There are two very different things people mean by “Elementor templates”, and they deserve opposite advice. Templates you save from your own site are one of the most useful features in Elementor. Complete website kits imported from a library are a shortcut that often costs more than it saves.
Your own saved templates: use them constantly
Any page or container you build can be saved as a template and reused. Right-click a container (in the canvas or the Structure panel) and choose Save as template, or save a whole page from the dropdown next to the Publish button. Elementor’s guide to creating templates walks through both.
You’ll be asked where to save it:
- Site Templates are stored on this website, for reuse on its pages.
- Cloud Templates are stored in your Elementor account, so you can use them on any site connected to that account. How much you can store depends on your subscription.
Saved templates appear under the My Templates tab in the template library, ready to drop into any page.
What’s worth saving
On a typical small business site, we save:
- The call-to-action band that sits at the bottom of service pages
- A testimonial block
- An FAQ section layout
- A “meet the team” card
- A standard service page layout, with placeholder text in each section
- A blog post intro block, if posts use a consistent layout
The test is simple: if you’ll build it more than twice, save it. Then the fourth service page takes 20 minutes instead of two hours, and it matches the other three.
The trap with saved templates
When you insert a saved template, Elementor drops in a copy. Edit the copy and the original doesn’t change. Edit the original and the copies you’ve already placed don’t change either. That’s fine for layouts you’ll customise anyway, like a service page.
For things that must stay identical everywhere, such as a call-to-action with your phone number, a copy is a liability. Change your number and you’re hunting through 15 pages. For those, use a Theme Builder template (for repeated site parts), or pull the content from one place with dynamic content. Our guide to dynamic content in Elementor Pro explains how that works for teams, services and listings.
Website kits: where they help
Elementor’s library of complete designs, now called website templates (you’ll still hear them called kits), install a full set of pages, a header and footer, global colours and fonts, and often popups and forms. Elementor’s website templates overview describes what’s included.
They’re useful in a few situations:
- Learning Elementor. Pulling apart a professionally built kit is a good way to see how containers, global styles and Theme Builder fit together.
- A short-term or internal site. An event microsite, a staging prototype, or a site that will be replaced within a year.
- A starting point for an experienced builder who’ll strip it back to the useful structure and rebuild the rest.
Website kits: where they hurt
They look like everyone else’s site
Kits are designed to suit thousands of businesses, so they suit none in particular. The same hero layout, the same icon boxes, the same “Our Process: 01, 02, 03” section. Visitors can’t name what’s wrong, but a kit site reads as generic, and generic is the opposite of what a local business needs to stand out. The more popular the kit, the more competitors are using it.
The content is shaped for the kit, not your business
Kit pages come with dummy content, and it’s tempting to fill each slot with something. You end up writing to fit the template’s boxes (three features, six services, four stats) instead of saying what customers need to hear. Good sites start with the content and design around it.
They bring bloat
A kit imports pages you’ll never use, placeholder images, extra forms, popups and global styles. Many sites built on kits also lean on third-party add-on plugins for particular widgets. The unused parts tend to stay forever, because nobody is sure whether deleting them will break something. Every leftover add-on and oversized image makes the site slower.
They can overwrite your settings
Importing a kit into an existing site can bring in its own global colours, fonts and site settings. If you’ve already set up your brand in Site Settings, read every screen of the import wizard carefully, and back up first.
How to use a kit without the downsides
If you do start from a kit:
- Import it onto a staging site, not your live site.
- Delete every page, popup and form you don’t need straight away.
- Replace the kit’s global colours and fonts with your brand’s, and rename them sensibly.
- Remove any add-on plugins you aren’t using.
- Replace every stock image, or at least every image on the homepage and service pages.
- Rewrite every heading. If a section has nothing true to say, delete the section.
- Check for leftover popups (the kit may include a newsletter one that fires on load) and review their triggers. Our article on popups that don’t annoy people has the settings we’d use.
By the time you’ve done all that, you’ll often find it would have been quicker to build clean. If you’ve inherited a slow site built on a kit, stripping it back is one of the more common Elementor fixes we’re asked for.
Our approach
We don’t start client sites from imported kits. We’d rather keep our own library of tested layouts and components, which lets us move quickly without every site looking the same. The difference is that the components are lean, built to our standards, and assembled around each client’s content rather than the other way round.
You can see how differently the results turn out across our portfolio. If you’re weighing up a kit against a custom build, set the seven clean-up steps above next to what’s included in our web design packages.