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Episode 234 - Showit vs Elementor
307 Plays2 months ago
In this episode, we’re covering the differences between Showit and Elementor; both of which are website building platforms that we use actively, readily and these are the platforms that we build our templates on.
Would you rather watch a video? Links, resources and the full video can be found in the show notes. Check ’em out at https://daveyandkrista.com/showit-vs-elementor-wordpress. And if you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review over at Apple Podcasts.
Grab your free font pairing guide at canva.daveyandkrista.com.
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Transcript
Introduction: Show It vs Elementor
00:00:00
Speaker
Alright, so in this episode, I'm going to be covering the differences between show it and Elementor, both of which are website building platforms that we use um actively readily. And these are the the platforms that we build our templates on. So several years ago, Davey and I recorded an episode doing this point by point comparison, but both platforms have changed a lot. And I'm actually going to choose some new winners for some of these categories and break down my reasoning for the switches. So if you are considering changing website platforms, if you want a new website, if you just aren't happy with your current site, um I think today's episode is going to be really helpful for you. And you're going to learn a lot about
00:00:42
Speaker
when I think about these two different platforms. So hot takes in here, but stay tuned.
Podcast and Hosts Introduction
00:00:48
Speaker
You're listening to The Brands That Book Show, a podcast for creative entrepreneurs who want practical tips and strategies to build engaging brands and craft high converting websites. We're your hosts, Davey and Krista, co-founders of a brand and website design agency specializing in visual brand design and show it websites. You're listening to The Brands That Book Show. Okay, so I'm going to get to the episode
Free Canva Guide for Listeners
00:01:11
Speaker
in a second. But first, I want to give you a gift just to thank you for being here with me today and listening to this episode. So if I learned anything in design school, it's that choosing the right fonts can make or break a design. And if you don't have a set of brand fonts to work with, or you want to test out a few new fonts to elevate your online presence, I put together a free Canva guide that lets you actually copy and paste my exact settings into your own projects. So I did the hard work of figuring out the combinations for you and which serifs and sans serifs work together so that you can spend less time sweating your latest set of social media graphics and more time doing what you love. Grab your free copy of the guide at canva.dabianchrista.com. And now onto the
Evolution of Platforms and Selection Criteria
00:01:48
Speaker
episode.
00:01:48
Speaker
So Davey recorded a tutorial on this several years ago, but since then both platforms have made a lot of updates and he kind of did like a point by point comparison and gave each one like a winning category. But a lot of things have shifted. My opinions of both platforms have shifted and I'm going to choose some different winners in some of these categories. So if you are looking for another website builder, if you're going to be building a new website soon, if you want to know more about either one of these platforms, sit tight because I think this video is going to be really helpful.
00:02:20
Speaker
I wanna start by saying that both website platforms are incredibly reputable and that with both of them, it's possible to build a beautiful, high-functioning, high-converting website.
Show It vs Elementor: Core Differences
00:02:31
Speaker
And if you're new to ShowIt, ShowIt is a drag and drop editor that connects with WordPress, so it gives you the full power of WordPress and the flexibility of design programs like the Adobe Suite or Canva. And the platform that I'm gonna be comparing it to is one that we also build templates for, which is called Elementor. Elementor is a plugin that you add to a WordPress website and it lets you edit the visual front end of the site without any code. It's a little bit different from Showit in that it's more column space instead of a free flow design editor. And but we've compared well at this we've tested pretty much all of the website builders out there. We've tested Squarespace and Wix and Divi and Webflow. And if you're not going to go with the Showit website, I think that out of all of those other programs that I just listed, Elementor is probably going to be your best bet.
00:03:18
Speaker
So, let's dive into my point by point comparison.
Ease of Use: Show It vs Elementor
00:03:22
Speaker
So, the first point that I want to compare these two platforms on is ease of use. So, show it like I mentioned is completely drag and drop. You can move a photo wherever you wanted to go on the page. You can add as many elements as you want in your different canvases that you're designing with. You can easily change out colors or add new colors or add in custom fonts or pull from the entire Google Font Library. It's a really free forum and I think it's similar to Canva, although I actually think it's a lot easier to design with Show-It sites than with Canva. There's just a little bit more flexibility when it comes to design that I as a designer i really appreciate. So it's really easy to get oriented on the platform and the Show-It team has done a really good job of designing the user interface to make it easy to interact with and learn on
00:04:04
Speaker
and get a website up that is beautiful fast. Showit also has an in-app chat and they have real people who will help you figure out exactly how to do everything. They have awesome support docs and they have active designer communities and Facebook user communities get answers to your questions quickly. I really appreciate that the Show-It team is mostly based in Arizona. They're real people that you go to and get to interact with. um They answer you with kindness, and they're super technical, but they're not going to speak to you in the technical jargon that I think can be kind of common among web communities. Okay, so Elementor ease of use.
