Elementor Cloud Review: WordPress Hosting Made Simple

What Is Elementor Cloud (And What It Isn't)

Elementor Cloud is Elementor's answer to the biggest barrier in WordPress: getting started. Rather than building their own data centers or converting Elementor into a locked-down SaaS product, the team took a conservative and smart approach. They partnered with Google Cloud for server infrastructure and Cloudflare for the CDN, which has over 200 points of presence worldwide.

The result is a fully managed WordPress hosting environment that comes pre-loaded with Elementor Pro. You get a real WordPress installation — not some watered-down version — running on enterprise-grade infrastructure. Your site files are served through Cloudflare's global CDN, which means cached assets load fast regardless of where your visitors are located.

This is important to understand: Elementor Cloud is still WordPress. You still have access to the WordPress dashboard, you can install most plugins, and you can export your entire site if you ever want to move to a different host. It's not a walled garden.

Plugin Compatibility: What Works and What Doesn't

The big question with any managed WordPress host is plugin compatibility, and Elementor Cloud handles this reasonably well. The vast majority of WordPress plugins work without issues — ACF, LearnDash, WooCommerce, WordFence, Yoast, and hundreds of others install and run just fine.

The plugins that are blocked fall into predictable categories. Other page builders (Divi, Oxygen, Breezy) are obviously incompatible since they'd conflict with Elementor itself. SSL plugins like Really Simple SSL are unnecessary because Elementor Cloud provides SSL certificates automatically. Backup plugins like UpdraftPlus are also blocked since daily backups are handled by the platform. Migration plugins like Migrate Guru aren't allowed either, though there is built-in export functionality if you ever need to move your site.

The last category of blocked plugins includes security risks like WP File Manager, which creates a file browser inside your WordPress admin — something that's almost never a good idea on any WordPress installation. When you're browsing the plugin repository from within Elementor Cloud, incompatible plugins are clearly flagged with a pop-up, so there's no guesswork involved.

Pricing and Sign-Up Process

Elementor Cloud comes in at $99 per year with a 30-day money-back guarantee. That price includes both the Google Cloud hosting and all Elementor Pro features. When you consider that Elementor Pro alone costs $49/year for a single site license, you're essentially getting managed WordPress hosting on Google Cloud infrastructure for an additional $50 per year. For a solo entrepreneur building one website, that's a compelling deal.

The sign-up process is straightforward — it's a standard WooCommerce checkout page (built with Elementor, naturally). After completing the purchase, you're immediately taken into a four-step setup wizard where you name your site, choose your website type, and select a starter template.

Setup Wizard and Choosing a Website Kit

The setup wizard walks you through four steps: naming your site, getting an Elementor Cloud subdomain, choosing your website type (blog, business, store, etc.), and selecting a website kit as your starting point.

Even if you prefer building from scratch, choosing a website kit is the smarter move. The kit pre-populates every page template you need for a complete WordPress site — header, footer, single post template, archive page, 404 page, and your homepage. Starting from scratch means you'll have to build each of these templates manually, which is tedious work that a kit handles in seconds.

The wireframe kit is a particularly good choice if you want creative control. It provides pure layout without any design decisions — no colors, no fonts, no photography. It's a blank canvas with structure, which makes it incredibly easy to customize with your own brand identity. The entire setup process from purchase to editable site took roughly three and a half minutes.

Connecting a Custom Domain

Connecting a custom domain to Elementor Cloud is straightforward. From your Elementor account's website management page, you grab the IP address of your Google Cloud server, then head over to your DNS provider (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, etc.) and create an A record pointing your domain to that IP address. You'll also want to set up a CNAME record to forward the www version of your domain to the primary domain.

There's one important technical consideration: if you're already using Cloudflare for DNS management, you need to turn off Cloudflare's proxy (caching) for your domain. Since Elementor Cloud already uses Cloudflare as its CDN, having both active creates a double-cache situation that can cause problems. Simply disable the proxy status on both the A record and CNAME record in your Cloudflare dashboard and let Elementor Cloud handle all the caching.

