Introduction
Page builders make life so much easier when it comes to customising your WordPress website. These plugins are visual design tools that allow WordPress users to use drag-and-drop functionality to create web pages effectively and efficiently.
A key advantage of using a page builder is that you don’t require any coding knowledge to create incredible web page designs. Instead, page builders are known for their user-friendly interfaces simplifying the building of your website pages and the ongoing management and maintenance.
The drag-and-drop functionality allows you to design customised web pages with just a few clicks –from selecting and editing layouts to adding new and powerful elements; it has never been simpler to get your website up and running as quickly as possible.
Page builders have numerous advantages, and the possibilities are endless – from customising existing themes and templates to creating numerous variations which can be repeatedly used.
But the challenge is always around deciding which option is right for your business requirements.
Factors to consider when choosing a page builder
You need to consider various factors when deciding which page builder to use. For example, your budget constraints and your unique needs should also be easy to use and intuitive.
Trial period/money-back guarantees
Providers offering trial periods or money-back guarantees allow you to try out the page builder before completely committing, giving you time to familiarise yourself with the various features, ensuring it is the right solution for your business.
Easy to use
Page builders should, at the minimum, be effortless to use and intuitive, and you definitely shouldn’t require any coding skills. Solutions should offer flexibility when creating and customising your web pages – pages should be easy to create and just as easy to change!
Functionality and features
It’s essential to check that whichever page builder you choose has all the features that you require to create that perfect page. And don’t forget to ensure that it is compatible with any specific themes or plugins you currently use; otherwise, you may need to make unnecessary changes.
Support
Support comes in many forms and is often taken for granted. Therefore, it is advisable to ensure that there are sufficient resources that you can utilise to initially familiarise yourself with the page builder and access when you run into challenges.
Finally, whichever page builder you choose should include regular updates to ensure it matches the latest WordPress version; otherwise, you will run into unnecessary challenges.
Page builder options - our top 8 picks
Elementor
Elementor is probably one of the most widely used WordPress page builder solutions and happens to be our top pick.
It definitely is one of the best free options available. The free version provides access to their drag-and-drop website editor, various widgets and templates, and responsive editing. It also includes around 30 elements and 60 preset layouts, allowing you to create pages quickly easily.
The premium version provides a host of additional features including numerous elements that allow you to effortlessly customise your layout, including buttons, headlines, galleries, text, etc. The Pro version has an additional 26 modules, including menus, tables and price lists, allowing easy integration with social media or WooCommerce.
We love Elementor’s theme builder, which provides a framework enabling you to build your own theme layout for various page types entirely from Elementor components without knowing how to code. Another advantage is that any layouts you create can be repeatedly used.
Key features
As mentioned, Elementor has many advantages; here is a comprehensive list of all their editor and design features as per their website.
- Drag & Drop Editor – Drag and drop any widget onto your canvas. Build Intuitively with pixel-perfect design without writing a single line of code.
- Responsive Editing – Adjust your website’s style and layout for every screen. Including desktop, mobile, tablet, and more.
- Live Editing – Build and customize every part of your website visually and watch your website come to life.
- 100 Widgets – Choose from a growing selection of widgets to meet your every need in design, layout, animations, marketing, ecommerce and more.
- Theme Builder – Design and manage the entire framework and parts of your website with maximum control from a single place.
- Global Editing – Ensure consistency across your website using global settings for fonts, colors, and widgets.
- Global Colors – Define your website’s design system with global colors. Save them once and apply them to any element on your website.
- Global Fonts – Maximize typographic control with advanced font capabilities including adding your own custom and Adobe fonts. Adjust size, weight, letter spacing, line height and more.
- Custom CSS – Add custom CSS code, if you wish, to uniquely control the presentation of elements, layouts, colors, effects, behaviors, and more.
- Motion & Interactions – Create stunning animations and playful entrance effects to deliver fresh impact to your websites.
- 90+ Website Kits – Build and customize every part of your website visually and watch your website come to life in realtime.
- Designer Made Templates – Select from over 300 designer-made templates and add content and customize to make it your own
Beaver Builder
This WordPress page builder plugin is popular and considered to be a great solution for beginners. It has 30 pre-designed landing page templates making it simple to create exceptional website designs.
Another reason for its popularity is its user-friendly drag-and-drop interface and built-in onboarding tour, enabling you to get started immediately. Beaver Builder is known for its reliability and is focused on performance and stability as opposed to limitless features.
According to their website, Beaver Builder has four products – Page Builder, Beaver Builder Theme, Beaver Themer, and Assistant Pro.
When it comes to their Page Builder product, their slogan is “Focus on creating, not coding” and has the following key features:
- Use On Unlimited Sites – from one license
- Build Websites Fast – visually and intuitively with a drag and drop page builder
- Developer Friendly – clean code, stable platform, customize HTML, PHP, CSS, JS
- SEO Friendly – mobile responsive, loads fast
- Build Any Type Of Site – Blog, Ecommerce, Membership, Landing Page
- Works With Themes & Plugins – Astra, Genesis, Page Builder Framework
Beaver Builder has the following features:
- Codeless Website Control – We’ve fully adopted the WordPress Customizer for all of our theme settings. This enables you to live preview any of your theme setting changes.
