To hire a good Elementor developer in the UK, check three things before you look at price. Their live sites should pass Core Web Vitals on mobile. Your team should be able to edit pages without breaking the layout. And their portfolio should be real, live sites you can open and test. On budget, UK freelance WordPress developers typically charge £40 to £80 an hour, and ITJobsWatch puts the median UK contract day rate for a WordPress developer at £375.
I'm Mohit Goyal. I've been building on Elementor for over four years, and in 2025 I built a run of UK hospitality sites on it for Aura Clips, a London digital agency: the Crowne Plaza London Kingston rebuild, a new Warren House homepage, the Cyprianis restaurant revamp and the Samko Holdings corporate site. I'll come back to them below, because each check is easier to picture on a real project.
How much does an Elementor developer cost in the UK?
Expect £40–£80 an hour for a UK freelancer, roughly £375–£386 a day at median contract and freelance rates, and £500–£900 a day through a UK agency. There's no official rate card. I've pulled these numbers from rate surveys and hiring platforms, and most of them track "WordPress developer" rather than "Elementor developer". That's fair enough. Elementor is one skill inside WordPress work, not a separate job.
| Source | What it measures | Figure |
|---|---|---|
| ITJobsWatch | Median UK contract day rate, WordPress developer | £375 a day |
| Malt UK | Average freelance day rate, WordPress developers | £386 a day |
| Alex Walton | Typical UK freelance WordPress hourly rate | £40–£80 an hour |
| Mecanik | UK freelance implementers vs UK agencies | £250–£400 vs £500–£900 a day |
| Flexiple | Elementor developers worldwide | $10–$150+ an hour |
The hourly rate moves your final quote less than these do:
- The number of unique templates, not pages. Twenty event pages built from one Elementor template cost far less than twenty pages built by hand.
- Whether you already have a design. Building from a finished Figma file is quicker and more predictable than designing inside Elementor as you go.
- Integrations. Booking engines, HubSpot or CRM forms, popups and tracking all add time.
- Content migration. Moving and reformatting old pages is the bit people most often forget to budget for.
- Licences. Elementor Pro starts at around $60 a year for one site, and premium add-ons cost extra.
For whole-project budgets, see my guide to what a WordPress website costs in the UK.
How do you check if an Elementor developer builds fast sites?
Test it yourself. Ask for three live sites they built and run each one through PageSpeed Insights on mobile. Google's "good" Core Web Vitals thresholds are an LCP of 2.5 seconds or less, an INP of 200 milliseconds or less and a CLS of 0.1 or less. Someone who knows the job will have looked at these numbers long before you ask.
Elementor isn't slow out of the box. It's just easy to make slow. Slow Elementor sites usually come down to one of these:
- Old section and inner-section layouts nested several levels deep, where Flexbox containers should have been used.
- Three or four add-on packs installed for one widget each, every one loading its own CSS and JavaScript.
- Full-size hero images, and autoplay videos with no poster image.
- Popups, sliders and animations on every single page.
A question I like to ask: "How would you build a video hero without slowing the page down?" The Warren House homepage I built has a video hero, with rooms and Google reviews underneath. A good answer mentions a light poster image, a compressed and muted video, and nothing else fighting to load first. If you hear "we'll install a caching plugin", keep looking.
If you already have a slow Elementor site, read how to speed up an Elementor site without rebuilding it, or paste your PageSpeed report into my free Page Speed Fix Planner.
Can your team edit an Elementor site without breaking it?
Yes, as long as the developer built it with global styles, Theme Builder templates and reusable templates. Ask them to prove it before you sign. Most buyers skip this check, and it's the one they regret later. You pick Elementor so your marketing team can make changes without calling a developer. That only works if the site was set up for it.
Ask how they handle:
- Global colours and fonts in Elementor Site Settings, so a brand change is one edit instead of a hundred.
- Theme Builder templates for headers, footers, posts and archives.
- Templates for repeated content like rooms, events or menus, so new items pick up the layout automatically.
- Popups your team can switch on and off for promotions, using display rules rather than code.
For Cyprianis I built the events listing and a private dining template from Figma. Events are exactly the kind of repeated content that belongs in a template, so a new one picks up the same layout. On Crowne Plaza London Kingston, the rooms link out to IHG booking, and there are meeting enquiry forms and promo popups. Each of those is something the hotel's team needs to change without touching the layout, so ask a developer how they'd set them up.
Before you sign anything, ask for a ten-minute screen share where the developer edits a page on one of their past builds. You'll learn more from watching that than from reading their proposal.
What should an Elementor developer's portfolio show?
