Recently, Elementor, the website builder plugin from WordPress, known for having over 5 million active installations, announced some key changes to its core features in the Elementor Pro Essential subscription plan.
Nevertheless, the plan continues to include the Theme builder with access to over 50 Pro widgets, basic marketing tools, and the Form Widget. That said, it plans to shift other sophisticated features to a higher level of pricing tiers, which has many impacts on an Athens car accident attorney or another lawyer.
“Going forward, when you purchase the new Elementor Pro Essential, you will have all the features you need to create a complete basic website, and also gain access to new features that will be part of the Essential plan,” Elementor Senior Product Marketing Manager Gabriella Laster said. “For more professional capabilities like the Popup Builder, e-commerce features including PayPal button, Stripe button, and the full WooCommerce Builder or collaboration tools like Notes or the Role Manager, you will need to upgrade to the Advanced plan or higher.”
The changes outlined in the announcement are expected to come into effect on December 4, 2023. Thanks to the team, it will not impact the existing subscribers or any other subscription plans in any manner.
Existing Essential subscribers get to keep all current features. If you have a valid Elementor Pro Essential subscription, you can keep your subscription with all the features currently available to you, at no additional cost. You’ll also be able to renew your subscription upon expiration while keeping all the features currently available in your plan. Some new features, released to the higher plans, will not be available as part of your current Pro subscription.
In a recent discussion, Scott Kingsley Clark, a lead developer of Pods Framework, said that pods will play a significant role in supporting Elementor users in the future.
“Elementor Pro is removing things like ACF/Pods integration from their lowest tier ‘Essential’ plan in December,” Clark said. “Existing subscribers keep the functionality but anyone getting new licenses after Dec 4th won’t have those.
“It’s not super clear since I don’t use the other features whether they’ve removed many other things or if some of those things are actually new features shipping in December to just the other plans.
“The impact of this is that I’ve chosen to replace the Elementor Pro integration for Pods that they provide — with a more complete alternative solution within the Page Builder Toolkit add-on. Previously, only new Pods-centric widgets were added. Soon I’ll add dynamic content support for Pods that will be available as a better alternative to what is in Elementor Pro currently.”
In relation to this, consumers worldwide are concerned and enquiring anxiously if the features that they paid for will continue to be accessible after the change. To this, some anti-Elementor people replied critically, stressing the page builder’s dismissal.
The primary reason for this kind of response is that Elementor had a contentious relationship with the open source. From the start, Elementor has marketed itself away from the WordPress core. Besides, its bloat and performance concerns have destabilized the position of the plugin by questioning its long-term future.
Elementor is constantly making changes to its plans and pricing while ensuring legal pricing to its customers. One of its core strategies is to get customers locked into auto-renewals, thereby guaranteeing a safe financial future for the company.
A few months back, human-made engineer Frank Klein started a conversation on X/Twitter, stating, “Elementor will disappear as a standalone plugin, along with all other non-block page builders,” while the WordPress ecosystem turns into block-first by default.
“Since 2022, all default themes are block themes,” Klein said. “WordPress.com is all in on blocks. WooCommerce is modernizing with blocks.
“For plugin authors, the biggest return on investment is to use blocks. So it falls to the page builder developer to ensure that plugins integrate well. And that’s a difficult, tedious, and costly undertaking.”
WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg referenced Elementor’s move to remove its features in the core tier in the news.
“As Gutenberg gets more capable, non-Gutenberg site builders will likely need to continue raising their prices, as one is in the news for today, to maintain revenue churn in the face of higher churn and fewer new users,” Mullenweg said. “I don’t [think] this trend will happen for the Gutenberg-based ones.
“They’ll also need to spend more to keep up, as they have to duplicate all the engineering that’s going into the core. This is why we asked them all to plan on Gutenberg since we started development in 2017. Phases 1 and 2 also could have gone a lot faster with their help. The pace of iteration is pretty relentless.”
Wrapping up
Elementor’s decision to reallocate its features by splitting it across pricing tiers is a response to shifting dynamics within the page builder landscape and an intention to support third-party integrations by cutting costs in the basic plan. In this regard, WordPress developers and users alike are assessing their connection with page builders. This is primarily because the core releases focus on block-based editing for content and design.
This showcases a paradigm shift in the way WordPress websites are created and how page builders will be challenged to gratify user expectations while fostering innovation and ensuring business sustainability.