How To Add & Edit Header In Elementor for Free, Add Header & Footer Easily 2026

Open the Elementor menu in your WordPress sidebar and you land on its home screen: quick links to create a page, a link to watch a guide, and an AI chat box for generating a brief or sitemap. There's no option here to edit your site's header or footer.

Elementor's theme-builder feature, the part that lets you design a header once and apply it site-wide, ships only with Elementor Pro. A free plugin gets you the same result without the upgrade.

In Plugins, search for and install Ultimate Addons for Elementor. It used to be sold under the name Header Footer Elementor, so older tutorials and forum posts may still call it that. Its own description explains what it does: create custom headers and footers with Elementor and display them in selected locations, plus build reusable Elementor blocks placed anywhere with a shortcode.

Once activated, the plugin adds its own menu item to the WordPress sidebar, separate from Elementor's own menu, with Dashboard, Header & Footer, Widgets, and Settings tabs. Click Header & Footer to reach the builder. On a fresh install this list is empty, with an Add New button and no templates found: your starting point for building a header from scratch.

Clicking Add New opens a standard WordPress edit screen where you name the template. Something clear like "Main Header" makes it easy to find later if you build more than one.

The plugin's own documentation lists four template types: Header, Footer, Before Footer, and Custom Block, so pick Header here even though the screen otherwise looks like any WordPress post editor. Saving and publishing at this stage doesn't put anything live on your site yet. It creates the template shell and a permalink for it, along with the usual post-level controls for status, visibility, and publish date.

From the template screen, the design work opens in Elementor's normal drag-and-drop canvas, not a separate builder interface. Add widgets the same way you would on any page: an image placeholder for your logo, a text editor block for a tagline or heading, and further widgets dropped into the empty zone below. Editing inside this canvas behaves identically to editing content on a normal page, which is what makes the free-plugin method hold up against Pro's built-in version.

Swap the placeholder image for your real logo through Elementor's media library, and add a Nav Menu widget to pull in whichever WordPress menu you want displayed. The widget's Style tab handles spacing, colors, and a sticky-header toggle so the header stays visible as visitors scroll, all in the same editor used for the logo and text.

Back in the plugin's Header & Footer list, each template carries its own Display Rules column, which controls where the header appears: the whole site, specific pages, or particular post types. Set the rule to match your intent and publish the template.

It takes over your site's header without touching your active theme's own header file, so the same header survives a theme switch as long as the plugin stays active. If your theme still shows its own header alongside the new one, check the plugin's Settings tab for theme-specific support. UAE ships native integration for Astra, Hello Elementor, OceanWP, GeneratePress, Blocksy, Neve, and Kadence, and falls back to a generic method for everything else, which doesn't always suppress the old header cleanly.