- Developer Friendly – The Beaver Builder Theme was engineered to be manipulated and extended!
- Bootstrap Framework – The Beaver Builder Theme utilizes the popular Bootstrap framework as its CSS base. With best practices baked in and a thriving community, Bootstrap puts you in good hands.
- Use On Unlimited Sites – Whether you’re building one website or one hundred, you’ll want to pick a lightweight, versatile theme that you’ll enjoy working with.
Beaver Themer’s features are as follows:
- Theme Templates – Create layouts for blog archives, Custom Post Types, WooCommerce Products, 404 Pages, search pages, and more.
- Theme Parts – Build partial layouts like headers and footers, announcement bars, call-to-action rows and display them on all or just some of the pages on your site.
- Post Grids – Take your archive and blog page designs to the next level with full control over how each post in a list or grid gets displayed.
- Field Connections – Plug theme templates/parts in underlying data in each page or post.
And their final product, Assistant Pro lets you export, import, and save page builder templates and other design assets to the cloud.
Divi
The Divi page builder is a powerful solution with endless design options. It is modern, user-friendly, and comes with many features, including around 50 ready-made elements for your websites. Divi Builder is from ElegantThemes , and as soon as you buy it, you can access more than 110 themes in addition to its WordPress Page Builder.
This page builder also comes with a visual drag-and-drop functionality. Numerous layout designs are exceptionally easy to use and cater to all types of websites.
Custom layouts can be created quickly and saved so you can use them repeatedly. One of its advantages is that you can click on your page and edit in real time with a live preview of your changes. This means that you do not need to save and then click preview to see your new design.
There are many different content modules that you can drag and drop into your layout and arrange them in various section and row types, as well as being able to customise each element through the advanced design settings.
According to its website, Divi prides itself on its advanced visual builder technology and has the following key features:
- Drag & Drop Building – Add, delete and move elements around on the front end of your website. No coding and no confusing back end options.
- Visual Editing – design your page in real time and see the results instantly. Create and customize your pages using intuitive visual controls.
- Custom CSS Control – Developers can easily combine Divi’s visual design controls with their own custom CSS. Divi’s interface is simple yet not limiting.
- Responsive Editing – Building beautiful responsive websites is easy. Divi is responsive by nature and also gives you full control over how your website looks on mobile devices.
- Design Options – Enjoy dozens of unique page elements and thousands of design options. Divi gives you full design control over your website.
- Inline Text Editing – Just click and start typing! Editing your page has never been this easy. Draft pages on the front end and see the results instantly as you type.
- Design Management – Save and manage unlimited custom designs. Easily re-use them to jump-start new pages. Create advanced design systems and streamline your work flow.
- Global Elements & Styles – Manage your entire website’s design using global elements and website-wide design settings. Divi isn’t just a page builder, it’s a website design system.
- Undo, Redo, & Revisions – Divi works like a modern software application. Easily undo, redo and travel through your entire editing history. If you make a mistake, Divi has your back.
Oxygen
This flexible page builder has similar features to the other page builders, and its tools and features are focused on three main areas:
- Visual website building
- WooCommerce store management
- Website performance and search engine optimization (SEO)
The main difference between Oxygen and other page builders is that it connects to WordPress as a plugin, effectively replacing the WordPress interface. In addition, it creates a separate sandbox module where all the designing takes place.
Advantages include a multitude of quality designs and templates that can easily be used without programming skills. One of its strengths is the support of PHP, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, which is applicable to coders looking for flexibility.
Its website promotes the following features:
- Drag & Drop Editing – Drag element edges to set spacing, or drag & drop to re-order.
- WooCommerce – Get visual control of every part of your WooCommerce store.
- Header Builder – Create custom website headers visually, including sticky and overlay headers.
- Global Colors – Edit colors in one place. Changes take effect everywhere the color was used.
- Developer Friendly – Build with fundamental HTML elements. Write PHP, CSS, and JS live.
- Advanced Functionality – Flexible builder elements. Dynamic data with repeaters and loops. And more.
Avada
Avada is another website builder with intuitive drag-and-drop functionality, besides being both SEO and mobile-friendly, it is also compatible with various plugins. For example, WooCommerce, Slider Revolution, WPML, ACF Pro, and Convert Plus
Avada offers a range of pre-built website designs that are fully customisable. There are many options and design elements available and importantly, it also requires no coding skills.
Avada products divide their customers into beginners, marketers, and professionals. They pride themselves that their products are” 100% maintained in-house by our team and not reliant on third-party tools and plugins.”
Avada’s key features, according to their website, are as follows:
- Live Visual Builder – Avada’s Live Design Interface gives you complete creative freedom, allowing for an intuitive workflow that will empower you to create any website style of choice. The only limit is your imagination.