00:04:40
Speaker
WordPress in general has like a reputation for being a little bit more technical, i a little bit more involved in terms of setup, but out of all of the straight WordPress builders out there, so not counting show it, I think Elementor is the easiest to use. It's more calm space and you drag in different widgets to the different areas that you want to add text or images or videos, et cetera. um And so like from a front-end perspective, I think it's a lot easier than something like Webflow or Divi. It's faster if you're trying to get your site to look and act a certain way. With that said, I think that WordPress still requires a lot more of a learning curve than something like Show It. Figuring out the columns and the stacking and the layering and adding in custom fonts takes a little bit more work. well
00:05:25
Speaker
I'm going to say a lot more work than something like ShowIt. And they don't have an in-app chat, so you'll have to figure out your own hosting and install Elementor and install your template on Elementor. You'll have to make sure that your plugins stay up to date and that you don't add a plugin that conflicts with other plugins. And you think that Elementor can just break a lot more easily than a ShowIt website. And overall, I think that in all of my experience using Elementor, the websites are a lot more fragile than show it websites. You really have to give an eye on your Elementor site to make sure that if you've added custom fonts, they don't come unlinked or that a plugin doesn't break your images. um And so if you have an Elementor site,
00:06:05
Speaker
I would definitely make sure that you have a quality host that does daily website backups for a while. um So if you host with us, we offer that um just because it really is so easy for those Elementor sites to break. And I think that this point where I'm talking about ease of use is really important because I have a few more points that I'm going to go through, but I think that ease of use kind of summarizes the biggest comparison between show it at Elementor. Elementor takes some work to figure out it takes a lot of work to maintain and show it just straight out of the box is beautiful and easy to use and a lot more intuitive in nature and so in 95% of cases if somebody is asking me which platform they should go on my recommendation is typically show it just because I think that for most people that is really the best option. Okay, so when it comes to ease of use I give show it the edge here by a long shot.
00:06:57
Speaker
My second point that I want to compare on is a mobile responsiveness.
Mobile Responsiveness and Design Flexibility
00:07:01
Speaker
So what I mean here is when your website gets smaller for different screens, how easy is it to customize those other various screen sizes? So first up, let's talk about Show It. Show It in their editor. They have two different versions that you're going to be working on at any tip given time. You'll be working on your desktop version and your mobile version. And so within any different canvas that you're working on in Showit, you can easily customize the desktop version and then pop on the mobile version and make sure everything looks good on mobile. Showit allows you to change the fonts or layouts or several, actually a lot of other aspects.
00:07:35
Speaker
between desktop and mobile because there are just a lot of instances where you find that something might need to look different on mobile to make it clear and readable while keeping the integrity of your design. One of the biggest mistakes that I see people make when they're working on a show-it site is not looking at that mobile view until the very end of a project. So when you're adding elements to show it, a lot of times it's not the elements on mobile are not going to pull in the styles from desktop. Sometimes they say do and there are some ways to kind of clean up mobile a little bit faster, but unlike something like Elementor, the elements don't automatically snap into place as you're designing them. You'll want to make sure that when you add something to desktop, you turn on mobile and double check the way it looks and kind of design as you go.
00:08:15
Speaker
I think that once you get used to that process, it's really easy and really straightforward. And I think that personally, I like it more than something like Elementor where you don't have as much control over how everything snacks and the differences between the two platforms. um But if you don't want to think about mobile at all, you might consider something like Elementor. So with Elementor, as you add different elements, they're automatically going to kind of format on mobile. You'll still need to go in and clean some stuff up, but if you didn't look at it until the end, you might not have as much to clean up as you would if you didn't look at a show at site until the end.
00:08:49
Speaker
Elementor also allows you to check the formatting on iPads and change some of the sizing and spacing on iPad specific devices or like tablet specific devices. um And I would say with both ShowIt and Elementor, both of them give you a lot more mobile control than platforms like Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, etc. So, who has the edge here? I'm going to give it to Elementor, although for what it's worth, I would still take a show-it website over an Elementor website for my personal website any day, um and I still prefer to build on show-it than I do Elementor, even though I think Elementor technically would win this mobile responsiveness category. All right, next point is design flexibility. So if you work on an Elementor site long enough and hard enough, you can get it to look um as beautiful as Show-It sites do. um But it takes a lot more work. And like I said in that first point, these sites are a lot more fragile. When we build our templates on Show-It and Elementor, the Show-It sites take a fraction of the time. It takes us to build on the Elementor sites. Those Elementor sites take hours and hours longer. And we have to continually check on them to make sure that
00:09:57
Speaker
images aren't broken, and contact forms don't work. um We had our own website on Elementor for a long time, and the contact form, which was an Elementor forum, was always breaking, and it was just finicky. And I would notice that when I updated my plugins, the fonts would come unlinked. So I think that in terms of design flexibility, like yes, you could work really, really hard to get an Elementor site to look as great as a show-it site. But I think it's a trade off. You have to think about how much time do you want to put into that project in order to get it to look exactly the same. So the edge for design flexibility goes to show it. Okay, so next up is features
Feature Comparison and SEO Effectiveness
00:10:34
Speaker
and tools. Like I said at the beginning, both Show It and Elementor work with WordPress, which gives you the full power of the WordPress tool library.
