Howdy Reader 👋🏻

Elementor is always marketed as a no-code website builder. And that’s the truth.

With Elementor, you can create a professional website without touching a single line of code. You can even use it to create a super complex dynamic website by pairing it with plugins like ACF and JetEngine.

The next question is, how far can you go with the default styling options that Elementor offers?

Because in many cases, what’s available in the Elementor settings panel is not enough.

I will give you a super simple example.

Say you are working with the Heading widget and you want to create a dual-color heading like the one below.

To achieve something like that, you need to add a custom CSS.

It takes only an incredibly simple CSS snippet to achieve this style but it is still CSS.

It’s true that you can achieve the heading style by placing two Heading widgets side by side inside a wrapper. But this is not a good practice for this particular style because adding more widgets means more HTML elements will be added to your page.

More HTML elements means more HTML requests. And more HTML requests means longer response time on the server. And longer response time means, as you guess, slower page load.

So, instead of using two Heading widgets, custom CSS is a better, cleaner approach for the heading style above.

But do you know a worse approach than using two Heading widgets? Yup, installing an add-on.

Installing an add-on for a simple design style like the one above is the worst approach.

Understand the basics, let Gemini do the rest

In my early days of building websites with Elementor, I treated it purely as a no-code website builder. But recently, I rather treat it as a low-code website builder because if I solely rely on what Elementor offers, I can’t sell my design at a higher price.

If you want to add more value to your Elementor design, I strongly recommend learning CSS so that you can go beyond others and build your own unique niche.

No, you don’t need to be super knowledgeable in CSS. You only need to understand the basics. Especially the use of selectors because it is the most fundamental thing in CSS.

The rest, you can hand the jobs over to Gemini or Claude. I also use Gemini -- and Claude once in while -- on the Elementor templates that I create. Mostly to add animation effects like hover effects and scrolling effects.

You can treat them as your labor to grow your business. Just don't overly rely on them.

That’s it and good luck.

Talk soon,

Aliko

Founder of Totheweb (UtilizeWP, WPPagebuilders, Pagebuildertemplates.com)