Can you guess what is the most popular Elementor add-on today? If your answer is Essential Addons then you are correct. According to a stat on WordPress.org, Essential Addons is the most popular Elementor add-on with over one million active installations. Just like the name suggests, Essential Addons offers some essential Elementor widgets that you can use when creating a page or theme builder template using Elementor. There are over seventy widgets offered by Essential Addons in total, but you need to upgrade to Essential Addons Pro to access them all. That’s all? Of course not.
Essential Addons also offers some features to add certain functionalities in Elementor. For instance, you can lock a content and requires users to enter a pass code to access the content. Or you can also add a particle affect background to a section. Here are the features offered by the pro version of Essential Addons.
Essential Addons Pro Features
1. Content Protection
Do you want to create a membership website with WordPress+Ementor? If yes, Essential Addons can help. One of the features offered by Essential Addons Pro is the ability to create a password-protected content. You can create password-protected content using the Protected Content widget. In addition, the widget also allows you to show the content to users with certain roles. For instance, you can set the content to be shown to users with the role of Customer only. You can make use of this feature to create a membership website.
About the content itself, you can create the content directly on the Elementor editor using the provided QYSIWYG editor. Or you can also add the content from a template.
You can read our previous article how to create a password-protected page in Elementor using Essential Addons.
2. Particles
Elementor Pro has no default feature yet to allow you to add a particle effect to a section background. If you want to do so, you can use Essential Addons Pro. The feature makes it possible for you to add more compelling background to a certain section on the page you are working on. Unlike Happy Addons Pro, you can only add particle effect to a section. There is no option to add particle effect to a column. The particle effect itself is generated using the particles.js library.
Essential Addons Pro itself offers five different particle shapes you can choose from:
- Polygon
- Bubble
- NASA
- Snow
- Nyan Cat
Unfortunately, there are no options to set the particle size and speed. If you want to further customize the particle effect, you can make the settings on this page and download and paste the generated code.
3. Parallax
Elementor Pro allows you to add a parallax effect to a section background. If you prefer to install an add-on instead of upgrading to Elementor Pro and are looking for an add-on that offers parallax feature, Essential Addons is one of the add-ons you can give a try. The pro version of Essential Addons allows you to add a parallax effect to a background. You can choose the following parallax effects to be applied to your section background.
- Scroll
- Scroll with Fade
- Fade
- Zoom
- Zoom with Fade
- In-Motion
- Multi-Layered
To add a parallax effect, make sure that you use an image as your section background.
4. Advanced Google Map
Elementor comes with a Google Maps widget which you can use to add a physical address of your business to your website to make it easier for your customers to find your business location. However, you can only add basic map with it. If you want to add a more advanced map like a 360-degree virual tour, a map with multiple pins, a polyline map, and so on, you can use Essential Addons Pro.
The Google Map widget offered by Essential Addons Pro allows you to create the following map types:
- Basic
- Multiple Marker
- Static
- Polyline
- Polygon
- Overlay
- With Routers
- Panorama
One thing. Google requires you to add your billing info to be able to add a map to a website or app. Otherwise, you will see a “For Development Purposes Only” message. You can read this page to learn more about the issue.
5. Off-Canvas Menu
Elementor has no feature dedicated to creating an off-canvas menu, but you can accomplish it using its popup builder (read our previous article to learn more). Looking for a simpler solution? Essential Addons Pro comes with a widget — the Offcanvas widget — designed specifically to create an off-canvas menu. The widget is great to be added to a custom header although you can add it anywhere. To add the content to the canvas menu, you can use a saved template, saved widget, or saved section. That being said, you can add any content to your liking just like when you are creating a mega menu.
Essential Addons Pro Widgets
If your intention of installing an Elementor add-on is to enrich the Elementor widget collections, then Essential Addons is a great option. As mentioned earlier, there over seventy widgets offered by Essential Addons in total. From basic widgets to social media widgets. If you use a form builder plugin like WPForms, Gravity Forms, or weForms, Essential Addons also allows you to style up your form using the visual editor of Elementor.
The pro version of Essential Addons offers some widgets to display blog posts in varied styles. There is also a widget to display LeardDash course in case you use the LMS plugin. Here are the widgets offered by Essential Addons Pro.
Static Product | Post Carousel | Image Hotspots |
Team Member Carousel | Content Timeline | Image Scroller |
Logo Carousel | Dynamic Gallery | Divider |
Testimonial Slider | Advanced Google Map | Counter |
Toggle | Woo Product Collections | Lightbox & Modal |
Protected Content | Price Menu | Flip Carousel |
Offcanvas | Interactive Promo | MailChimp |
Advanced Menu | Interactive Cards | Instagram Feed |
Post Block | One Page Navigation | Twitter Feed Carousel |
Smart Post List | Image Comparison | LearnDash Course List |
The bottom line
Elementor Free offers over forty widgets. You can use them to add elements like image, button, text, map, icon, gallery, and so on to your page. If they are not enough to you, you have two options to enrich your widget options. First, you can upgrade to Elementor Pro which offers advanced widgets like Form, Posts, Price Table, and so on. Second, you can install and add-on like Essential Addons. Same as Elementor, Essential Addons is also released as a freemium plugin with the pro version offers 70+ widgets in total. Essential Addons is by far the most popular Elementor add-on with over one million active installations.
Essential Addons itself is developed by WPDeveloper. The developer actually also offers ready-made Elementor templates. However, you need to install an additional plugin (Templately) to access the templates.