Joe Leonard

How to convert a WP-Bakery website to Elementor

First of all, let’s highlight the main reasons why one would want to switch a WP-Bakery based site to Elementor.

  1. Even a free version of Elementor has plenty of useful features and functionality, while WP-Bakery is a premium plugin. Moreover, Elementor has over 10 times the number of free and paid plugins or extensions.
  2. User Experience. Elementor made a significant step towards improving the user experience. They’ve created a visual editor that shows users to see the changes immediately.
  3. Elementor is much easier to customize-.
  4. Also, Elementor has added Undo / Redo functionality which is totally absent in premium WP-Bakery. If you ever created any site, you probably know how it is important nowadays.
  5. Elementor has over 10 million installations whereas WP-Bakery has about 2 million.

Elementor Visual Editor

The Elementor visual editor is not only developer-friendly allow the easy transformation of PSD designs to WordPress Themes, but they also can create their own shortcodes, blocks, and sections and save them as templates for future usage.

Steps to Migrate WPBakery site to Elementor

Ok, let’s consider the situation when you have a WordPress site built on the WP-Bakery (or Visual Composer) based theme. You have some pages and posts with this builder. Now you want to migrate WP-Bakery to Elementor.

Please note! There are no 1-click solutions or apps that can help you switch easily without manual actions. Nor is there no way to just back up your website and restore it.

  • Download & Install Elementor from the official WordPress site. Your website will not crush if you have both plugins activated. In fact, if you have a lot of pages already built with WP-Bakery there is no need to convert them all to Elementor. Only convert the most important one thus saving a lot of time and money if you have a lot of pages and posts.
  • Create a test page with Elementor and add several standard shortcodes on the page. Make sure the theme you are using doesn’t conflict with Elementor and its elements. If you notice any issues, fix your theme JS/CSS. Elementor works with almost all themes. In fact, it really doesn’t need a theme at all. Most themes, have restrictions on the header, content, sidebar, and footer. With Elementor you can completely ignore the theme. (However, since WordPress will not work without a theme, most Elementor website just use a bare-bones, do-nothing theme like the Elementor Hello Theme or Astra because they load fast.)
  • Disable WP-Bakery when ready. WP-Bakery will leave behind a lot of Short Codes. Use the Short Code cleaner plugin to sweep out the shortcodes created by this builder.
  • User Elementor’s Pros editor to rebuild the Header & Footer of your site. If you don’t have Elementor Pro, you can create the same global header and footers with a free plugin.
  • Rebuild your pages and Posts with Elementor. Again, you don’t have to rebuild all pages and posts
  • Re-save your posts with Elementor.
  • Go through your site and make the final touch-ups.

check the layout and css

As it was mentioned before there is no easy way to convert your WP-Bakery or Visual Composer site to Elementor. They use different tag classes, attributes, and styling. Therefore, what works for WP-Bakery will not work for Elementor and vice versa.

Use WordPress plugins for functionaliy

If you are converting a WP-Bakery page or post that use their functionality, like image sliders, you should replace these with standard WordPress plugins. Even though Elementor has functionality like a contact form, it is still best practice to use a third-part WordPress plugin.

Header and Footer

Elementor Pro (or a free Elementor plugin) offers global headers and footers. These should be created and will override the WP-Bakery headers and footers.

Pages

If you are converting pages from WP-Bakery you will have to rewrite them

Posts or Blogs

If you used the standard WordPress editor to create Posts, you should see no changes. However, the display might be different if you change themes.

Elementor can also be used to create your posts, too.

plugins

All WordPress plugins (those not specifically designed for WP-Bakery) should continue to work the same.

ECOMMERCE

If you have installed WooCommerce, there should be no changes needed.

Conclusion

While WP-Bakery may have suited you when you first launched your website, it may no longer have everything you need for your growing business. In checking out the alternatives for your website, you likely considered moving to Elementor.

While the task is not difficult, it does take quite a bit of time to get done.