Page builders are usually included in most purchased WordPress themes – they’re there to make the process of building a website easy for mostly anyone with the motivation and time to build their site themselves. There are lots of options with a lot of features; Beaver Builder, Divi, Elementor, and Visual Composer to name a few of the big players. Let’s take a look at the WP Page Builder pros and cons.
WP Page Builder pros and cons
Page builders can save money. You don’t have to hire a marketing team or web developer, they let you create pages on the fly and can even put the power of your website’s mobile responsiveness in your hands.
Some page builders come included with purchased themes, but to keep up with their security patches and plugin updates there is usually a subscription fee ranging from $15 to $65 per year.
Page builders take away having to code. Somewhere between a WYSIWYG editor and a drag-n-drop interface, page builders stand their ground and remove the need for looking for professional help.
The never-ending features of page builders are almost too good to be true, and you know what they say about those things that are too good to be true.
Page Builder Realities
Page builders add a ton of extra bloat and slow everything down. In order to account for the possibilities of all of the features at your fingertips, hundreds of javascript and style files can be added to your page load. The user’s browser needs to evaluate these files before displaying your site as a whole, and the longer they wait the higher the chance that they bounce.
Unless you make the effort to reduce the amount of resources being loaded – whether through deferring or asyncing files on-demand and per page, for every layout, feature, and effect there’s a network call being made and neither Google nor your users like that.
Page builders are detrimental to search engine optimization. In defense of page builders, it is extremely difficult to develop for each possible design outcome that a client wants. It isn’t their fault really, but the output of most page builder sections is simply a mess of <div>s and <span>s with no regards to semantics and SEO standards.
The Busybee Solution
Somewhere between giving our clients complete control over their websites and keeping the front-end fast-loading, optimized, and clean – we develop our sites using a system of pre-defined layers. No coding needed, fully-customizable, and as detailed as it matters to you.
We’ve found that the best way to build websites for our clients (to manage themselves) is to develop the entire site actually using the same modularized sections that our clients will use when building their own pages.
Each of these sections are abstractly developed, meaning separate from any static code, to allow for sharing these modules between pages, posts, and anywhere else on the site. This method allows us to keep a consistent brand style across pages and also lets us define what’s important for both your business and your customer.
For a live demo of how we create websites by using this custom page builder method to work for both our clients and their users, it’s probably easier shown than explained, please write us a message – we’ll schedule a one-on-one screenshare or drop in if you’re in the capital region of NY. You can learn more about our Web Development services here.