We do not recommend that bloggers use pagebuilders to create pages on their website, and we don't offer support for it.
Below is an opinionated take on pagebuilders, and why we don't support it. As always, bloggers are free to customize their theme in any way they see fit, if they're willing to take on the burden of maintaining those customizations.
In addition to adding an unnecessary layer of complexity, they don't allow you to do anything that you can't do with the block editor.
As always, we recommend asking: why am I making this change?
Unless you can draw a direct correlation between using a pagebuilder to build a conversion-optimized page that will immediately boost your revenues by a significant number, it's best not to waste time on it.
Pagebuilders include:
- LeadPages
- BeaverBuilder
- Divi
- VisualComposer
- Themify
- Elementor
- Thrive
- Showit
Jump to:
Heavy Up-Front Investment
While creating pages can be quicker once you've invested in learning how to use it (40+ hours), we've never actually seen a page built that offers any sort of user-benefit that justifies this investment.
Page builders are meant for landing page conversion rate optimization, when you're trying to sell something and have huge volumes of traffic to work with. This is not how food blogs work.
Shaky Future
The "Block Editor" (codename Gutenberg) release from WordPress is a direct attack on pagebuilders, providing what will be a similar pagebuilding experience to the above.
There's been some good arguments that the pagebuilders will always be more useful for the top 10%-20% powerusers, who make 3-4 landing page variations per day, and for whom a 5% increase in conversions results in thousands of dollars.
But that means 80%-90% of their market (non-power-users) will disappear.
With that much of the market drying up, revenues will plummet and the industry will be forced to cut back. This will cause customer support to suffer, and more people to abandon, leading to a death spiral.
If this happens, every page built will have to be manually migrated and rebuilt.
Here's a post outlining the performance of the block editor vs. Elementor, with the conclusion that Elementor is on the way out.
Maintainability
Pagebuilders make transferring content difficult. They often store content in shortcodes, code blocks, or custom post types, fragmenting the page content.
This means the content of a page may be hidden across multiple areas, rather than directly in the standard classic or block editor.
Of all the reasons not to use a page builder, this is the most compelling. The amount of effort involved in creating a single page, and then maintaining that page over time, is simply not worth it.
When (not if) you eventually need to migrate away, having to rebuild every page is a huuuuge problem. It needs to be done page-by-page and extremely carefully.
Vulnerabilities
The large user base of some of these pagebuilders make them a target for hacking, as seen:
- Elementor vulnerability (2021/03)
- Elemenator add-ons vulnerability (2021/04)
- Pagebuilder by SiteOrigin vulnerability (2020/04)
- WPBakery vulnerability (2020/07)
- Divi page builder vulnerability (2020/07)
- VisualComposer vulnerability (2020/05)
Excessive Styling + Javascript
While not ALL pagebuilders load their entire styling and javascript library on each page, even the better ones will cause your performance to take a hit. Both styling and javascript add page weight (making it larger in "kb" to download), making your pagespeed suffer.
You can check pagespeed at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Then there's the issue of making it play well with optimization plugins like WP Rocket. Lazyloading, caching, and defering are critical to food blogs in 2019 and in the future, and the pagebuilder may or may not have compatibility with performance plugins in mind.
Even ad companies like Mediavine have come out against using page builders: https://www.mediavine.com/post-builders/
Where do pagebuilders make sense?
There is a place for pagebuilders, but it's not for food blogs.
The one use case where we've seen pagebuilders be worth the effort are high traffic landing pages with designed to convert highly targeted visitors.
Usually, with paid traffic.
If you're selling a $100,000 product or service, and paying $1,000/day to send paid traffic to it, it's totally worth it to use a pagebuilder to bump up conversions from 0.1% to 0.2%.
Typically, this scenario plays out with highly experience internet marketers with TONS of conversion optimization experience and a TEAM of people to build a dozen variations of that page per day to split-test designs. Bumping conversions via design happens in tiny increments, with hundreds of iterations over time.
This is not what food blogs are. Page builders don't belong on food blogs.
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