What is a page builder?
First thing’s first – what’s a page builder? Simply put, a page builder is software on your site that allows you to lay out all of the elements on a page through the use of drag-and-drop interfaces. These programs make it so that you can edit, change and manipulate your content in a much more straightforward and intuitive way without any prerequisite coding knowledge. Some popular page builders out there are WPBakery, Elementor and Beaver Builder. In this post, I’ll explain some of the benefits of WPBakery, and why we prefer it to some of the other page builders available.
Benefits of WPBakery
1. Easy to learn, intuitive controls: Of the many page builders I have used and tested, WPBakery is by far the easiest to learn and start working with. Although all page builders by design make page building and designing easier, some have a steeper learning curve than others. For example, Elementor is a very popular page builder because it is quite powerful and you can accomplish a lot with it. However, because of all the functionality included with the plugin, it takes a bit longer to figure out how it works to the point that you can successfully set up or edit your pages. WPBakery on the other hand, is easy to understand right out of the box. You simply go to edit a page, where you are then presented with different element options like text blocks, forms, images, sliders, etc… that are available to add within sections, rows, and columns that you set up to control the structure of your content. Once you’ve successfully set up a layout that you like, you can save it as a template to re-use elsewhere on the site as needed.
2. Seamless integration with WordPress, lightweight: As I mentioned above, Elementor is an example of a page builder that has a lot of features and functionality built into it that allows you almost endless possibilities with your layouts and content. However, the downside to having all of these added features is that you’re loading a much larger program each time you go to edit a page. This means more time spent waiting for your program to load so that you can make those edits. This is also true for when you are saving and publishing content.
Another contributor to Elementor’s extended loading times is that when you go to edit content through Elementor, you are essentially pulled from the WordPress “environment” and placed into the Elementor environment. Therefore, to perform any WordPress specific functions like update site settings, add/remove widgets, add/update plugins, etc… you must leave the Elementor program’s environment and go back to WordPress. This time waiting on things to load and having to go back and forth between programs can really slow things down when you are editing your website, and that time adds up quickly.
WPBakery succeeds in both of these areas – it is packed right out of the box with content elements that cover most of our clients’ needs, and then some. In certain situations and applications, it is possible that we need a certain element or functionality not included with the standard version of WPBakery. In those cases there are no shortage of add-ons available to accomplish whatever it is you need to do, which also makes WPBakery a very flexible plugin that can be extended as needed. Another plus for WPBakery over Elementor is that you never leave the WordPress environment. All of the WPBakery tools and controls are contained within the standard WordPress editor metabox, and you still have WordPress’ left-hand sidebar there to navigate to different parts of your site’s back-end as needed. While still being incredibly feature-rich and powerful, WPBakery is much more lightweight than other page builder options which will contribute to you being able to get in and out of your site quickly when making edits, rather than having to wait for programs to load and initialize before you can start making changes.
3. Implementation: One of the bigger differences between plugins like Elementor and Beaver Builder versus WPBakery is their scope and the way they are used on your site. Elementor and Beaver Builder could also be called “Site Builders” rather than simply page builders because they do offer the functionality and tools to create your entire site through, rather than just the content of pages. Through these programs you can also edit your header and footer areas, and create and add widget areas to different areas of your site. While this all sounds great at first, let’s look into it a little more closely.
First, as explained above, this added functionality significantly increases size of the plugin and it’s files, which contributes to higher load times on the back-end and more time spent waiting before you can edit. Also, headers and footers generally contains content that is static and unchanging, not dynamic. Therefore, it makes more sense to handle static content like headers and footers outside of your page builder. In situations where dynamic content is needed in the header or footer, we have several ways we can accomplish this such as widget areas or just code. All of which are more efficient than setting up and managing your header/footer through a page building plugin.
These are three main reasons why we include and use WPBakery on almost every single project we do. For us, there is really never a situation in which we would use another page builder over WPBakery. With the deep knowledge that we have of WordPress, we’ve never found a need to use such a comprehensive tool as Elementor or Beaver Builder (the “site-builders”). This will result in a site that is not only easy to edit for us and our clients, but also one that runs efficiently without all of the added clutter of larger page builders.