It’s common knowledge that everyone needs a great-looking website these days. Whether it’s a company website or a portfolio website, great design speaks volumes. It helps convey professionalism and sets the tone for future conversations.
Designing great websites with WordPress is easy these days, thanks to the vast number of WordPress themes available. Most themes/templates are advertised as websites-in-a-box, where the user has to install the template, and they’re off and running.
Elementor, the popular WordPress design platform, recently unveiled its website kits feature, which promises site owners and designers several benefits over standard WordPress themes. The question is: Can these site kits compete with themes? Let’s take a look.
What Are Full Website Kits And How Do They Differ From Themes?
A common problem website creators faced was having to start every project from scratch. Layering design elements, ensuring code was validated for performance, and structuring themes meant they wasted time performing repetitive tasks. Website Kits remove this issue. Designers can now create a full website, export its blueprints or the entire design itself, and use them to create a new website.
For instance, a site designer who specializes in creating photography websites can create a blueprint for their clients. This framework can include common design elements and pre-validated performance-enhancing features. When the time comes to design the website, they can export the blueprint and customize features on top of it to create a unique website.
Naturally, the Website Kits feature is most useful to designers and agencies, and not to business owners who need one-off websites. They allow designers the ability to avoid repetitive work and focus more on creating unique, great-performing websites for their clients. There are a few other advantages as well.
Faster Design
While designing a great-looking website is important, no one wants to spend weeks or months getting it up. After all, the point of a website is to establish credibility and get a business started. Having a semi-permanent “under construction” page isn’t a good look.
WordPress templates allow designers and site owners to get a website’s shell up quickly. However, certain businesses might find that the customization they need delays releases.
Elementor’s site kits save time for both owners and designers. Owners can export older websites they created on Elementor and apply the theme to the new website at the click of a button. All settings are automatically applied, and design elements are instantly exported.
Designers can replicate successful designs across multiple clients and establish a brand identity easily. For example, if a designer favors certain design elements on the homepage, they can export this feature to a new website instantly. They can customize it as needed and present their clients with a completely new website.
The result is faster website creation times and more efficient design. Once website owners and designers identify a great design, they can replicate a winning formula easily. WP templates don’t allow customization to this extent. If a template is a poor fit for a client’s needs, site design time is lengthened considerably.
Extensive Choice of Designs
One of the great things about WordPress templates is that there’s a template for virtually any business or topic one can think of. Need a WordPress theme for your church? Well, there’s a template for that!
Elementor replicates this vast range of choices by providing site owners and creators with two sources of website kits. They can either choose site kits from Elementor’s Kits Library, or they can import Elementor Kits directly from Envato.
The Kits Library hosts a variety of designer-made website kits that owners can immediately apply. While some customization might be necessary, Elementor hosts over 200 beautifully designed templates for every purpose imaginable.
Envato offers a review system and displays transparent pricing so owners and designers can quickly compare site kits’ features. They can then decide whether a standard WP template or a site kit fits their needs better. Elementor doesn’t trump the vast range of templates available. However, it does match the range and variety very well.
Optimal Features
One of the problems with installing a template is that creators cannot predict how the website will perform. Every template uses a mixture of assets, and it isn’t always easy to examine what’s under the template’s hood. Code affects performance, and a poorly performing website will drop like a rock in search rankings.
This is where Elementor scores over a standard WP theme. Once designers optimize their websites for performance, they can export these settings endlessly, even if the front-end design changes. For instance, if a designer installs custom image optimization features for their clients, they can replicate this feature by exporting it to their new creations.
Thus, designs are consistent and always optimized. Not every business owner is technically minded and Elementor’s focus on performance helps them build performance-enhancing features into their website’s code automatically. For instance, Elementor’s Site Kits automatically apply selective asset loading and eliminate references to outdated Javascript and CSS libraries.
They also rely on native browser support and implement smart caching. All of these features might not mean anything to a non-technical person. However, they enhance site performance and help SEO rankings.
The result is a great-looking and fast website that can be consistently replicated. Elementor helps designers and owners enhance design consistency by providing a central design platform that houses every element they previously used or might need for their projects.
A Great Addition
Elementor’s Site Kits are a supercharged version of standard WordPress templates. Thanks to their time-saving features, easy exportability, and performance-enhancing focus, site owners and designers can rest assured that their designs will always hit the spot.