- Build Custom Layouts – More than just a Website Builder, Avada is a set of intuitive workflow tools that gives you complete creative control and gives you the confidence to design and build websites like a professional.
- Avada Header Builder – Using the Drag & Drop Builder interface, decide what goes into your header, and use columns to neatly structure the header layout.
- Avada Footer Builder – A website’s footer is a crucial portion of real estate. It is an excellent way to display common information, such as opening hours, resource links, widgets, and so much more.
- Avada Setup Wizard – A step-by-step website setup wizard that makes it easy to generate websites on the fly and fast.
- Off-Canvas Builder – Popups, slideouts, or overlays are ideal for informational, functional, or promotional content; Designed to capture your visitors’ attention with a call to action.
- Avada Studio – Expansive library of multi-use content designed professionally to speed up your workflow. Get a head start with prebuilt headers to footers, containers to elements, and everything in between.
- Avada + WooCommerce – Avada is integrated with WooCommerce, allowing you to build successful online stores to sell anything online.
- Avada Form Builder – Created exclusively in-house by our team for Avada, with several essential facets in mind: Flexibility, control, and choice. In addition, the Avada Form Builder allows you to eliminate the need for another 3rd party plugin.
- Avada Performance Wizard – You can scan, analyze, and manage your website features with a straightforward set-by-step process. Be empowered to make better performance-related decisions.
Cornerstone
Cornerstone is Themeco’s trademark page builder and contains over 40 page elements that form the building blocks of your website pages. One of its key advantages is the clutter-free building interface which provides live previews.
It also includes a feature for live CSS coding for those more advanced programmers. This feature allows you to see any changes that you make in the CSS editor on your web page in realtime
Their website highlights the following key features:
- Powerful Layouts – Build custom templates for your blogs, pages, shops, and more. No additional plugins or addons needed!
- Stunning Headers – Effortlessly build everything from simple navigations to beautiful hero sections. All backed by a powerful Header Builder.
- Creative Content – Unleash your website’s potential with powerful page-building features, content blocks, and an optimized workflow for all skill levels.
- Easy Page Layouts – Go as complex (or simple) as you like. Select your column layout and configure as needed.
- Drag, Meet Drop – Say goodbye to frustrating editing tools. With Pro, what you see is what you get
- Extensive Element Library – Choose from dozens of pre-built Elements or build your own with our Element API.
- Perfect Footers – There’s just something about a beautifully designed footer. With our Footer Builder, you can easily create your own to pixel perfect perfection.
Brizy
Brizy is known for its modern interface, which is intuitive and easy to use. It is built on React and has various designs and templates to get you started. There are no complicated menus, and you can easily edit your pages with a few clicks creating new page elements, or layouts is equally simple.
If you are looking for additional customisation functionality, you will need to upgrade to Brizy Pro. One of the features that differentiate it, is global blocks. These elements can be set up centrally and then made available to your other sites via the cloud. The advantage of this is that when you announce an event in a Global Block, this becomes automatically visible on any of your other sites that contain Global Block.
The following features are highlighted on Brizy’s website:
- Drag & Drop builder
- Global Colors & Fonts
- Fully Responsive
- Visual editing (no code)
- 36+ Powerful Elements
- Clean code & optimised
Themify
Themify is a popular WordPress theme shop offering the built-in Themify Builder with all of their WordPress themes. As a page builder, it is known for its flexibility and simplicity. Several ready-to-use modules can be easily added to your pages or posts, many of which require you to install separate WordPress plugins.
There are over 40 designs included in the builder. The advantage is that these ready-to-use layouts can be imported with one click – all you need to do is import a layout, edit the text and images and you have a great landing page within a few minutes.
Themify Builder has two options for editing your pages – you can do this from the admin area or your live site. And finally, the Themify Builder standalone plugin is available for free.
Themify’s website highlights the following features:
- Drag & Drop – Design and build by dragging elements with a click of your mouse. It’s that easy!
- Preview – Instantly see changes you’ve made to your design with our intuitive Live Preview feature.
- Undo/Redo – Not sure if you like the changes? No problem, just undo it. You can always redo it!
- Copy/Paste – Copy/paste modules and rows from one page to another without messing with the whole layout.
- Import/Export – Import a specific module or row from one computer to another (eg. email data to clients)
- Duplicate – Duplicate helps you to speed up prototyping by quickly cloning existing modules and rows.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are plenty of options available. To help you identify the various page builders’ functionality, we have taken all the key features directly from their websites.
As previously mentioned, our favorite is Elementor. There are endless possibilities, and it is exceptionally intuitive and easy to use and, most importantly, has the functionality required to keep up with the latest trends and your evolving requirements.
Once again, we recommend you first identify your specific needs and take advantage of free trials, demos, and money-back guarantees. This will provide you with the perfect opportunity to ensure that whatever page builder you choose matches your requirements.