Live URLs that work on mobile, pages that match the original designs, a clear line on who did what, and ideally some work in your sector. Here's what I'd look for:
- Live URLs, not screenshots. Mockups on Dribbble show design taste. They tell you nothing about build quality.
- Mobile versions that actually work. Open every site on your phone. For Samko Holdings, a UK hospitality, energy and restaurant group, making the site responsive was part of the job, and it's the first thing I check in anyone's portfolio.
- Accuracy against the design. If you're handing over a Figma file, ask to see a past design next to its live page. I've written about how I get pixel-perfect Figma to WordPress builds.
- Who did what. A lot of UK freelance work is white-label for agencies. My Aura Clips work was. That's normal, but ask whether the developer designed the site, built it or only made edits.
- Work in your sector. Hotels need booking engine links and meeting enquiry forms. Restaurants need menus, events and private dining pages. Someone who has built these before already knows what to ask you. My hotel and restaurant website essentials post lists what those sites need.
What questions should you ask an Elementor developer before hiring?
Ask about licence ownership, add-ons, how they lay pages out, staging, PageSpeed testing, who owns the accounts and what happens after launch. A short call covering these sorts careful developers from risky ones pretty quickly.
| Question | Good answer | Red flag |
|---|---|---|
| Whose account is the Elementor Pro licence on? | Yours, so renewals and updates stay with you | Theirs, or "don't worry about it" |
| Which add-ons will you install? | A short list, each named with a reason | "Whatever we need" |
| Containers or sections? | Flexbox containers for new builds | Doesn't know the difference |
| Where will you build? | On a staging site, then launch | Straight on the live site |
| Can I test your live sites on PageSpeed? | Sends you the URLs | Shows only desktop scores |
| Who owns the hosting, domain and admin logins? | You do, from day one | They do |
| What happens after launch? | A fixed support period or a clearly defined maintenance retainer | Vague promises |
For what that retainer should include, read what a WordPress maintenance retainer covers.
What are the red flags when hiring an Elementor developer?
A nulled or pirated Elementor Pro licence is the big one. After that, watch for a suspiciously cheap fixed price with no written scope, no global styles, no staging or backups, and any reluctance to hand over access.
Never accept a nulled Elementor Pro licence
A pirated or nulled Elementor Pro licence won't get updates through your own account, and you have no way of knowing what has been changed in its files. If a quote looks cheap because the licence is included, ask whose account it's on.
Other warning signs:
- A fixed price well below the UK ranges above, with no written scope. Something will get cut, and it's usually mobile layouts or testing.
- Every page built from scratch with no global styles or templates. It looks fine at launch and gets expensive at your first rebrand.
- No backups, no staging site and no plan for plugin updates.
- Hesitation about handing over WordPress admin, hosting or domain access.
- Pushing Elementor when another builder would suit you better. If you're starting from scratch, compare Bricks vs Elementor vs Oxygen first.
Should you hire a UK-based or offshore Elementor developer?
Either can work. Where they're based matters less than whether they pass the same quality checks. The table shows typical rates for each route.
| Option | Typical rate | Strengths | Watch for |
|---|---|---|---|
| UK freelancer | £40–£80 an hour | Same time zone, knows the local market | Limited availability, since it's one person |
| UK agency | £500–£900 a day | Design, build and account management in one place | You pay for overheads and layers of management |
| Offshore freelancer | $10–$150+ an hour worldwide | Lower cost, and work can happen while you sleep | Quality varies a lot, so check their UK work and how they communicate |
I'm in Gurugram, India, and most of my recent Elementor work has been for UK clients, so read my view with that in mind. The time difference can genuinely help, though. I built the coming-soon page for Raasa, an Indian restaurant in Locksbottom, overnight and put it live. Whoever you pick, run the same checks on speed, editability, live work and ownership. If the site is a store, my guide to hiring a WooCommerce developer in the UK covers the extra checks.
- 1
Write a short brief
List the pages, templates and integrations you need, and who will edit the site. Attach your Figma file if you have one.
- 2
Shortlist on live work
Pick two or three Elementor developers whose live sites you can open, and test those sites on mobile in PageSpeed Insights.
- 3
Ask the questions above
Their answers on licence ownership, add-ons, staging and access tell you more than a polished proposal.
- 4
Watch them edit
A ten-minute screen share on a past build shows whether your team will cope after handover.
- 5
Agree scope and support in writing
Write down the template list, timeline, launch checks and post-launch support before work starts.
What should you do next?
If you've got an Elementor site to build, rebuild or fix, send me your Figma file or your current URL, plus a note on what your team needs to edit. I'll tell you straight whether Elementor is the right fit and what the build involves. You can read more about my WordPress websites on Bricks, Elementor and Oxygen service, or book a 20-minute call.