After connecting your domain, Elementor Cloud provisions an SSL certificate automatically. The DNS propagation can take up to 48 hours, though it's often much faster. You'll receive an email once everything is connected and secured.

Site Settings: Global Colors and Fonts

Before touching any individual page, the first stop should be Elementor's site settings, where you configure global colors and fonts that cascade across your entire website. This is one of the most underutilized features in Elementor and it saves enormous amounts of time.

For colors, a good rule of thumb is the 60-30-10 principle: 60% neutral colors (white, light gray), 30% brand color, and 10% accent color. Keeping your palette simple and limited makes design decisions easier, especially if you're not a professional designer. You can always create additional global colors later — for example, a specific "CTA hover" color that you can reuse consistently across buttons and links.

For fonts, the same minimalist approach works well. Using one or two fonts across the entire site creates visual cohesion. Set up a primary headline font, a secondary headline variant (same typeface but smaller and lighter weight), body text, and button text as separate global font presets. Even if they're all the same font family initially, having them as distinct globals means you can change any category site-wide with a single edit later.

Theme Style and Linking Globals to HTML Elements

This is the step that trips up a lot of Elementor users: after setting up global colors and fonts, you need to link them to actual HTML elements in the Theme Style settings. This is where you tell Elementor that every H1 should use your primary headline color, every H2 should use your brand color, and buttons should use your accent color with your button font preset.

There's a critical setting that many people miss: you need to go into Elementor's settings page and check "Disable Default Colors" and "Disable Default Fonts." Without this, your global style choices won't actually apply to elements on the page. Once those defaults are disabled, every color and font change you make in Theme Style propagates immediately across your entire site.

The button styling deserves special attention. Configure both the default state (background color, text color, border) and the hover state so that every button on your site behaves consistently. This eliminates the need to style individual buttons as you build pages — they all inherit the global settings automatically.

Building with Flexbox Containers

Elementor has been rolling out Flexbox container support as an experimental feature, and it's worth turning on if you're comfortable with a slightly less polished experience. You can enable it under Elementor > Settings > Experiments in the WordPress dashboard.

Flexbox containers replace the older section/column model with CSS Flexbox, which gives you significantly more layout flexibility. You can convert existing sections to containers with a single click — Elementor duplicates the section and rebuilds it using the Flexbox model. The conversion isn't always perfect (some styling can get scrambled), but the resulting layouts are cleaner and more responsive.

One essential tool for working with Flexbox — or any complex layout — is Elementor's Navigator panel. Right-click anywhere on the page and select Navigator to open a hierarchical view of every element on the page. This makes it easy to find, select, and rearrange elements that might be difficult to click on directly in the visual editor, especially after converting sections to the new container model.

Single Post Template and Theme Builder

One of the biggest advantages of using a website kit is the single post template. This template controls how every blog post on your site is displayed. When you write content in the standard WordPress Gutenberg editor, Elementor wraps it in your single post template — applying your global fonts, colors, layout, and any additional elements like share buttons, author info, and related posts.

The Theme Builder (found under Elementor > Templates > Theme Builder) gives you a birds-eye view of every template component on your site: headers, footers, single post templates, archive pages, and 404 pages. You can create multiple versions of each and assign them to specific sections of your site. Without a website kit, all of these template slots would be empty and you'd need to build each one from scratch.

A small but important detail: make sure your WordPress user profile displays your actual name rather than your username. Go to Users > Edit Profile, fill in your first and last name, and set your public display name. Since the single post template pulls the author name dynamically, this ensures your blog posts show "Dave Swift" instead of a username.

Transactional Email Configuration

Email handling is one area where Elementor Cloud requires a bit of extra setup. By default, emails sent from your site (form submissions, password resets, etc.) will come from your elementor.cloud subdomain, which isn't great for deliverability. Without configuring an SMTP plugin, you're also limited to 100 emails per day.

Elementor Cloud recommends the WP Mail SMTP plugin, though other SMTP plugins should work as well. The idea is to route your transactional emails through a proper email service provider — SendGrid, Mailgun, Amazon SES, or similar — so they come from your actual domain and have much better inbox placement. The cost for transactional email services is typically pennies per day.

