6 Big Reasons to Use a WordPress Page Builder + Which One We Love Most
So, you’ve decided to invest in a WordPress website for your business, congrats! You’ve made a great decision. WordPress is the most commonly used website publishing platform in the world for good reason, and it’s what we use to design and develop custom branded, mobile-friendly websites for many of our small business clients.
(Side Note: Still exploring options or not sure which website platform is right for you? Give our web team a holler to compare WordPress versus Squarespace versus Shopify to decide what platform might work best for your biz.)
Once you’ve committed to a WordPress website, you have a few important decisions to make: You can choose to code your website from scratch or use a free or paid WordPress theme as a starting point. You also have the option of using WordPress’s built-in block editor, Gutenberg, or installing one of several popular page builders on the market to make editing your site a little more user-friendly.
Page builders are popular among designers and developers, because they’re faster to set up and style than custom coding everything, and they make it easier to manage updates for clients who are overwhelmed by ones and zeros and all that nerdy, tech stuff.
But, is using a page builder right for you? That answer depends on your budget, skillset, and the features and performance on your wishlist. In this post, we’re going to explain why we recommend using a page builder, and talk a little bit about Divi——our go-to page builder of choice — including pros, cons, and myths debunked so that you can make an informed choice and feel confident that your new site will be a perfect fit for your business.
5 Reasons to Use a Page Builder
1. Cost Effective
Building a custom-coded WordPress site is no short order, and it isn’t cheap. By using a page builder (Spoiler alert: Divi is our builder of choice. More on that below.), we are able to save our clients considerable development costs. Upfront, your site is built without hiring a developer to custom code. Later on, if something on your site breaks or needs to be changed, you won’t have to rely on a developer, or even us, to make edits.
2. Faster to Build + Launch
Once your site is planned and designed, it only takes a few days to create a live, mobile-responsive prototype using a page builder. Custom coding the same site would take a lot longer (and obviously cost more, see above). For small businesses trying to launch fast so they can start attracting customers and ramp up sales, that time and money is better spent elsewhere.
3. Easier to Edit + Update
Most of our clients want to be able to make edits to their site, and a WordPress page builder swaps the bare bones Gutenburg editor in WordPress for a more intuitive, visual drag-and-drop editor that makes adding content and maintaining your website easier and less intimidating.
4. Focus on Content, Not Code
Instead of spending precious marketing dollars on custom HTML, CSS, and javascript, we put our clients’ budget to use where we know they need it——show stopping visuals, stronger brand storytelling, creating an unexpected digital experience for their customers, and making sure that their messaging is clear, compelling, and memorable.
5. Limitless Customization
Free or premium WordPress themes (which can be used with or without a page builder usually), can be less customizable than you think. It can be difficult to find a theme with all the editable features and options that you expect, and it often still requires coding to customize to your needs. Not all page builders solve this particular dilemma, but Divi does, so we’re counting it and will dive in further below.
6 More Reasons We Love Divi by Elegant Themes
Unlike Elementor, Beaver Builder, or the other page builders out there, Divi is a hybrid visual-page-builder-and-WordPress-theme-in-one created by Elegant Themes. It’s perhaps the most popular WordPress theme in the world (according to their website). We’ve experimented with a lot of different WordPress themes and platforms in our work, and some are good, but most leave lots to be desired. Here’s what makes Divi our fave by far:
1. Advanced Drag-and-Drop Editor
Divi allows you to start with a blank page and design to your heart’s content without fiddling with lines of code. Sure, that could be said about Elementor or the others, but Divi’s visual editor is developer- and designer-friendly. Once they’ve been shown the ropes, our clients love the ease with which they can add and edit content and pages within their site.
2. No Theme Limitations
Since Divi doesn’t require any third party themes to work, there’s no need to hunt for a compatible theme with the features you need. That means there won’t be any frustrating surprises part way through the process when you realize your theme doesn’t support something basic without custom code.
3. Hundreds of Layout Packs
Divi offers hundreds of free, mix-and-match templates called layout packs that can be used for inspiration or imported and restyled to speed up the design and development process. For any business owners out there wanting to go the DIY route, this is a great way to do it without starting from scratch.
