Understanding Elementor's Data Structure

Before writing an ability that touches Elementor content, you need to know exactly what Elementor stores and where. This lesson covers the real, documented structure, verified against Elementor’s own developer documentation, plus the version differences that make “just parse the JSON” more nuanced than it first sounds. Lesson 4 builds the actual ability on top of what you learn here.

Step 1: Where the data actually lives

Elementor stores a page’s layout as JSON in a single post meta field, keyed _elementor_data, on the post itself. This is a real, well-established convention, not an implementation detail likely to change without notice, and you can confirm it on any Elementor-built post right now:

# File: terminal
wp post meta get <post_id> _elementor_data

You’ll get back a long JSON string. post_content on the same post is largely irrelevant to the actual layout, Elementor keeps it in sync mostly for backward compatibility (search, RSS feeds, plugins that read post_content directly), the source of truth for what renders on the front end is _elementor_data.

Step 2: The top-level JSON shape

According to Elementor’s own developer documentation, the decoded JSON is an object with five top-level fields:

Step 3: The recursive element shape

Every object inside content (and inside any element’s own nested elements array) shares the same basic fields:

{
  "id": "3f2a91c",
  "elType": "container",
  "isInner": false,
  "settings": {
    "background_background": "classic",
    "background_color": "#f7f7f7"
  },
  "elements": [
    {
      "id": "8b4e027",
      "elType": "widget",
      "widgetType": "heading",
      "isInner": false,
      "settings": {
        "title": "Welcome to our site",
        "header_size": "h1"
      },
      "elements": []
    }
  ]
}

id is a short, stable identifier Elementor assigns to every element and keeps stable across saves, this is the value you’ll match against in Lesson 4, never a numeric position in an array. elType says what kind of element it is, layout elements (sections, columns, or containers depending on version) versus widget. settings is where the actual content and styling live, a heading widget’s visible text sits in settings.title in the example above, but the exact key varies by widget type, always confirm the real key for a given widget by inspecting your own saved data rather than guessing. elements holds children and is empty for leaf widgets. widgetType only appears when elType is "widget", naming which specific widget (heading, image, button, and so on) this is.

Step 4: Re-saving the JSON without corrupting it

Once you decode _elementor_data with json_decode( $raw, true ), modify the array, and re-encode it, there’s a real, documented WordPress behavior to account for: WordPress’s meta-saving functions run incoming data through wp_unslash()-adjacent logic that strips backslashes as if they’d been added by “magic quotes.” A JSON string containing escaped characters (an apostrophe inside a heading’s text, for instance) can lose those backslashes on save if you don’t call wp_slash() on the encoded string first. Use wp_json_encode() rather than raw json_encode() to match how WordPress itself encodes JSON for storage, and wrap the result in wp_slash() before passing it to update_post_meta(). Lesson 4 shows this in a complete, working ability.

Test it: inspect your own site’s real structure

Don’t take this lesson’s example JSON as gospel for your site, confirm it directly:

# File: terminal
wp post meta get <post_id> _elementor_data | python3 -m json.tool | less

Look specifically at the elType values you actually see, and note whether it’s section/column/widget or container/widget, that distinction determines how your Lesson 4 ability walks the tree.

Recap

Elementor stores a page’s real layout as JSON in the _elementor_data post meta field, structured as a top-level object with title, type, version, page_settings, and a recursive content array. Each element carries a stable id, an elType, a settings object, and a nested elements array, with widgetType added for widgets specifically. The exact nesting depends on whether a page uses the older section/column structure or newer containers, and re-saving the JSON safely requires wp_json_encode() and wp_slash() to avoid WordPress stripping backslashes on the way into the database.

Resources & further reading

• Elementor Developers: Data Structure overview, developers.elementor.com
• Elementor Developers: General Structure, developers.elementor.com
• Elementor Developers: General Elements, developers.elementor.com
• wp_json_encode() function reference, developer.wordpress.org