How To Install Any Plugins On Elementor Cloud And Why You Shouldn't Do That

Elementor Cloud is a great service. It comes with everything every designer needs to focus on design. However, if you've been using another service before and wanted to move to Elementor Cloud, you have very less migration options especially if you weren't using Elementor. However some interesting plugins such as UpdraftPlus over a nice solution for migrating your website.

It's true we've created a guide that explains how to migrate your WordPress Website to Elementor, however, that only works for posts, pages, and a few other contents (not everything is exported actually). We'll then discuss in today's tutorial how to install those necessary plugins which are however restricted, and most importantly why you must absolutely avoid doing that.

Disclaimer: Why You Shouldn't Do That?

Elementor Cloud is an auto-hosted service that offers you a secure environment to host your Elementor project. The fact they allowed any plugins to be installed gives them a way for users to break their own installation with unstable plugins.

Yes, you can enable PHP Logging, but with a plugin that crashes, without proper file management, you have no chance to recover your setup (unless you use backups). Installing restricted plugins goes further as this is installing plugins Elementor team has strictly prohibited the installation. Chances are you'll probably get no support or have your support voided in case this happens.

But let's suppose you have legit reasons to install one of the forbidden plugins (I'm not talking about installing Beaver Builder or whatever other builder). For example, if you've been using UpdraftPlus for years and decided to migrate your website to Elementor Cloud, well you won't, simply because UpdraftPlus are part of the forbidden plugin. So, as long as your reason is for the purpose of improving your experience without completely breaking your website, that sounds fine.

Please, proceed to read this if you're aware of the risks and know exactly what you're doing. Having some coding knowledge might be useful.

Installing Any Plugins On Elementor

Let's now see how you can install any plugins on Elementor Cloud.

Creating a Backup

The first step is obviously to create a backup of your setup. That will be useful if our change crashes the website. You'll need to log in to my.elementor.com and select your installation to manage it.

You'll then need to scroll till you see the "Backup" section. This section is a pretty obvious one. From there, you'll just create manually your backup.

Let's now see what is the next step.

Downloading the plugin on WordPress.org

We'll move ahead by browsing WordPress.org and by downloading the plugin we want to use. Let's assume you want to import your old website Elementor website with UpdraftPlus, then go to the item page and download that.

Once downloaded, you'll get a zip file that has the source code of the plugin. The trick here is to convince Elementor Cloud, that they should let those plugins be installed. You'll proceed by extracting the zip on your computer and you'll edit the main entry file, in our example, it's "updraftplus.php".

Technically we'll just have to change the name of the plugin to anything else, from:

to:

I believe you'll choose a better name than what I did.

Uploading To Elementor Cloud

Now you'll rezip the extracted plugins and go to Elementor Cloud. We'll head to the plugins and click on "Upload Plugin".

After having uploaded and activated your plugin, it will be listed as an activated plugin.

You can now use the plugin as you used to do. However, you should note that you won't be able to get an update on that module as the name has changed, you'll then need to perform that manually. That's one of the downsides of that technique.

Final Words

If you're just looking to completely import your website, you might reach the support of Elementor so they can give you a better approach, if you believe this approach is not suitable for you. Remember, you should only do this if you know what you're doing.