4. Reusable Saved Modules
With the Divi page builder, we are able to save a comprehensive library of versatile, reusable sections, rows, and modules that are on-brand and ready for our clients to copy, paste, and repurpose across their whole site however they need.
5. Extensive Undo & Revisions
Let’s be honest, mistakes happen. If you accidentally mess something up (even if it was several steps ago or hours in the past), Divi lets you go back through your entire editing history to restore an earlier version of your site before the mess up happened. Seems simple, but kinda a lifesaver!
6. Community Support
Divi is backed by a knowledgeable customer support team who, in our experience, are quick to help via web chat 24/7. There’s also no shortage of designers and developers familiar with this popular builder, as well as support articles, forums, and other resources to guide the way.
Possible Drawbacks + Some Myth Busting
Believe it or not, there are people out there who don’t love page builders. (In all honesty, we’re about to get pretty geeky, but absolutely keep reading if you’re not afraid to talk nerdy.) Here are some of the commonly cited downsides of using a page builder, as well as our official take on them to help you make an informed and confident decision:
Concern 1:
Do Page Builders Create Slow-Loading Blogs + Websites?
It’s true that using any page builder adds extra code and load time to your site out of the box. Whether you use Divi, Elementor, or any of the rest, the convenience of a drag-and-drop builder and enhanced customizations comes at a price … sort of.
But, Caching Changes Everything
While Divi on its own tends to weigh things down, our website packages include a caching plugin that is installed and configured to cut page speed in half, making our Divi sites competitive in performance to a WordPress site with no builder installed.
Concern 2:
Won’t Divi Shortcodes Make Exporting Content or Switching Themes A Pain?
This is a frequent Divi gripe. All the customization controls and easy-to-use back end features that make Divi, other WordPress page builders, and WordPress plugins a breeze to use leave invisible code bits (i.e. shortcodes) within your site. These tiny snippets allow for all kinds of advanced scripting behind the scenes, and they make your life in WordPress much easier. But, they do need to be removed or converted in the case of a switch. Is that gonna suck?
No, Not Really
Yes, shortcodes are a thing, but if your site is a typical brochure size (5-30 pages), it will be no big task to convert your pages to a new builder should you want to use something different in the future—especially since you’re likely to be refreshing the design and content on your pages anyway. Bear in mind that businesses don’t change website platforms every day. Our clients are generally happy to trade that future lift for the ease and usability that Divi offers. Besides, not to be a “there’s a plugin for that” broken record, but …. there totally are plugins that specifically remove shortcodes from code!
CONCERN 3:
I heard Divi Makes Blog Migration Impossible?!
Similar to the concern above, but worth addressing on its own, page builders add shortcodes to render modules and store all the settings that make your WordPress site look and function how you want it to. Mo’ modules, mo’ shortcodes, and those shortcodes need to be converted or removed in order to transition your site. For a large site with lots of posts, pages, and layouts, this can mean a lot of work, right?
Ahem, Theme Builder Templates to the Rescue
We don’t use Divi’s visual editor to custom design blog posts individually, which is future-proof and faster for everyone. Posting to your blog should be straightforward, and it’s generally expected that blog posts follow a consistent template anyway, so why customize every time? Instead, we use the Divi Theme Builder to create standardized post templates that apply to each blog post at the end and keep shortcodes out of the posts themselves! Our clients can easily add blog content using the no-frills-no-fuss standard editor, and everything stays consistently styled and on-brand automagically!
Feeling inspired to build your own WordPress website with Divi? Go for it!
There are so many great layout packs, tutorials, and Divi resources out there to help non-designers and non-coders get started. Will there be a learning curve? Most likely, yes. Will it be a rewarding and creative challenge worth the effort? Absolutely!
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Looking for a friendly, knowledgeable design + dev Crew to build the fully-branded Divi website of your dreams?
Schedule a consultation – We’d love to meet in-person or online to tour your existing site, talk about your needs, and see if a custom Divi site is right for your business.
Book a design sprint - If you already have a Divi site, you can reserve a full- or half-day work session to knock out whatever website updates have been stuck on your to-do list.
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Divi builder video courtesy of Elegant Themes.
