Last Wednesday, we published the first Ask Me Anything Livestream featuring Elementor’s VP Product, Amitai Gat. We asked our community to send in their questions in the weeks before the session. and received hundreds of them.

This article summarizes the main takeaways from the event, including where the company is heading, when a complete ecommerce solution will be available, and more. If you are curious about the inner workings of developing features in Elementor, we recommend you rewatch the full video.

Table Of Contents

What the Future Holds: 3 Major Pillars Guiding Elementor’s Roadmap

Elementor’s  vision and roadmap for the coming years is guided by three main pillars. Our mission has always been to empower web creators, and that continues to be the mission.

From a product perspective, we’re looking at three main tracks:
innovation, current feature investment, and expansion.

Innovation

In the short term, we have a lot of really cool features coming up, including a Loop Builder, Containers, Nested Elements, and CSS Transform. This is just the beginning as we plan to continue adding more and more functionality to the product. 

If we look farther ahead, many exciting things are happening on the web in terms of architecture. Things like Jamstack or Headless, have the potential to change the way websites are built and become more dynamic. Personalization is also going to play an important part, which is why we’ll continue to make tools that enable our users to adapt to new technology.

Investment in Features

The second track is investing in the existing product. While we’ve been doing a lot to improve the product this year, our main focus was primarily on performance. Going forward, we are looking to expand to other areas of the product. We plan to invest in features related to our Pro users, users who use that product every day and build their business on top of Elementor.

Expansion

The third track is about expanding Elementor as a platform. Our mission is to empower web creators, and obviously, building a website is the main objective. There’s a lot more that we can do to help our users be successfu, help them grow their business and promote themselves.

For example, our Experts network was created to help web creators present their work and get hired. We also launched Elementor’s Academy to give web creators access to educational resources. All these efforts go beyond the editor functionality and aims to positively impact how web creators build their business.

Complete WooCommerce Builder Solution

Great news for those waiting to build better ecommerce stores on WordPress! A complete WooCommerce solution is coming very soon. 

Elementor has already started rolling out additional WooCommerce capabiltiies, and many more new and exciting features are on the way.

Both the Cart and the Checkout widgets are coming out in the next Elementor Pro version, bringing with them more customization options than ever before. 

WC features have been the most requested features that we’ve had in the past year. That makes total sense considering the ecommerce boom in the post COVID era. Many business owners are in the process of moving their stores online, and the demand for online stores keeps rising. Our users seek to have the same flexibility level that they have when using Elementor, just with WooCommerce.

Balancing design flexibility and WooCommerce compatibility

The reason it took us a little bit of time to ship the extended WC Builder is that it was essential for us to make sure we provided as much design flexibility as possible, while also maintaining compatibility with the WooCommerce ecosystem.

The easiest thing would have been to develop a totally independent widget for WooCommerce, but then it would have compromised that compatibility. After a lot of research and a lot of testing, we came up with features that provide a lot of design flexibility while still maintaining that compatibility. We’re excited about finally getting these features out and we hope you are too!

New Features News: Loop Builder, Containers and More

We received many questions concerning specific advanced features our audience is eagerly awaiting for. These include dynamic capabilities (repeaters, loops, conditionals), CSS grid, mega menu, and Form Builder. Some of these features are already in our developer edition plugin, and others are in the late stages of user testing. Our aim is to get all of these features this quarter or early next year.

Loop Builder

Loop Builder is one of the most requested features of all time. It will give the user the ability to customize every repeating element, whether these are posts or galleries, or other elements.

Containers

The aim is to start rolling out the Flexbox containers. Containers are going to change the way that you build with Elementor, as these features will have a dramatic impact on performance, reducing the number of DOM elements on the page. They also give users a lot of design flexibility when building responsive and fluid websites.

Form Builder & Mega Menu

Containers and the nested elements will allow you to nest elements within other elements. These features will serve as the building blocks for other advanced capabilities like extending our Form Builder and releasing the Mega Menu.

Elementor’s Performance Leap in 2021

We’ve made many performance improvements this year, and they had a substantial effect on the page load results our users are seeing.

Elementor has placed performance as a top priority, and this past year have seen massive improvements in how Elementor loads assets, scripts, and CSS. In the last release, we saw a 40% improvement in speed. Many community members are sharing that they are getting 90s and 100s page speed scores just by updating to the latest version.

Containers & performance

The containers we mentioned will have a big impact on performance in terms of the number of DOM elements. This is just the beginning, and we’ll continue to come up with new ways to improve how everything loads onto the page.

Helping web creators make the right performance decisions

When we look ahead, we think about how to design new features that will help our users make better decisions about elements that can impact the performance. We have a lot of ideas on that front.

Empowring performance skills

And when considering performance, you can’t ignore the importance of having the right skill and experience to build a fast-loading page. That’s why we released a course about how to improve performance on Elementor websites.

Behind the Scenes of the Development Process

This year, we implemented many QA and testing processes, and this new workflow resulted in more frequent and reliable feature releases during 2021.

The challenge

In the earlier days of Elementor, QA and testing of the product used to be much simpler and required less resources, but once we reached a certain scale, we had to come up with a new process.

The reason that this is such a big challenge is that in a way, every WordPress site is unique. Every website is hosted on a different hosting platform with a different server configuration. There’s a different theme installed, and various combinations of plugins activated.

The website itself uses different features of Elementor and other plugins, so manually testing every combination of every website is impossible.

The solution

To scale testing, we’re investing heavily in automation. This includes examining multiple tools and platforms that allow us to run unit tests and functional end-to-end tests. This will give us the ability to see if a website changes after an update. Every time we run into an issue, we just add that to the list of scenarios that we’re testing.

Web creators can now install the Developer Edition. This lets you experience some of the features early on and gives us crucial user feedback as early as possible.

There are over 30,000 active installs on the Developer Edition, and the new process has managed to help improve the quality assurance of releases and scale production.

Results

We released eight new versions this year, which included 34 new features. This is a massive increase from the previous year. Once you get this thing going and it starts to get some coverage, it also gives you the confidence to release faster to focus on development and ship features more quickly.

Support You Can Rely On

We put special effort into improving the quality of our support, and are already seeing results.

The way we look at it, support is an integral part of our product, and we want to make sure that the quality of the support that we provide is as good as the product. 

In the past few months, we’ve made a lot of changes to support. Our co-founder and CEO took that as a personal project, investing a ton of time into making Elementor support the best it can be.

Some of the efforts we made included:

  • Recruiting dozens of high-quality individuals, Elementor experts.
  • Changing the structure of the support team.
  • Opening new sites in areas around the globe. We plan to open more locations in the future.

We already see the change in terms of the feedback that we’re getting. We dramatically reduced the time to the first response and the resolution time

Strengthening Communications

We covered a lot of grounds in this AMA. The reason we decided to do the AMA was because we are always on the lookout for new ways to listen to and communicate with our community. If you have more questions you’d like to ask Amitai, please let us know in the comments below.