Plan to create a new website with WordPress and Elementor? If yes, you might want to take a look at the Essential Addons. It is one of the most popular Elementor add-ons with over 15 million downloads. How great is this add-on? Read on to figure out.
The pro version of Elementor offers tens of widgets that you can use to create your website. But sometimes, they are not enough. You need more widgets to unleash your creativity. Essential Addons offers 60+ additional widgets to your Elementor, allowing you to unleash your best potential.
A Brief Intro About Essential Addons
Essential Addons is one of the products developed by WPDeveloper. This add-on was released in 2017, about a year after Elementor was born. Essential Addons is available as a freemium add-on. The free version of this add-on is available on the plugin directory of WordPress.
The Widgets
An Elementor add-on comes with a set of additional widgets. Coupled with the native Elementor’s widgets, you can use them to create any kind of website. As mentioned earlier, Essential Addons comes with 60+ widgets. Some widgets are unique and not available on Elementor by default. Some have similarities to Elementor’s native widgets, but with different setting options. For instance, Essential Addons has a widget Creative Button. The same widget already offered by Elementor. But, Essential Addons offers a differentiation by allowing you to create a button with a wide range of animation effects.
If you want to create a dynamic website — such as a blog or online magazine — you will also have more options to display your dynamic content. You can, for instance, add a section on your homepage to display the latest posts in a grid mode with the EA Post Grid widget. Or, you can also use the EA Post Grid widget to display the posts on the sidebar — or any section — and filters the posts by category, tag or author.
The following are the widgets offered by Essential Addons.
Free Widgets
Post Grid | Info Box | Progress Bar |
Post Timeline | Flip Box | Feature List |
Fancy Text | Dual Color Headline | FluentForm |
Creative Buttons | Call to Action | Facebook Feed |
Countdown | Pricing Table | Sticky Video |
Team Members | Twitter Feed | BetterDocs Category Grid |
Testimonials | Data Table | BetterDocs Category Box |
WooCommerce Product Grid | Filterable Gallery | BetterDocs Search Form |
Contact Form 7 | Image Accordion | Advanced Data Table |
Gravity Forms | Content Ticker | Event Calendar |
Ninja Forms | Advanced Tabs | weForms |
Caldera Forms | Advanced Accordion | Tooltip |
WPForms | Typeform | Woo Checkout |
Formstack |
Pro Widgets
Post Block | Content Timeline | Fancy Divider |
Lightbox & Modal | Data Table | Counter |
Testimonial Slider | Twitter Feed Carousel | Team Member Carousel |
Image Comparison | Dynamic Filterable Gallery | Post Carousel |
Interactive Promo | Smart Post List | Logo Carousel |
Instagram Gallery & Feed | Mailchimp | Protected Content |
Advanced Google Map | Content Toggle | Offcanvas |
Static Product | One Page Navigation | Advanced Menu |
Flip Carousel | Price Menu | Image Scroller |
Interactive Cards | Image Hotspots |
- Widgets to Create a Dynamic Website
Essential Addons is not aimed specifically at a certain website. You can use it to build any type of website. From a static website to a dynamic website. However, we find this add-on is great to build a dynamic website. There are several widgets that you can use to display the posts on your website in a wide range of ways.
- EA Dynamic Gallery – You can use this widget to display the featured images of your post with a link to the posts.
- EA Post Block – You can use this widget to display posts on a certain section. Posts can be filtered by category, tag or author.
- EA Post Carousel – Display posts in a carousel.
- EA Post Grid – Pretty similar to EA Post Block.
- EA Smart Post List – You can use this widget to display posts on a sidebar area of your website.
In addition to the widgets above, there are also handy widgets you can apply on a dynamic website such as Content Ticker to display what’s trending today. There is also an option to add reading progress on your website.
- Handy Widget for a One-page Website
Essential Addons is also great to create a one-page website such as a portfolio website or a one-page company website. Normally, you need several sections to create a one-page website with Elementor. EA One Page Navigation is a handy widget you can use for a one-page website. It allows your visitors to easily jump from a section to other sections effortlessly with a single click, instead of performing a deep mouse scroll.
- Widgets to Integrate Your Social Media Accounts with Your Website
Today, nearly all businesses use social media to promote their products/services. Essential Addons allows you to integrate the social media accounts of your business with your WordPress site. There are at least three widgets offered by this add-on that you can use to integrate your social media accounts:
- EA Facebook Feed
- EA Instagram Feed
- EA Twitter Feed
- EA Twitter Feed Carousel
Other Features
Unlike premium Elementor add-ons like JetElements, Essential Addons doesn’t offer pre-made templates. But, features like the option to disable certain widgets are available.
After installing Essential Addons, you will have 60+ additional widgets on Elementor. Along with Elementor’s native widgets, you will have more than 100 hundred widgets. We are pretty sure that you won’t need them all. Plus, some Essential Addons (or at least the similar ones) are basically already available on the Elementor Pro.
Essential Addons allows you to streamline your Elementor by disabling the widgets you don’t need.
A crucial thing to note. If you disable a widget used on a published page, the widget will disappear on the page. So, if you want to disable an Essential Addons widget, you better do so before start working with Essential Addons.
Essential Addons also allows you to integrate your WordPress with MailChimp in use you need this service. Or, if you use LeardDash, there is an EA LearnDash Course List widget that you can use to showcase your online courses on your WordPress site.
Almost forgot, Essential Addons also has the following features:
- Content Protection: Allows you to apply restrictions of Elementor content from being accessed by unauthorized people. This feature allows you to lock an important section of your page with a password.
- Duplicator: Allows you to close a post. Handy if you you want to create multiple posts in a short of time
Technical Support
By the time we bought the Essential Addons — it was Saturday — there was a little issue regarding the download process. The download link didn’t work. Reflexively, we tried to contact WPDeveloper to get some help. Since it was Saturday, we didn’t get the instant reply and had to wait until Monday. On Monday, once the technical support team got back to work, the problem solved. We had excellent service from the technical support team. They replied to the message we left via the live chat (we left the message on Saturday), providing an explanation about the download issue. They then gave us an alternative link to download the add-on.
What we want to say is that WPDeveloper has great technical support. If you experience a technical issue on weekdays, you can use the live chat feature to get an instant reply. Or, if you can wait, you can also create a support ticket.
Pricing
With 60+ widgets and the features like we covered above, Essential Addons charges $39.97 a year for a single site and $69.97 for multiple sites. Or, if you hate the subscription-based model, Essential Addons also offers a one-time purchase option for $169.97.
$39 is not too expensive in our perspective. There are several Elementor add-ons that charge more than that. Besides, Essential Addons also gives a 25% renewal discount.
The Verdict
With 60+ additional widgets, Essential Addons is a great add-on to enhance your experience in building a website with WordPress+Elementor. There are several widgets — such as EA Post Block and EA Post Grid — that are pretty handy to create a dynamic website. Or, you can also use widgets like EA One Page Navigation to provide a great user experience if you want to create a one-page website. This add-on also has excellent technical support to help you to fix technical issues.
Overal score:
[usr 5]