Hello Elementor Theme Review 2026: Light, but Is It Enough?

Hello’s header settings inside Elementor’s Site Settings panel on a test install, Hello Elementor 3.5.1 with Elementor 4.3.3, October 2026.

Our verdict: Hello Elementor is the right theme if you build your whole site with Elementor, and especially if you pay for Elementor Pro. On its own it is the lightest theme we have measured: 24 KB of code and no JavaScript. Once you build pages with Elementor, most of the weight comes from Elementor, not the theme. Our Elementor page came to 180 KB of code over 28 requests. Hello still beat Twenty Twenty-Five by 69 KB on the same Elementor page. Skip Hello if you use the block editor, or if you use free Elementor and want a proper header builder from the theme itself.

This review is based on a fresh install of Hello Elementor 3.5.1 and free Elementor 4.3.3 on WordPress 7.1.2. We set up the theme and walked through Elementor’s onboarding. Then we built the same homepage as a block page and as an Elementor page, and measured both against Twenty Twenty-Five. We also installed Hello Plus to see what it adds. Prices and plugin details come from Elementor’s own pages and WordPress.org, checked in October 2026.

Hello Elementor Quick Facts

Item	Details
Latest version	3.5.1 (released August 25, 2026)
Price	Free, on WordPress.org
Developer	Elementor
Active installs	1 million+ on WordPress.org
Rating	4.2 out of 5 from 129 reviews
Requires	WordPress 6.0 and PHP 7.4 or newer
Built for	Elementor (free or Pro). Without it, the theme shows a plain title, tagline and content
Theme settings	6 on/off switches, plus header and footer styling in Elementor’s Site Settings
Custom headers and footers	Elementor Pro’s Theme Builder, or the free Hello Plus plugin
Our test, theme alone	7 requests, 24 KB of code, no theme JavaScript
Our test, Elementor page	28 requests, 180 KB of code, including jQuery and a Google font
Elementor Pro	From $60 a year for 1 site
Best for	Elementor Pro users, and agencies that build every site in Elementor

Code weight is the transferred size of everything except the page’s one photo, which was the same on every setup.

What Is Hello Elementor?

Hello Elementor, often just called “Hello” or “the Hello theme”, is a free starter theme made by the team behind the Elementor page builder. It first appeared on WordPress.org in May 2019 and now has more than a million active installs.

It is almost empty on purpose. There is no header builder, no blog layout options, no color or font panel and no starter sites. It loads a small CSS reset and a little basic styling, then gets out of the way so Elementor can control the design. Elementor’s help center describes it as a blank canvas that “includes only basic browser compatibility styling.”

That makes Hello a different kind of product from Astra, GeneratePress or Kadence. Those themes design your header, footer and blog for you. Hello leaves all of that to Elementor.

Installing Hello Elementor: What Happens

Hello installs like any other free theme from Appearance, Themes, Add New. Our guide to installing a WordPress theme covers the other methods if you need them.

The dashboard right after activating Hello without Elementor on a test install, Hello Elementor 3.5.1, October 2026.

On our test install, activating Hello added a “Hello” item to the admin menu and a large “Thanks for installing the Hello Theme!” panel on the dashboard, with one button: “Install Elementor”. That is the theme’s whole pitch. It does very little until Elementor is there.

Here is what the front end looked like with Hello and no plugins:

Our block-editor homepage on Hello with no plugins and no menu assigned, Hello Elementor 3.5.1, October 2026.

Two things stood out:

• The page title prints as an H1 above your content. Our page already started with its own H1 heading, so the page had two. Hello has a “Hide page title” switch for this, and most Elementor users will want it on.
• No menu means no navigation. Hello showed only the site title and tagline until we assigned a menu to its Header location.

Elementor itself opened a three-step onboarding screen after activation: connect an Elementor account, pick the Pro features you want, then choose a blank canvas or a template. We skipped the account step and the Pro step. Neither is required, and the free editor worked straight away.

Hello’s Settings and the Customizer

Hello has very few settings, and they are spread across three places.

The Hello settings page

The Hello menu’s “Advanced theme settings” page on a test install, Hello Elementor 3.5.1, October 2026.

