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I’m comfortable coding. Lately I’ve wondered if I should be familiar with things like Elementor as I prepare to look for freelance work.
To give you an idea of what my skill level is, I coded a custom theme and plugins from scratch that use a few CPTs(I didn’t use ACF)
I would like get some work on Upwork and some local freelance gigs.
Thanks!
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Or course there is legit reasons. Think many people in this industry are self absorbed (generally speaking) and forget that time is money and that some clients want to actually interact with their site.
As a coder working with things like Elementor and Divi feels incredibly inefficient and frustrating to me.
For customizing sites for client requirements and marketing focused design using ACF is essential in my experience. The very few times I inherited sites with elementor clients were very much intimidated by it. With Gutenberg extended with custom ACF blocks I have a lot of success handing over sites.
Why not both?
First of all, you can write (and contribute or even sell) custom Elementor widgets. And widgets for secure and performant page builders as well.
You can also custom code themes (which end users rarely need to tinker with) and use Elementor (or a secure, performant page builder) for page layout so that site owners or their staff can make changes without bringing in another developer.
You can also write custom plugins that provide missing integrations — for instance between a client’s e-commerce and membership plugins.
The main thing for me is always bringing appropriate technology to problems rather than maximal or doctrinal ones. If a user has a low budget or if they need a lot of flexibility and independence then a good page builder (or Elementor) is probably the right solution. If they need maximum performance (i.e. an extra 5 points on PageSpeedInsights for mobile) or scale (i.e. support 10,000 visits/hour) *and* they can afford it *and* you can have an ongoing contractual relationship then bespoke code is the right choice for them.
It’s ok to specialize — plenty of people do. But it would be a mistake to try and build Barnes & Noble’s website with Elementor, and it would be budget-busting overkill to hand code an SPA for a roadside taco truck.
It all comes down on time and effort efficiency. If you can build sites faster with editors that provide the same results and you provide the same value to the clients, why not using Elementor, Oxygen and such?
On the contrary, if you excel with CPT and ACF, Coding sites with minimum dependency is also a valuable skill.
Elementor with jet engine is S tier for almost any normal small business or site under 100k/month, generally speaking.
With the right caching setup and config it is super easy to edit, fast, structured, and stable. Almost every problem I’ve seen is just a lack of knowledge on it, given there is a learning curve on the dev side.
We only do custom for high traffic or very unique requirements, then of course Headless WP with nextJS is S tier in that case.
Just normal WordPress with a custom theme and custom implementation really doesn’t check any of the “best” boxes. You’re slower than Headless and harder to manage than elementor/jet engine. Remember, you are building the site for a client, nor yourself. You want to maximize the things that matter to them.
Source: have worked with wp for over 12 years and launched hundreds of websites/apps.
If you have any chance of ever turning over a site to a client/customer to self-manage (even just content changes) then a visual editor makes a big difference.
Your ability to code is nice, but it’s about your client’s abilities and the needs of the project.
Lots use these theme builders simply to get things designed easier. Pretty much assigning classes and ID’s can be easy not to mention a lot of design features that come in with Elementor and Divi. This projects can have a quick turn around from simple brochure site to corporate websites with just basic contact form and post types that can be customized using the likes of ACF. A simple project like this can have a turn around time of 2 weeks to a month just for 1 developer. It’s an easy tool especially for frontend wp devs. This can fit to small and medium businesses that just needs an online presence.
On the other hand if a project is massive an has ample time to really develop from discovery to prototyping to the actualy development, qa and testing. You can always go headless wp where you can use any js library you want for your frontend and the wp/php on the backend. It’s leaner and much faster to develop because ot has most of the hooks you need for backend and it includes almost of of the features needed to jumpstart a project, but you need to cover the design/frontend part from scratch using the libraries.
Or if you want all wp but you want everything customized so you can easily manipulate dynamic data especially when automating content, you can do the newer block based themes and plugins that used the native gutenberg style. It’s lean but pf course you’ll need to delv with php and html and css and even css preprocessors to get things working on the frontend. It really depends on the need if you ask me.