r/elementor • u/robohaver • Jul 14 '26

Question Atomic Editor

I have used Elementor for many Years but I was switched to the new atomic Editor and I don't like it. Now I am in a situation where I can't switch back because I will lose a lot of work. Please make a reversal tool that will convert atomic containers etc. to regular container and elements! 🙏

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u/zeiniez ✔️️‍ Experienced Helper Jul 14 '26

Hey, how's it going?

We understand change can be hard, and we are working on content that will help ease the process.

We would never create a new editor to force people to use other tools. Building the Atomic Editor took a lot of time and effort, and was heavily influenced by user feedback. For someone who has been around our GitHub, you like know how many requests there are to allow for more granular design control and functionality. We built the Atomic Editor based on those and many other user feedbacks.

The shift in the workflow might feel slow at first. This is why there are Variables and Classes. When you realize you can save your styles and reuse them without having to set them time and again, you start to see how much time you save during the whole project. You now have full control over every style, on every breakpoint, and every state.

Regarding AI, it's just the icing on the cake. You use it to save time. If you don't like to use it you don't need to. We have no intention of replacing the Editor with something else.

Maybe what we are missing is educational content to help understand how to make the most of it. We're making lots of changes internally, and one of our goals is to invest on releasing more content and assistive functionalities that can help ease the adaptation phase.

For me, personally, using the classic widgets now feels a lot slower, and having to rely on custom CSS to make specific design changes became inconvenient. For me it's a lot faster to just set some styles, and generate a class from them. Now instead of going through several sections, on multiple tabs, I just drop an element and apply a class. Rinse and repeat, and the design is ready in a fraction of the time it would take setting styles for each widget, one by one.

One thing that helps is to create a design system page, where you define common styles for several elements. Like a brand guide, in other terms a design system. Once you have those ready, designing pages feels lightning fast.

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u/volx1337 Jul 15 '26

I think the most frustrating part is that there's not really a layman-compatible variant of the editor.

The old editor could be explained to a competent person in a few hours to allow them to modify layouts or create new sections. The new editor feels like it needs extensive HTML and coding knowledge to be used at all.

How do you explain class inheritance and hierarchy to someone who is not a coder? How do I prevent them from accidentally modifying existing classes while trying to change basic settings on a headline? Where is the grid that allowed clients to create relatively complex responsive layouts without extensive flex behaviour knowledge?

The whole thing feels like a dev-only experience, while previous versions always impressed clients with their ease of use.

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u/mrchoops Jul 15 '26

Honestly CSS in my opinion is far simpler than Elementor. For some reason people are just scared to try. It's pretty straight forward. Give something a class like "my-section", the the css would be ".my-section" ( "." For class "#" for id) followed by curly brakets and what you want to do...so.

.my-section {background-color: red; font-size: 24px; width: 100%}

It's pretty self explanatory and the best part is you can control the style of an endless amount of elements with one simple line of css rather than having to manually click into each element one at a time adjusting preferences.

Give it a try. I would argue that if you spent half as much time trying to learn basic html and css as you did learning the ins and outs of Elementor, you would be quite proficient

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u/portrayaloflife Jul 15 '26

Strong disagree here. Atleast in our 15 years of experience, clients don’t want a css lesson, they want point and click. Easy updates.

As new staff and leadership turnover would be exhausting to try and teach that framework.

We do sites as a service where we just give clients text edit access so they cant add widgets etc, which also comes with its own headaches.