Elementor is one of the most popular Visual Page Builder for WordPress with over 5+ million downloads. If you were a beginner & now consider yourself an intermediate Elementor user, sooner or later you will surely ask yourself how to create “Global Sections” or “Global Templates”.
Elementor provide an easy way to create “Global Widgets”, hmmmm… but when it comes to Global Sections/Templates, its very easy but you need to know how.
Global Widgets are a nice way to re-use specific content elements. In this post, I am going to talk about creating Global Sections/Templates in Elementor. If you are wondering how can we create a Global Widget or What are Global Widgets, please refer to the post on “Global Widgets”.
If you don’t know yet, pro features of Elementor are free just use the Pro-Elements plugin. It offers you all the pro features but you won’t have access to Elementor Template Library. So rather than using nulled Elementor Pro, use the free Pro Elements plugin :-).
What is a Template in Elementor?
A template is a combination of content elements (headings, text, forms, banners, images etc.) and layout components (sections, inner sections, columns etc). In simpler terms rather than saving a single element you can save larger part of a page for reusing later. Elementor Sections & Inner Sections can be saved as a template.
In order to save a template, simply right click on any section of Elementor & select Save As Template from the menu. Give your template a meaningful name & voila you will have a new saved template in MY LIBRARY.
The saved template then can easily be added to any page or post on the website by using the Add Template Folder Icon, which is next to the Red + sign ( adding a section) .
This is the classic use of templates. Obviously, this is what you require, if you want to add similar sections to different pages of the website & only want to change the content. It saves you from a lot of hazard as you don’t have to stylise similar sections again & again.
A simple use case to describe this scenario can be a Team page where we stylise a particular section for one team member & then re-use that template, only changing the required things like image, name, social links, description etc. & we won’t be worried about styling as it will look identical.
Where Global Sections/Templates fit in?
Recently I was working on a listing website, New Forest National Park, a gigantic website with over 3200+ pages & listings. On most of the pages & listings, there was a contact section with contact details & contact form whose placement on different pages & listings was different but they share the same content.
Now, imagine a scenario like this. Supposedly, client wants to add another phone number or change the email or even want to add an email to the Elementor Contact Form, imagine the amount of work for 3200+ pages.
Another approach would be to create multiple global widgets & recall them. But then again, on every page we will have to add a section, stylise it & then add the global widgets one by one to achieve the same result. This is where Global Sections/Templates come in.
How to create Global Sections using Template Widget?
Recently I was working on a listing website, New Forest National Park, a gigantic website with over 3200+ pages & listings. On most of the pages & listings, there was a contact section with contact details & contact form whose placement on different pages & listings was different but they share the same content.
Now, imagine a scenario like this. Supposedly, client wants to add another phone number or change the email or even want to add an email to the Elementor Contact Form, imagine the amount of work for 3200+ pages.
Another approach would be to create multiple global widgets & recall them. But then again, on every page we will have to add a section, stylise it & then add the global widgets one by one to achieve the same result. This is where Global Sections/Templates come in.
Most beginners and intermediate developers might have seen this but initially like myself we seem to neglect what it does. I am talking about the TEMPLATE widget in Elementor 😮 . Wowww….. are you like me who didn’t know its use initially:
This widget was already there but generally we don’t use it. So basically, once you drag this Element to your page, you can add any section that you have created & the best part is, it will appear as a Global Section, thus ensuring that changing the parent template carries those changes across to anywhere it is on the website. Lets have a quick look at this in the screencast below: