Since we have moved to Elementor as our preferred way of creating, or rather, re-creating our template designs, it’s important to better understand how you can get your site to look like the one as shown in the live preview.
Getting up and running with your Elementor template involves the following steps:
- Step 1. Have the latest version of WordPress running with your favorite hosting company
- Step 2. Install and activate the latest version of the WordPress theme we’ve used as the foundation for the Elementor template. This is the free OceanWP theme.
- Step 3. Install and activate the latest version of the free Essential Addons for Elementor WordPress plugin.
- Step 4. Install and activate the latest version of the free Elementor page builder WordPress plugin.
- Step 5. Install and activate the latest version of the premium Elementor Pro WordPress plugin extension.
- Step 6. Install and activate the latest version of the free All-In-One WP Migration WordPress plugin
- Step 7. Import the Elementor template content file you purchased into your WordPress website using the All-In-One WP Migration plugin.
- Step 8. Login and change user
- Step 9. Changing the Elementor Form widget email address
Support
If you have any issues getting the template to work, or don’t feel confident enough installing it yourself, please contact our support.
Step 1. Get WordPress hosted with your favorite hosting provider
Before anything else, you’ll need WordPress to be able to display any of our templates.
Many hosting providers offer WordPress with their hosting plans. If you’re unsure which hosting provider to choose, just know we host our sites using Siteground, and have no reason to recommend another one.
Step 2. Install and activate the OceanWP WordPress theme
Elementor is not a WordPress theme. It’s a WordPress plugin. Hence an Elementor Template cannot be installed as if it were a WordPress theme.
If you do try to install it as a WordPress theme, your WP installation will fail to recognize it as such and will show the following error message: “The package could not be installed. The theme is missing the style.css stylesheet. Theme installation failed.”
Even if Elementor is a WordPress plugin, WordPress still requires a WordPress theme to operate. As the go-to WordPress theme to serve as the required foundation we’ve chosen OceanWP WordPress theme. So you’ll need to install and activate that theme.
Technically, any other WordPress theme will do, but a theme template specific layout might cause your site to look different if you do. So we definitely do NOT recommend using another theme.
We use as little theme customizer configurations as possible to increase compatibility, should you decide, for whatever reason, to want to use another theme.
Some people try to install the downloaded file as a WordPress theme, ignoring our installation instructions. I hope you now understand why this will not work.
Installing and activating the Ocean Extra plugin
After you’ve installed and activated the OceanWP theme, you’re also prompted with a message to install the free Ocean Extra plugin. Doing this will provide you with more fine-grained control over the page, like excluding the page title.
We recommend installing and activating this plugin as well.
Step 3. Install and activate the Essential Addons for Elementor plugin
The first plugin, which is not required necessarily, is the Essential Addons for Elementor WordPress plugin. It’s free.
The only reason we incorporate this plugin as well is that Elementor does not have functionality to create tables. This plugin does, so for Elementor Templates that have tables, we’ve designed them using this plugin.
Not using plugins for Elementor templates with tables means those tables will not be displayed.
Step 4. Install and activate the Elementor WordPress plugin
Of all the page builders we’ve researched, we felt Elementor prove to outshine them all. You’ll need to install and activate this free page builder plugin for obvious reasons.
Step 5. Install and activate the Elementor Pro plugin
The Elementor Pro plugin extends the functionality of the basic Elementor plugin features. You’ll need to purchase a premium license to be able to download the Elementor Pro plugin.
Since this step constitutes an additional payment besides paying for our Elementor template, we’ve written a separate article about which widgets and features of Elementor Pro are used in our Templates. Not using the Elementor Pro plugin means content created with those widgets and features will not be displayed.
Step 6. Install and activate the All-in-One WP Migration plugin
Since Elementor is a plugin and not a theme, your purchase includes a backup file of all the theme’s demo content. This file has the “.wpress” extension.
The wpress file contains everything from the demo site: pages, posts, images, categories, site structure and layout, customizer settings, Elementor configuration, everything.
We make use of the All-in-One Wp Migration WordPress plugin to get this file into your WordPress environment. It’s basically the same process as reinstalling a backup or, indeed, migrating a website from one WordPress installation to another.
Step 7. Unzip and import your Elementor Template using the All-In-One Migration plugin
Don’t use this process on an existing website; all your current content will be overwritten if you do so.
Please watch the following video to learn how to import your Elementor Template wpress file.
The file is zipped. Ensure you unzip it first before importing it. You cannot import a zipped .wpress file. If you do you’ll receive an “unable to import” warning.
Step 8. Login and change user
Since the import of the wpress file will overwrite existing users, as soon as you’ve finished this process you’ll need to login to your site again. You can do so with the temporary user that’s part of the wpress file:
- username: wproot
- password: temp1234
You’ll be prompted with an admin email verification popup. You can safely ignore this and click the “remind me later” link to skip it.
After you’ve logged in, please add a user you’ll use from then on to actually login to the site. Choose a strong password using a password generator. and remove the “wproot” temporary user as soon as possible.
Changing the Elementor Form widget email address
To ensure the form from your Elementor template is working, be sure to change the email address of the Elementor form widget to whatever email you feel should be the receiver of submitted forms.
Wrapping up
If you perform all of these steps you’ll notice you’ll get a ton of marketing and sales messages from all of the plugins. You can safely ignore them and click them away.
If you’ve done all that, you’re finished. Congratulations, and enjoy your website!