Restrict for Elementor lets you show or hide any Elementor section, column, container or widget based on who is looking at it. Three visitor-based criteria — URL parameter, referrer and cookie — are available in the free version and open the door to landing page personalization: one page, different content for different visitors.
Where to find the criteria
- Open any page with the Elementor editor.
- Select the desired section, column, container or widget.
- Click the Content tab and navigate to the Restrict section.
- Set the Action switcher — Show displays the element only to the visitors matching the criteria, while Hide hides it from them.
- Choose one of the criteria in the dropdown.
Visitors arriving with a URL parameter
Enter the Parameter name (i.e. src) and optionally the Parameter value (i.e. newsletter). A visitor landing on yoursite.com/page/?src=newsletter matches the criteria. If you leave the value empty, the presence of the parameter with any value is enough. The comparison is case-insensitive.
A typical setup: duplicate a section of your landing page, set one variant to Show for visitors with ?src=newsletter and the other to Hide for the same criteria — your email campaign visitors will see a special offer, everyone else the regular content.
Visitors arriving from a specific website (referrer)
Enter the text the referrer should contain, for example facebook.com. The criteria matches when the address of the website the visitor is coming from contains that text (case-insensitive). Keep in mind that browsers may omit the referrer for direct visits or due to privacy settings — such visitors are treated as not matching.
Visitors with a specific cookie
Enter the Cookie name and optionally the Cookie value. Leave the value empty to match any value of the cookie. This criteria is handy for returning visitors, consent-based content or integrations with A/B testing tools that set their own cookies.
How it works under the hood
- The criteria are evaluated on the server — elements the visitor is not allowed to see are not rendered into the page at all, so the content cannot be revealed by viewing the page source.
- Restricted elements are automatically excluded from Elementor’s Element Cache, so every visit is evaluated freshly.
- If your website is served from an external full-page cache (server or CDN level), the referrer and cookie criteria may show a cached variant of the page. The URL parameter criteria generally works with page caching, since URLs with query strings typically bypass the cache.