00:10:44
Speaker
I would say that straight out of the box Elementor has a lot more tools and features, but I've found that I often still need to add a lot more plugins in order to get it to do exactly what I want it to do. So um I've noticed that if I want to add certain types of galleries to a portfolio or I want certain just things to happen on Elementor site, I have to still buy and support and then maintain a plugin to do a lot of the things that I really would need Elementor to do. So it technically doesn't have as much built into their platform, but I do think it has enough for 99% of websites to do what they need to do. And if you need to do something else, a lot of times you can add that through a WordPress plugin. And just keep in mind that whether you're doing Show It or Elementor, the more plugins that you add to your website, the more intricate it becomes and the bigger it comes. And thus the more fragile it becomes and the more likely it is to load
00:11:38
Speaker
more slowly, um so which is not a which is not great for search engine optimization if you want your site to come up higher in search engine results, which I think we all do. So when it comes to features and tools, I'm going to give Shoa and Alemtra a tie here um because I think that they are both really powerful since they're both built with WordPress. ah Next up is SEO and optimization, and I'm really excited to talk about this one because I think my take is a hot one, but I have the proof to back it up. There used to be this mentality out there that show it was not good for search engine optimization, and let me just say that that is false.
00:12:13
Speaker
so Proof in point, we used to be wedding photographers. So um if you've been following us for a while, you might remember those days. We shot a couple hundred plus weddings over the period of like 10 years. And somewhere in the middle of our career, we switched our website to be on show it. And we optimized our websites for our desired searches in the Annapolis, Maryland wear area, which is where we photographed weddings. And then around the time our first job was born, so 2018, we stopped updating that website because we stopped taking weddings. We shifted to just focus on design and I didn't want any more wedding work. And then that website sat untouched for six years. I literally blogged nothing else. I updated nothing else on that website and I still got at least a few inquiries a week just because it was still on the first pages of my desired searches. so
00:13:02
Speaker
Six years of touching nothing, creating no content, and this show at website was still ranking first and bringing in potential work that I didn't even want to take. um The only reason we don't get those inquiries anymore is because we took that website down. I just didn't want to have it out there on the inner internet anymore because we are not photographers. so Showit can be so powerful if you know what you're doing in terms of search engine optimization. Because Showit connects with WordPress, it allows you to have that full power of WordPress for blogging. And there are a lot of third-party plugins like RankMath. That's our current favorite.
00:13:37
Speaker
that you can add to your ShowIt WordPress account to really optimize your post for searches. ShowIt also has some built-in tools that make it easy to customize the pages and some of the content on your website. Another thing that I think that ShowIt does so well just straight out of the box is ensuring that their websites load really quickly. and Um, site speed is a major factor for ranking as well as for visitors who are coming to your site. I think that if somebody comes to your site and it doesn't load, or at least not in a few seconds, they're going to get distracted. They might go over to Instagram and they might forget to come back to you. So it's really vital to ensure that your website is loading quickly and just right out of the gate show. It does a really good job of that.
00:14:19
Speaker
I think that if you are the kind of person who is super technical, you like optimizing things like cascading style sheets to make sure that different lot JavaScripts are loaded at different times, you want to move all of your assets. And so when I say assets, I mean like images and files and fonts and all of those things to an Amazon web server and set that up on your Elementor and really optimize the heck out of your website, um then maybe Elementor is a good fit for you. But I'd say that most of us really didn't get into the website world, the business world, to care about those things. Sorry, developers, if I'm breaking your heart. um And so first like for everybody else, and so for everybody else, I think that show it is such a good fit because it allows you to spend more time doing what you love and less time hacking the code on your website. I know that I can code. I design websites.
00:15:12
Speaker
all day, every day, and I still don't want to do those things that it would take to optimize an Elementor website. So here, the edge for SEO, I'm giving it to show it, unless you are that person who are really, like I said, wants to optimize their site and do all of those like really complicated things that I mentioned. And then, like sure, you can win for Elementor there.
