10 Steps To Remove Elementor from a website or blog

A weekend project – Remove Elementor from my blog.

It’s not very often that anyone spends a weekend working on a reasonably complex project and when it’s done they hope that nobody will notice the results.

But that’s what has happened to me over the past weekend.

And what was the project that I hoped nobody would notice? It was to totally remove Elementor, one of the most popular website/page builder plugins for WordPress, from my blog, while at the same time avoiding having the “The website is undergoing scheduled maintenance” banner showing for too long.

I’ve been using Elementor Pro on this blog for a couple of years now, and I think it is a great website/page builder – reasonably easy to understand and use, and with a huge range of add-ons and widgets. But there is a sort of “lock-in” effect with using Elementor and on my blog things got to the point where, over the years, some of my very early posts had been created with the WordPress Classic Editor, some with Gutenberg, and more recent ones with Elementor. Overall my blog had become a bit of a hodge-podge making post-revisions more difficult than they should be, so I decided it was time for a cleanup!

Another motivating reason to remove Elementor Pro was to avoid paying the annual US$59.00 (NZ$96.59) license fee. Yep – I’m a tight wad.

Unfortunately just deleting the Elementor plugins does not necessarily make for a happy outcome due to the “lock-in” effect I mentioned above, and as I am not a WordPress expert (a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing) I reached out to a couple of people who should and did know, the way to remove Elementor totally.

First of all, I contacted Adam at Blogging Wizard who put me on the right track regarding a theme that would allow me to replicate my Elementor-based website. He suggested that the free version of Kadence offered enough features to meet my needs. Adam also gave me an overview of how to go about tackling my project.

I also reached out to the support team at HooplaHosting, who have been hosting my blog right here in New Zealand for a while now, and they were spectacularly helpful and gave me 100% correct advice and information on how to make the change. Thanks to Logan in particular.

10 steps to remove Elementor With Little Or No Downtime

This is what you don’t want to see…

These are the steps I followed to remove Elementor Pro from my blog and reformat it – i.e. make it look the way I wanted – the way it looked previously:

1. Log in to cPanel and create a subdomain of the main domain named (for example) staging;
2. Clone the main website into the subdomain using WP Toolkit;
3. Log into the staging site and remove Elementor and Elementor Pro plugins, and any other plugins other than those needed going forward;
4. Install the Kadence theme and the Kadence Blocks plugin;
5. Customize the theme;
6. Edit/customize all relevant pages;
7. Progressively work through all the posts that require layout/formatting corrections. Posts created using Elementor will require mode changes than posts created with either the Classic Editor or Gutenberg Blocks;
8. Create a full back up of the original website (in case of disaster…) then remove/delete the main website from the primary domain with WP Toolkit;
9. Clone the staging (new) site back into the main domain;
10. If 100% happy with the result, use WP Toolkit to remove the staging site, and delete the subdomain in cPanel.

By my estimation, my blog was offline for no more than 5 minutes, which I am very happy with.

Bear in mind – my hosting account uses cPanel – but I understand (thank you Google) that the Plesk control panel also has WP Toolkit in its arsenal so the transition should be very similar.

Job done!