter of WordPress and continue to build engaging WP solutions on a daily basis. I'm the CTO of a web development agency and we manage over 700 WordPress sites - so most of what you'll find here on this site, we've used in practice.

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