How to Save, Import & Export Templates in WordPress Using Elementor 2026 Easily

In the Elementor editor, open the page whose layout you want saved for later — the Widgets panel on the left confirms you're in the standard Elementor editing view, with Layout elements like Container and Grid at the top and Basic elements like Heading and Text Editor below. There's nothing special to configure here; any page you can edit in Elementor can be saved as a template, whether it's a full page, a single section, or a container.

Click the small arrow next to the Publish button in the top bar to open its dropdown menu, which shows Save Draft, Save as Template, and View Page. Choose Save as Template, give it a clear, descriptive name — something you'll recognize months later rather than a generic label — and confirm. The design is now stored in your Template Library rather than only existing as this one page, which means you can insert it into any other page on the same site going forward.

Navigate to Templates → Saved Templates in the WordPress admin sidebar to see every template you've saved, listed with its type, author, and date. Find the template you just created, and use its export option to download it as a .json file to your computer. This file is the portable version of your design — everything about the layout, widget settings, and content structure is packed into it, ready to move to a different WordPress installation entirely.

On the destination WordPress site, go to the same Templates → Saved Templates screen and click Import Templates near the top of the page. Upload the .json file you exported, and Elementor adds it to that site's Template Library within seconds. From there, insert it into any page the same way you'd insert any saved template — no copy-pasting individual sections or rebuilding anything by hand.

The most common cause of a broken import is a mismatch in plugins between the two sites — if the original template used a widget from Elementor Pro or a third-party addon plugin, that widget simply won't render on a site that doesn't have the same plugin installed and active. Before importing, check what the template actually relies on; if you built it with a specific icon pack or a form plugin's widget, install that on the destination site first. A template that fails to import entirely, rather than importing with gaps, is usually a corrupted or incomplete JSON file — re-export from the source site and try again.

Once you're saving templates regularly, naming and categorization stop being optional. Use Elementor's Categories option under Templates to group designs by type — headers, testimonial sections, pricing tables — so you're not scrolling through a flat list of similarly-named entries months later. A consistent naming convention, like starting each template's name with the section type it represents, pays off the moment you're hunting for one specific layout across a growing library.