If you need the same section on five pages — a contact block, a testimonials bar, a price comparison — and rebuild it five times by hand, that is not just tedious. It becomes a problem with the first change request, because then you have to find five places. Templates solve exactly that.
The three kinds of template
Elementor knows several template types, and the distinction matters more than it first sounds.
Page — a complete page with all its sections. Useful when you are creating several similarly structured pages, service pages following the same pattern for instance.
Section — a single block: the contact row, the call to action, the team grid. In practice the most used type.
Container — since the switch to flexbox containers, the finer-grained variant of the section. If you are building from scratch you are working with containers anyway; why, is covered in containers instead of sections.
On top of that, the Pro version adds the theme parts — header, footer, post layout. Those work differently and deserve their own article: Theme Builder for header and footer.
Creating a template
The quickest route is through the editor. You finish building the section, right-click the container handle and choose Save as Template. Give it a name that still makes sense in three months — “Section 3” is not a name, “CTA consultation call” is.
Alternatively you create templates in the WordPress menu under Templates → Saved Templates and build them there from scratch.
Using a template
In the editor you click the folder icon (“Add Template”), switch to the My Templates tab and insert the one you want. It lands on the page as a copy.
That is the crucial point: an inserted template is a copy. If you change the template later, the instances already inserted do not change. Anyone who does not know this is later puzzled by inconsistent pages.
Global widgets: the variant that follows along
That is exactly what global widgets are for. A widget you save as global exists only once — every use points to the same source. Change it in one place and it changes everywhere.
You save it by right-clicking the widget and choosing Save as Global. After that you can recognise it in the editor by the yellow outline.
Ideal for things that have to be identical everywhere and change occasionally: phone number, opening hours, a notice banner, the button for the current promotion. I use global widgets mainly for contact details — otherwise a changed phone number means a search operation across half the website.
Global widgets are a Pro feature.
Elementor Pro: Global widgets and the Theme Builder are among the features that make the difference day to day — not because of how things look, but because of maintenance. View Elementor Pro
Exporting and importing
Every template can be exported as a JSON file and loaded back into another WordPress installation. That is handy when you build on a staging environment and transfer to the live site, or when you take a proven section along into a new project.
Two things that tend to trip people up here:
Images do not always come along. After importing, check whether graphics are actually present or merely point at the old domain.
Global colours and fonts do not come along. The template only references them. If the target system has different global values stored, the imported section will look different — usually that is exactly what you want, but it is a surprise the first time.
An organising scheme that has proven itself
From around fifteen templates onwards the list gets unwieldy. What has worked in my projects: a short prefix by purpose — CTA –, Hero –, Contact –, Testimonials –. The list sorts alphabetically, so related items end up together.
Also tidy up occasionally. Templates you have not used for a year are usually experiments from back then. They cost no loading time, but they cost search time.
The real gain
Templates save less time when building than you might think — the section is quickly built anyway. They save time when changing. A website that runs for three years gets changed far more often than it gets built. Anyone who works with templates and global widgets from the start notices the difference not in the first week, but in the second year.
How to set up a website so that it stays maintainable even after years is one of the focal points of my Elementor training.
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