Support and Pricing Analysis
00:15:32
Speaker
So I touched on help and support a little bit when I talked about ease of use and I talked about show it's in app support, their Facebook community, they have a great Instagram account who they'll probably help you too. You can always email them from the support and they're real people who if you meet them in real life, you will probably get a hug for them because they are just like that kind and they want you to succeed.
00:15:53
Speaker
Elementor also has a wealth of support because it is such a popular website builder platform out there. Their Facebook group at the time of recording this, I think they have 150,000 people in it. um You can submit a support ticket to Elementor and they'll get back to you in a few days, but they will probably get back to you and try to help you, although not at the same level of like human interaction that the support team will. um So there are resources for both of them out there, but when it comes to help and support, I give Show at the Edge and because their support team is like bar none. The last point by point comparison is pricing because I know that pricing can be a major factor when choosing between website platforms out there.
00:16:34
Speaker
is A shit ah Show It subscription is going to run you between $228 and $408 a year, depending on which subscription you choose. I would say that for most businesses, it's a really good idea to blog, especially if you do care about showing up in search and your results. And so if you're going to blog, you're going to want the advanced plan because that's going to allow you to add the ah SEO plugins that really help you optimize your blog posts. um and it's going to let you add any plugin that you would like to your site. It also includes a content migration if you're coming from something like Squarespace or a different WordPress website. Elementor, on the other hand, costs $69 a year and I think it renews at a $25 discount every year, but unlike Show It, which has actually becomes your website host, you're going to need to find your own Elementor website host.
00:17:21
Speaker
I don't normally recommend going with Elementor themselves as your hosting platform. I would find a different, high-quality, reputable and Elementor host, and so like Flywheel is normally red what I recommend. I think that if you're going to go with an Elementor website, you want to make sure that whatever hosting you get has enough power to actually run the plugin and allow you to edit the pages. I've had people buy our templates and try to install them and the installations time out just because their hosting was shared and like three dollars a month and it just didn't have the bandwidth that it needed in order to run that platform. Elementor takes them like bandwidth on your site so you want to make sure that you're paying for good
00:18:03
Speaker
high quality hosting in order to do that um customization. So that's probably gonna run you anywhere from like $20 a month up. um And I think that, and so that's gonna run you anywhere from like $20 a month up just depending on how much traffic you have to your website. And so if you're looking at high quality hosting, it actually brings the Elementor hosting price um right up there with the cost of show it website hosting. So as far as who gets the edge here, I say it's a toss up because you could make WordPress a lot cheaper by going with really low quality hosting, but I don't think it's going to be your best bet or serve your audience the best and thus allow you to grow your business. So if you're going to go with Elementor because you want to save a little bit of money, make sure you get good hosting or save yourself peace of mind and save a lot of time and go with something like
E-commerce Integration
00:18:52
Speaker
show it. I feel like I should add one more little point in here about e-commerce. So show it out of the gate is not an e-commerce platform the way that something like Shopify is, but it integrates with WooCommerce and you can also add Shopify buy buttons or integrate other cart systems in order to make it a
00:19:08
Speaker
We're a checkout-friendly, e-commerce-friendly website platform out there. So on our Dave Inkerza site, it is a show-it site and then we also use WooCommerce to do our cart. And it's a really powerful combination and it lets us have the power of WooCommerce and the beauty of show-it. Elementor is also not a native e-commerce platform. You'll still need something like WooCommerce in order to get it to work correctly. But there are probably a lot of WooCommerce Elementor combination themes out there to let you add that to your website and bring in the e-commerce functionality. So that's
Final Recommendations for Users
00:19:41
Speaker
my little caveat. All right, so that is the end of my point-by-point comparison about which website platform is the best fit for you. So it's totally possible to create beautiful and high-functioning, high-converting websites on both Showit and Elementor. I think the point really comes down to how technical are you, how much work do you want to put into the website, and if you're in doubt, Showit has a free trial that you can test, and Elementor, if you set up a WordPress hosting site somewhere on the internet,
00:20:07
Speaker
and You can install the free version of Elementor and test that out as well. In order to do a lot of the more powerful stuff with Elementor though, you are probably going to need to pay for the premium version. And as I mentioned before, for what it's worth, in 95% of cases, I recommend show it over Elementor and it's what we've personally chosen for our website and brand. For a complete list of show notes and resources from this episode, head to davianchrista.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, it would mean the world to us if you would leave a review in iTunes and share it with a friend.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:20:37
Speaker
All right, thanks for joining me, guys.
00:20:42
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in to the Brands of Book Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing, leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, and sharing this episode with others. For show notes and other resources, head on over to DaveyandChrista.com.