The Hello admin menu opens a single page called “Advanced theme settings”. It has six switches in three tabs, all off by default:

Tab	Setting	When to turn it on
SEO and accessibility	Disable description meta tag	You use an SEO plugin that writes its own meta description
SEO and accessibility	Disable skip links	An accessibility plugin already adds a “Skip to content” link
Structure and layout	Disable theme header and footer	You build your own header and footer, for example with Elementor Pro
Structure and layout	Hide page title	You add your own H1 in Elementor
CSS and styling control	Deregister Hello reset.css	You use another CSS reset, such as in a child theme
CSS and styling control	Deregister Hello theme.css	You style comments, pagination and other WordPress parts yourself

The first one matters more than it looks. Hello adds its own meta description tag. If you also run Yoast, Rank Math or another SEO plugin, turn that switch on so the page does not get two descriptions. Elementor’s help center warns that some of these switches “may break your site”, so try them on a staging copy first.

The page also has an “Upgrade Now” link in its top bar that leads to Elementor Pro. In version 3.4, Hello added a “Theme Home” dashboard. In 3.5.1 on our test install, the Hello menu went straight to this settings page.

The Customizer

The Customizer with Hello active and Elementor not yet installed, test install, Hello Elementor 3.5.1, October 2026.

The Customizer shows WordPress’s standard sections (Site Identity, Menus, Homepage Settings, Additional CSS) plus one from Hello called “Header & Footer”. Below them sits a box selling Elementor Pro.

The Header & Footer section has no settings of its own. Without Elementor, it only showed an “Install Elementor” button. With Elementor active, it showed a “Start Designing” button that sends you to Elementor’s Site Settings.

Header and footer settings in Elementor

This is where Hello’s real options live. With Elementor active, the editor’s Site Settings panel gains two sections, “Hello Theme Header” and “Hello Theme Footer”. In the header section, shown at the top of this review, you can:

• Show or hide the site logo, tagline and menu
• Pick one of three layouts: default, centered or inverted
• Set the tagline position and gap
• Choose a boxed or full-width header, with content width and side margins
• Set a background color or gradient

The footer section works the same way. That is enough for a simple site with a logo and a menu. You cannot add a button, a search bar, a phone number or a second row. The panel ends with a “Create custom headers” box that points to Elementor Pro.

Speed: Hello vs Twenty Twenty-Five

Elementor’s Hello page says the theme is “under 30KB” and loads “in under 1/4 second”. Its help center says Hello uses “only 6KB of resources” and two requests. We wanted to see what that means once Elementor is involved, so we measured five setups on the same test site.

How we measured. WordPress 7.1.2 on PHP 8.3, running locally in Docker, with no caching plugin. The homepage had a heading, three paragraphs, one photo, a button and a four-item list. We built it once in the block editor. Then we rebuilt the same content as an Elementor page from five free widgets (Heading, Text Editor, Image, Button and Icon List) in one container and published it from the Elementor editor. Each setup ran three times in Lighthouse 13.5 for mobile and desktop. The table shows medians from the mobile runs. No menu was assigned, matching the method in our fastest WordPress theme test.

Setup	Requests	Total	Code (without the photo)	CSS	JavaScript	Fonts	Mobile score	Mobile LCP
Twenty Twenty-Five 1.5, block page	8	216 KB	94 KB	3 KB	22 KB	53 KB	99	2.1 s
Hello 3.5.1, block page, no plugins	7	146 KB	24 KB	6 KB	6 KB	0	100	1.7 s
Hello + Elementor active, same block page	13	176 KB	54 KB	37 KB	7 KB	0	98	2.2 s
Hello + Elementor page	28	302 KB	180 KB	23 KB	108 KB	37 KB	96	2.6 s
Twenty Twenty-Five + the same Elementor page	27	371 KB	249 KB	17 KB	123 KB	90 KB	85	3.6 s

Sizes are transferred kilobytes after compression. The photo was the same 122 KB file on every setup. LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) is the time until the biggest element on screen appears, under Lighthouse’s simulated slow phone. Desktop scores were 99 or 100 for every setup.