It's also worth noting that Elementor Cloud does not provide business email hosting. For your day-to-day email (yourname@yourdomain.com), you'll need a separate service like Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. This is standard for most hosting providers and isn't unique to Elementor Cloud.

Security, Image Optimization, and Third-Party Plugins

Elementor Cloud's built-in security covers the basics — SSL certificates, automatic updates, and a managed server environment — but you're free to add your own security plugin on top. Patchstack is a solid choice that works perfectly with Elementor Cloud, adding virtual patching and vulnerability monitoring without any conflicts.

For image optimization, ShortPixel integrates seamlessly. Since Elementor Cloud handles caching but not image compression, an optimization plugin is genuinely useful here. ShortPixel's bulk optimization feature processes all existing images on your site, and new uploads are optimized automatically going forward. This is one of those "set it and forget it" plugins that meaningfully impacts page load times.

The Activity Log plugin comes pre-installed with Elementor Cloud, which is a nice touch. It tracks every action taken on your site — plugin activations, setting changes, content edits — with timestamps and user attribution. If you ever have multiple people managing your site, this audit trail is invaluable for troubleshooting.

Site Lock, Backups, and Site Management

Site Lock is Elementor Cloud's way of keeping your site private during development. When enabled, visitors see a PIN code screen instead of your website, and search engines are blocked from indexing. The feature is prominent in the WordPress admin bar with a clear blue icon, which helps prevent the common mistake of forgetting to unlock your site before going live. Toggling it off takes one click from your Elementor account.

Backups are fully automated with daily snapshots stored in your Elementor account. You can also create manual backups at any time — a smart move before running bulk operations like image optimization. The backup interface lives in your Elementor account (not in WordPress), and from there you can restore any backup or download a full site export. That export option is worth highlighting: despite being a managed platform, Elementor Cloud gives you a clear path to migrate your site elsewhere if you ever choose to leave.

The management dashboard intentionally hides server-level settings like PHP memory limits or worker counts. Elementor handles all server configuration on your behalf, which is the entire point of a managed platform. For debugging, there's a streamlined troubleshooting section, and you can securely share temporary admin credentials with Elementor's support team directly from the dashboard.

Performance Test Results

The real test for any hosting platform is performance, and Elementor Cloud delivered strong results with zero manual optimization. Running the completed site through GTmetrix produced a 90 Performance score, 90 Structure score, 1.5-second Largest Contentful Paint, 7ms Total Blocking Time, and zero Cumulative Layout Shift.

These numbers are significant because the only optimization performed was running ShortPixel on the images. There was no manual caching configuration, no minification tweaks, no lazy-loading adjustments — just the out-of-the-box Elementor Cloud setup with Cloudflare's CDN doing its job. For a site with real images, forms, and dynamic post listings, these scores are excellent.

You won't be penalized by search engines for Core Web Vitals issues, and the load times are fast enough that conversion rates shouldn't suffer. For most small business sites and blogs, this level of performance is more than sufficient without ever touching a caching plugin or optimization setting.

Final Verdict: Who Should Use Elementor Cloud?

Elementor Cloud solves a genuine problem in the WordPress ecosystem: the barrier to entry. Setting up WordPress traditionally means choosing a host, configuring SSL, managing backups, installing caching plugins, and dealing with server settings before you even start building your site. Elementor Cloud collapses all of that into a single $99/year subscription.

The experience of building on Elementor Cloud felt identical to building on any other WordPress host. There were no compromises in what you could do, no noticeable performance limitations, and the plugin compatibility is broad enough that most WordPress users won't hit restrictions. The few plugins that are blocked are ones you genuinely don't need because Elementor Cloud provides that functionality natively.

If you're a solo entrepreneur, small business owner, or content creator who wants a WordPress site without the overhead of managing hosting infrastructure, Elementor Cloud is a strong option. It's more flexible than Squarespace or Wix because it's real WordPress underneath, but it's dramatically simpler than piecing together your own hosting, CDN, and page builder stack. At $99/year for Elementor Pro plus managed Google Cloud hosting with Cloudflare CDN, the value proposition is hard to beat.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.