Designers rarely use a plain horizontal rule. A separator is usually an empty div with a height and a background, or a short accent bar under a heading. Recognising those keeps your Elementor tree clean instead of filling it with empty containers.
What is recognised as a divider
An <hr> always becomes a Divider widget. Beyond that, an empty <div> or <span> is treated as a divider when it:
- contains no text and no real content elements,
- renders as a thin bar — a small height, and clearly wider than it is tall,
- and actually has a visible colour, either a background or a top/bottom border.
The empty-and-colourless case is excluded on purpose. A blank spacer div with no colour is not a separator, and turning it into a visible line would add something your design never had.
What is carried over
The line colour and its thickness — read from the border when there is one, otherwise from the background colour and the rendered height. A short accent bar that is clearly narrower than its container also gets an explicit width and alignment, so a 78px bar under a heading stays a 78px bar instead of stretching across the whole column.
Why this matters more than it sounds
Without this, every decorative line becomes an empty Container with a background — a node in your tree that looks like a layout element but is not. Multiply that by every section on a long page and the Structure map becomes hard to read. Mapping them to Divider widgets keeps the tree honest about what is layout and what is decoration.
Editing afterwards
Elementor’s Divider has more to offer than a plain line: styles beyond solid (dotted, dashed, patterns), an optional text or icon in the middle, and width and gap controls. Once a line is a real Divider widget, all of that is one click away — which is not true of an empty coloured div.
Tip for the source
If you want a separator to convert cleanly, give it an explicit background colour and a small height rather than relying on a pseudo-element. Pseudo-elements such as ::after are not real DOM nodes, so they cannot be converted into widgets at all — anything drawn with them has to be rebuilt in Elementor by hand.