What the numbers show:

• Hello on its own is tiny. Its three stylesheets added up to 5.7 KB, close to the “6KB” Elementor claims, though over three requests rather than two. The only JavaScript on the page was WordPress’s own emoji script. Twenty Twenty-Five sent four times as much code, mostly its 53 KB Manrope font file.
• Activating Elementor adds weight even to pages you don’t build with it. With Elementor switched on, our untouched block page gained 6 requests and 30 KB. That came from Elementor’s main stylesheet, its site settings CSS, WordPress’s full block stylesheet and two Google Fonts stylesheets, which Elementor loaded straight from Google’s servers.
• An Elementor page is where the weight comes from. Our Elementor page loaded jQuery, jQuery Migrate and jQuery UI Core (42 KB together), about 59 KB of Elementor scripts, and the Roboto font from Google (37 KB). The theme’s share stayed under 7 KB.
• Hello is still the lighter base for Elementor. On the identical Elementor page, Hello sent 69 KB less than Twenty Twenty-Five, because Twenty Twenty-Five still loads its own font and navigation scripts on top of Elementor’s. Hello’s mobile score was 96, against 85 for Twenty Twenty-Five.
• Mobile scores moved between runs. Both Elementor pages varied: Hello from 88 to 96, Twenty Twenty-Five from 84 to 95. Page weight and request counts were identical in every run.

We also tried one quick fix. Checking “Disable Default Fonts” in Elementor’s settings removed the 37 KB Roboto file and brought the Elementor page down to 265 KB over 27 requests. The two Google Fonts stylesheets still loaded. Elementor’s “Load Google Fonts Locally” option was off by default on our install. Turn it on if you want to keep visitors’ browsers from contacting Google. Elementor’s own description of that option says it helps “ensure GDPR compliance”.

Read these as lab numbers from a default install. Hosting, caching, images and your other plugins will matter more on a live site. Our page builder comparison shows how much weight Elementor adds next to Beaver Builder, Kadence Blocks and GenerateBlocks.

Hello Plus, Hello Biz and the “Hello Themes” Family

Searchers often run into Hello Plus and Hello Biz and wonder whether they need them. Here is where things stand in October 2026.

Hello Biz is a second free theme from Elementor, launched in late 2024 for beginners building business sites. It has 100,000+ active installs on WordPress.org. Elementor’s help center now says Hello Biz “will be moved into maintenance mode soon”, with no new features, and recommends moving to the Hello themes. A third theme, Hello Commerce, had 3,000+ installs.

Hello Plus (shown as “Hello+”) is a free companion plugin. Version 1.7.8 was released on May 19, 2026, and it has 70,000+ active installs. WordPress.org lists it as tested up to WordPress 6.8.10. Its description says it is designed for Elementor’s “Hello suite of themes”.

We installed Hello Plus on our Hello Elementor site to see what it does there:

• It activated with no notice and no new admin menu.
• The Elementor editor gained a “Hello+” widget group with five widgets: Zigzag, CTA, Flex Hero, Contact and Form Lite.
• Elementor’s Templates screen gained two new types, Hello+ Header and Hello+ Footer. These are custom headers and footers, which normally need Elementor Pro.

The library that opens when you create a Hello+ Header, test install, Hello Plus 1.7.8 with Hello Elementor 3.5.1, October 2026.

Creating a Hello+ Header opened a library of 17 header designs. Choosing one asked us to “Connect to Template Library” by “creating a free personal account”. We did not create one. Closing the library returned us to the templates list, so we could not start a Hello+ header without that account.

Our take: Hello Plus is optional. If you want a nicer header than Hello’s built-in one and don’t want to pay for Pro, it is worth a try, but you will need a free Elementor account. Since Hello Biz is being wound down and Hello Plus has not been updated since May, we would not build a long-term site around either one. Plain Hello Elementor is still the theme Elementor actively updates.

Do You Need Elementor Pro?

For Hello to make sense on a real site, you need Elementor. Free Elementor builds pages. Elementor Pro adds the Theme Builder, which lets you design headers, footers, blog post templates and archive pages. Without it, Hello’s header and footer are limited to the options above.

