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 editing view, with Layout elements like Container and Grid at the top and Basic elements like Heading and Text Editor below. Any page you can edit in Elementor can become a template, whether it's a full page, a single section, or a container.

Click the small arrow next to the Publish button to open its dropdown, which shows Save Draft, Save as Template, and View Page. Choose Save as Template and give it a name you'll still recognize months from now.

Elementor's own documentation adds a step worth knowing about here: the save dialog now asks you to choose Site Templates or Cloud Templates. Site Templates stores the design locally on this one site, available to anyone with access to it, free on any Elementor plan.

Cloud Templates saves it to your personal Elementor account instead, making it reusable on any site you connect that account to, but it needs an active Elementor Pro subscription and is only accessible to the account holder. For the JSON export-and-import workflow in this guide, choose Site Templates.

Go to Templates → Saved Templates in the WordPress admin sidebar to see every template saved on the site, listed with its type, author, and date. Find the one you just created and use its export option to download it as a .json file.

Elementor's current help documentation describes the same export from inside the editor's Template Library instead: open the Template Library, click Templates, find the template, click the ellipsis next to its name, and select Export. Either route produces the same JSON file, and either is fine to use.

On the destination site, open the same Templates → Saved Templates screen and click Import Templates near the top. Upload the .json file, and Elementor adds it to that site's Template Library within seconds. Elementor's documentation also supports uploading directly from the in-editor Template Library: open it, click Templates, click the upload icon, select the file (Elementor accepts both .json and .zip here), confirm, then click Insert to add it straight to the page you're on.

The most common cause of a broken import is a plugin mismatch between the two sites. If the original template used a widget from Elementor Pro or a third-party addon, that widget won't render on a site missing the same plugin.

Check what the template depends on before importing; if it uses a specific icon pack or a form plugin's widget, install that on the destination site first. A template that fails to import entirely, instead of coming in 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 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 in a growing library.