Have you ever created your WordPress site with a single page editor and then wanted to go back to a normal WordPress editor or maybe switch to another page editor? Or maybe you built your site with Squarespace, but now you want to switch to WordPress?

One important thing that stops you in both situations is confinement.

At best, you can just replace the main content. But no matter what, you will always lose your existing design. And if you’ve chosen the wrong WordPress page creator, some of the content may not even be guaranteed because you’ll be shown a bunch of shortcuts when you try to disable the creator.

Basically your only option was to manually recreate the design in a new editor, which takes a lot of time per page, let alone an entire site.

That can change now, because Nelio Unlocker is here to solve this sensitive problem.

In short, with Nelio Unlocker you can convert any theme into one that is identical to the one created with WordPress’ block editor or Elementor (note – the Elementor integration was not yet available at the time of writing this review, but should be available by the time you read this review).

I’m not just talking about transforming content, but transforming everything, including design, layout, and styles.

If you z. B. If you created your homepage with Divi, you can convert it to a block editor and keep both your content and design.

That’s a pretty strong value proposition!

In our practical test of Nelio Unlocker, I will tell you more about how this tool works and show you some concrete examples of how I convert different types of pages.

Nelio edition overview: How does it work?

The basic idea behind Nelio Unlocker is very simple – magic is what happens behind the scenes.

First, select the source page you want to convert. One way is to select an existing item or page on your site – which may have been created with any page generator. You can also enter a direct URL to any link on any website creation platform, even to an external website.

Then select the target editor to which you want to convert the original content. At the time of writing this review for Nelio Unlocker, Nelio Unlocker only supports conversion to the native WordPress block editor (Gutenberg). However, the developer plans to add Elementor as a destination fairly soon (it may have already happened by the time you read this), with future opportunities for other page creators as well.

Once you have made these two decisions, Nelio Unlocker will send your original drawing to the Nelio servers for processing. It then delivers the final product to your WordPress site.

In my tests, this process only took about ten seconds from start to finish, almost instantaneously.

That’s it! Again, the concept itself is not complicated, the tricky part is the behind-the-scenes handling that can turn a drawing made from, say, Divi, into the same drawing made from blocks.

Practical test of thewith the Neliounlocker .

To test how Nelio Unlocker works, I did a series of conversions on my website. I’ll show you specific details for a few different tests, but here are my general conclusions after doing them all.

First, Nelio Unlocker is pretty accurate in converting an existing WordPress page creation plugin. For example, switch from Beaver Builder to a block editor.

In all the testing I’ve done with Elementor and Beaver Builder, the only manual cleanup usually required is just to adjust the spacing a bit. For example, you can add a spacing between sections, because sometimes Nelio Unlocker seems to put things too close together.

I’ve also tried converting non-WordPress sites to WordPress (although I haven’t shared these tests below). Specifically, from Squarespace. Here the Nelio unlocker was not as accurate as one would think. It has successfully adopted the content, colors and general layout of Squarespace. However, you will have to put more effort into manually adjusting the formatting and spacing if you want a perfect conversion.

To start a conversion

Performing a conversion is very simple. First, install and activate the Nelio Unlocker plugin on WordPress.org. Then go to Tools → Nelio Unblocker.

First select the source. You can select an existing page or line item (or a custom line item type) on your site. You can also enter an internal or external URL.

You can then choose your destination. When you convert an existing page or article, you can choose to overwrite existing content or create a new project. You can then choose the editor you want to use to convert the content.

Again, at the time of writing this review for Nelio Unlocker, only the block editor is supported. However, the developer plans to add Elementor as a destination soon, and possibly other page makers later:

Then click Convert Now and your converted page will be ready to use in about 10 seconds.

Let’s look at the real tests and you’ll see for yourself….

Test 1: Blokeditor element

To quickly set up test scripts, I’ll use the Astra theme to import demo pages created with various Page Builder plugins, then convert them to the native WordPress block editor (aka Gutenberg).

I will start with a demo site made with Elementor. Elementor is the most popular page builder we used to create WPLift.

Here is the original design made with Elementor:

And here is the converted drawing created with the block editor :

Like I said before, the design itself is pretty well done, but it just lacks a little space. You must insert a space between the menu and the hero section, and between the hero section and the products section.

You should also remove some text in the lower part of the page (not shown in the image). But overall, the design is perfectly done and only requires a little work.

After all, this is what the design in the internal block editor looks like:

Overall, the Nelio Unlocker passed test #1 with the best results.

Test 2: Castor Builder – Block Editor

Now let’s look at the test page created with Beaver Builder.

Here is the original project made with Beaver Builder :

And here is the same drawing in the block editor:

Again, you see the same basic idea. The design itself is almost perfect – just adjust the spacing.

This is what it looks like in publishing:

For test n°2 Nelio Unlocker did a good job again.

Test No. 3: Breezy to lock the editor

To complete the conversion to WordPress, let’s look at another website created with another page builder, Brizy.

Here’s the original drawing in Brizzy:

However, the Nelio unlocker seems to be having some trouble adapting to Bryzy’s design. It has a basic layout, but for some reason the background images are missing:

This is what it looks like in publishing:

All in all, it seems that for some reason Nelio Unlocker only fights with pages created by Breezy. I tested another Brizy page and got exactly the same number, so it just seems to be something with the way the Brizy pages are set up.

NelioRelease price

Nelio Unlocker uses a fixed price per page model.

You pay $19 for each page you convert, which seems pretty cheap to me for most situations.

Suppose you have a Divi site that you want to convert to a block editor. Let’s say it takes you 2.5 hours to recreate the original layout of the home page in the block editor.

If you can pay $19 to save that 2.5 hours of work, that’s a no-brainer for most web professionals, since your time is probably worth more than the equivalent of $7.6 per hour you’d earn if you did the work manually.

So instead of spending 12.5 hours rebuilding a five-page website, you can pay $95 for the Nelio Unlocker, set a few intervals if necessary, and call it a day.

There is no option to do a test conversion – you have to pay before you convert anything.

However, if you want to test it, you can comment on the developers’ Twitter thread here and they’ll do the conversion for you, so you can see what the before/after might look like before you spend the money.

Final reflections on the release of Nelio

I have no doubt that Nelio Unlocker solves a very serious problem for WordPress users and implementers.

Blocking the page generator/content editor is one of the biggest drawbacks of using the page generator to design your website. So the ability to unlock not only your content but also your design is very powerful.

Converted drawings are not 100% complete, meaning you can convert a page and literally not touch anything. But they’re almost 100%, and usually you just need to change the spacing a bit and tweak a few other things here and there.

In my tests, the conversions with Elementor and Beaver Builder were almost perfect. In total, I tested about 10 pages built with Elementor and Beaver Builder, and they were all very accurate. However, Nelio Unlocker seems to have issues with the two Brizy models I tested, so it may need some fine tuning here.

All in all, if you are having problems with a website or its owner, you should definitely try Nelio Unlocker because I think it can save you a lot of time and frustration.

You can also check out this Twitter feed to ask the developer to do a conversion test for you and/or see other conversions.

Untie Nelio

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