How to Use Elementor Shortcodes Widget [Beginners’ Guide]

Recently I’ve transitioned to Elementor as my go-to drag and drop builder. Right off the start, the learning curve was so easy and visually entertaining – something I could use to make a webpage visually perfect along with pinpoint accuracy.

A few days later into WordPress Elementor, I realized that I can escalate the building process by ten times simply by using the ‘Elementor Shortcodes.’

For starters, optimizing a website to make it fast is one thing and on the other hand, building a website fast and easy is another. So, let’s talk about how to use WordPress Elementor shortcodes very easily and if it is a good idea to use Elementor shortcodes for your project.

What are Elementor Shortcodes?

Elementor shortcodes are a string of characters or a snippet that can be copied and pasted to duplicate a specific component of your website. In other words, shortcodes are special tags; something, when entered, will generate a different component once you view it.

If that sounds complicated, then let me break it down for you. Elementor library has an enormous collection of pre-built widgets that you can use for speeding up your website building process.

Now, if you’re hands down into development and in need of duplicating a component, then shortcodes are the best way to do it in a matter of seconds.

First, you need to copy the snippet of the selected component and paste it wherever you want to duplicate it.

Suppose you are working on building a form that you are going to use on another page. Ordinarily, you would build the exact same form using Elementor, and it would take you like a few minutes to do so.

However, the Elementor Template Shortcodes allow you to select a pre-made component of your choice from a web page and then duplicate it in other places.

That is one of the most basic uses of widget shortcodes, and honestly, there’s more efficient use for it. So, if you’re already thinking…

When & How to Use Elementor Shortcodes?

Here is one real-life case I found is best suited for using WordPress Elementor shortcodes:

Elementor shortcodes are the ideal choice to speedily add more content to your website if it’s partially designed using Elementor.

If you want to adjust the old content and add pre-designed widgets to your page, then expert suggestion says shortcodes are the way to go. So put in the shortcodes for the template you want, and voila!

It is the best choice to inject Elementor shortcodes for tweaking. A common scenario where you may come across this situation is working on the default pages of a chosen theme.

Not all themes are designed using Elementor, so trying to convert them into an Elementor web page might break the page structure.

Besides, other plugins that do not support Elementor will not give access to edit those elements and thus leaving you in a state of disaster.

But, don’t worry…

With Elementor shortcodes, you can add new components or elements to your website without the risk of any conflict with other page builders and/or plugins. And besides, it also allows you to add in your own customized template.

How to Install Shortcodes for Elementor?

Installing shortcodes is really easy and takes only 3 steps to get it done. Here’s how you can install shortcodes for Elementor.

A gentle reminder – all three steps in this installation guide require you to have Elementor installed in WordPress. So, if you have not done that until now, do it quickly and review the steps later.

There are two processes in this installation guide – Automatic Installation and Manual Installation

Automatic Installation

1. Head over to ‘Plugins’ and follow to ‘Add New’ from the same screen.
2. Look for WordPress Shortcodes for Elementor.
3. Install the plugin and activate it.

Manual Installation

1. Download RS<a href=” #”> Elementor Shortcode.
2. Extract the shortcode.zip file. The plugin files will be inside the directory named rselements-lite.
3. Upload the plugin files to the location of your WordPress installation. The directory should be something like this – /wp-content/plugins/elementor-short-code.
4. Activate the plugin from the ‘Plugins’ section in the WordPress menu.

The manual installation is just an example of one particular plugin, and the process is similar for any plugin you want to install manually.

How to Enter the Elementor Templates by Using Shortcodes?

Here’s how you can enter a pre-designed Elementor template using shortcodes. Here’s how you can do it. Head over to –

WordPress -> Templates -> Saved Templates

Over here, you will be able to check the shortcode for every widget in the library. Besides, you can also create your own template and generate a unique shortcode for it.

Each saved template has its own unique shortcode, which is always available for use on other pages.

For example, you want to create a WooCommerce popup where your clients can view their order status.

For this, all you need to do is drag and drop a popup widget from the sidebar on your canvas. Now, generate the shortcode from the original popup and paste it into the new popup, and it will generate exactly the same popup widget in no time.

Now that you know about shortcodes and how they work, you might wonder whether Elementor converts every content on a web page into shortcodes? Well, if you’re already asking that, here’s your answer.

Does Elementor Enter Content into Webpages with or without Shortcodes?

To clear your confusion, Elementor does not insert content into a webpage using shortcodes. Simply put, it does not convert a template into a unique shortcode and then puts it on the webpage. Here’s why…

If Elementor used shortcodes for every generated template in the library, its library elements would be hugely dependent on the Elementor plugin.

And for some reason, if you need to remove Elementor from the list of installed plugins for your web page, you would lose all the support for the existing Elementor library components and the shortcodes are associated with them. Like it would turn into an absolute nightmare should it happen.

But that is not the case with Elementor, as it solves the problem simply. Elementor does generate a shortcode for the selected template you want to copy.

But before it does that, it makes a copy of your designed template as code on the page.

And so, the next time you copy something from one place to another, you are pasting the code at the back. But visually, you are using shortcodes to do it.

Earlier page builders used to have such dependencies on specific plugins and templates, for which it was hard to use other plugins on a website.

But now, with no dependencies, you can easily tweak a webpage whether it uses Elementor page builder or not.

Summing It Up

By now, you have all the ideas you need to start using Elementor shortcodes on your WordPress website. Besides, the first few times are always a little confusing. So, make sure to check out some videos while you do it to make sure that your learning is perfected.