Moving large Elementor sites to a bespoke WordPress theme.

Elementor, like other page-builder plugins, can be great for smaller sites, but if you have plans to go large, you need to be on a bespoke theme.

Once WordPress sites get to a certain size, managing them in page builders like Elemenor can become problematic.

Speed and compatibility issues can become more complex and your site can slow down to a crawl, so if you have a large site built in Elementor, we can move it to a lightweight, purpose-built WordPress theme that will set a solid foundation for your websites growth.

Often websites start off small, which can mean small budgets to build.

Many of the sites we move from Elementor to bespoke themes started off as smaller websites, and Elementor was perfect for the job, but as the sites grow, things get more complex.

Because bespoke development can be overly complex on WordPress sites that use page builders, site owners tend to add more and more plugins to get things to work and this slows the site down.

What started off as a small site can quickly grow into a large mission-critical site, and once you get to this point, you’re seemingly stuck with Elementor as everything is baked into it.

The problem is that your site becomes slower and slower, more prone to plugin conflicts as more plugins are added over time to achieve basic functions.

Carefully, and with a lot of planning.

The truth with page-builder plugins is that the longer you use them, the more complex it becomes to unpick them when things start to go wrong.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but the sooner to make the move to a bespoke WP theme, the better.

We help clients to migrate away from Elementor themes and onto lightweight, future-proofed themes whilst maintaining rankings, permalink structure and so on.

We do this as follows:

1. Getting the complete site structure into a spreadsheet so all the URLs can be checked
2. Looking at ranking URLs (against SEM Rush and aHrefs data)
3. Planning custom post types on the new site to hold the migrated content and maintaining the URL structure
4. Using custom Gutenberg blocks to recreate global and page elements from the Elementor site
5. Migrating and cleaning out the content mess that page builders create
6. Repopulating all the new pages with the content
7. Technically optimising everything (green lights in Google Page Speed)
8. A hold range of other checks pre- and post-live

That’s a cut-down version of everything we do, but you get the idea.

Moving an Elementor site takes time and careful planning.

Many clients love how their site looks, they just want a better content management experience.

This is not a problem – when we move an Elementor site to a bespoke theme, there’s options when it comes to the design.

1. Keep it the same as the current site
2. Evolve it a little to improve UX
3. Throw it away and start again

If you prefer to keep the existing design, we can simply recreate this in your new bespoke theme.

If you want to evolve things a little, we can do this via new design visuals or simply work in-browser for smaller tweaks and changes.

For a complete redesign, this goes into our branding team for the full design process.

It can be tempting to rework a lot of content during a migration from a page-builder to a bespoke theme. Don’t do this.

We strongly recommend not changing content when moving WordPress themes.

If you rank for keywords, it’s best to keep the content as-is during the migration and move content updates to ‘phase two’.

One of the main reasons for this is that moving you to a bespoke theme means a significant change to your site’s codebase and structure of the code. It’s best to do this first and let the changes bed in with Google before changing the content too much.

Re-theming and reworking content at the same time also doubles the complexity of the project – on your new site, you’ll be able to edit all the content easily, so it’s best to wait until we’ve done our job before you start yours.

Speed, quality, content management, future-proofing and technical optimisation are a few to get us started.

Let’s be clear that we are not knocking Elementor—it’s an amazing piece of kit—but we’re talking horses-for-courses: it is not right for all websites.

If you’re a solopreneur or a micro business, Elementor gives you the option to build your own website (apparently in minutes), and this can be attractive for startups and people with more time than budget.

You can choose from 100s of generic designs and design elements to build your site from a set of templates that 16 million other people have used. You get a website, but you get a generic one.

What you spend on your website obviously matches what your business can afford to spend on a website, so if it’s not much, then a page builder is for you.

If you’re an established business that aims to rank higher and demands more custom coding and functionality from your website, a page builder app is not something you should consider – you have the budget to go bespoke.

The benefits of a bespoke theme:

1. Faster and improved technical optimisation
2. Future proof – built around the WordPress codex, which isn’t going anywhere
3. Easier to update – no plugin or theme conflicts
4. Easier to develop – add new functionality within the theme, not by adding loads of new plugins
5. Easier to manage content – page builder UI is famously complicated, so a stripped-back, built-for-purpose UI makes managing content easy, even for non-technical users
6. Easier to reskin – if your brand updates, you don’t need to throw the website away; you have the stylesheet updated
7. Unique – not like the millions of other sites already out there on generic templates and theme designs
8. Plays nicely with APIs and other integrations – seamlessly connect your other apps, APIs and other tools you use without the fear of breaking things
9. Easier to fix or debug – page builders are massive plugins; if there’s a problem, it can be like finding a needle in a haystack
10. Independence – remove the locked-in reliance on additional third-party plugins by using vanilla WordPress

As we’ve previously mentioned, the larger your Elementor site gets, the longer it will take to migrate it.

Due to the way that Elementor and other page builders work, migrating content from a site to a bespoke theme can often be a copy-and-paste job.

There are some automated ways that your content can be ‘cleaned,’ but more often than not, it has to be worked through page by page with each one being rebuilt.

There is (at the time of writing) no way to export page builder content into Gutenberg blocks, so if your page layouts are already complex in Elementor, the rebuild can also be complex.