Elementor Pro plans, billed yearly, as listed on Elementor’s pricing page in October 2026:

Plan	Price	Sites	What you get
Essential	$60/year	1	Theme Builder and Form Builder, no popups, custom CSS or WooCommerce features
Advanced Solo	$84/year	1	Adds the Popup Builder, custom code and CSS, and eCommerce features
Advanced	$108/year	3	Same features as Advanced Solo
Expert	$204/year	25	Same features, more sites

The Elementor One bundle costs $180 for the first year and renews at $228. It adds AI credits, image optimization and accessibility tools. All plans have a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you only need a header with a button or a phone number, Essential at $60 a year covers it.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• The lightest theme we have measured: 24 KB of code and no theme JavaScript on its own
• Built and updated by Elementor, so it keeps pace with Elementor releases
• Hello Theme Header and Footer settings handle simple sites with free Elementor
• Few settings, all of them clear, and none that fight with Elementor
• Free, with a 600 KB download and an official child theme on Elementor’s GitHub

Cons

• Almost useless without Elementor
• No real header builder without Elementor Pro or Hello Plus
• Prints the page title as an H1 by default, which can give Elementor pages two H1s
• Elementor itself loads jQuery and Google Fonts by default, so a Hello site is not light in practice
• Upgrade prompts for Elementor Pro in the Customizer, the settings page and the editor
• The Hello Biz and Hello Plus side of the family is confusing and partly being retired

Who Should Use Hello Elementor?

• You pay for Elementor Pro. Use Hello. You will build your header, footer and templates in the Theme Builder anyway, and Hello adds almost nothing on top.
• You build many client sites in Elementor. Use Hello with a child theme. Every site starts from the same clean base.
• You use free Elementor and need a simple site. Hello works if a logo, tagline and menu are enough for your header. If you want more, look at Astra or Kadence, which have free header builders and work well with Elementor.
• You use the block editor. Skip Hello. A block theme or GeneratePress will serve you better.
• You care most about speed. The theme is not your problem, Elementor is. Our fastest theme results show GeneratePress and Hello as the lightest bases. Builders like Bricks or the block editor send less code than Elementor; our Bricks vs Elementor page-weight comparison shows by how much.

Hello Elementor Alternatives

Theme	Price	Choose it if
Astra	Free, Pro from $69/year	You want a header builder and starter sites that work with Elementor
GeneratePress	Free, Premium $59/year	You want a light theme that also works without a page builder
Kadence	Free, paid plans from $99/year	You want a free drag-and-drop header and footer builder
Twenty Twenty-Five	Free	You build in the block editor and Site Editor
Divi	$89/year or $249 once	You want one builder and theme from one company with a lifetime option

FAQ

Is Hello Elementor free?

Yes. Hello Elementor is free on WordPress.org and has no paid version. Elementor makes its money from Elementor Pro and Elementor One, and the theme’s settings page and the Customizer link to them.

Does Hello Elementor work without Elementor?

It works, but there is little point. On our test install, Hello without Elementor showed the site title, tagline, menu, page title and content with plain styling. You get no layout, color or font options. If you won’t use Elementor, choose a theme like GeneratePress, Astra or a block theme instead.

Is Hello the fastest theme for Elementor?

It was the lightest base in our measurements. On the same Elementor page, Hello sent 180 KB of code against 249 KB for Twenty Twenty-Five, and got a better mobile score. But Elementor’s own scripts, jQuery and fonts made up most of that 180 KB. Changing the theme saves a few dozen kilobytes. Cutting Elementor’s defaults, like Google Fonts, saves more.

Do I need Elementor Pro with Hello?

Not for simple sites. Free Elementor plus Hello’s header and footer settings can give you a logo, a tagline and a menu. For custom headers and footers, blog post templates or WooCommerce page designs, you need Elementor Pro, from $60 a year for one site as of October 2026.

What is Hello Plus, and do I need it?

Hello Plus is a free Elementor plugin built for the Hello family of themes. On our Hello Elementor test site it added five extra widgets and free Hello+ Header and Hello+ Footer templates. Using its header designs required a free Elementor account. You don’t need it to use Hello Elementor.

Should I use a child theme with Hello Elementor?

If you plan to add custom code or edit theme files, yes. Elementor publishes an official Hello child theme on GitHub. If you only design in Elementor and never touch code, you can skip it, because Elementor stores your designs in the database, not in the theme.