WordPress Page Builders: Divi, Elementor & Co. — When Do They Make Sense?

A WordPress page builder is a visual editor that allows pages to be designed by dragging and dropping elements into place. Text, images, columns, buttons — all positioned directly on screen, without writing a single line of code. The result looks almost identical in the editor to what appears on the finished website.

There are two fundamentally different types. First, the Gutenberg Block Editor, which has been built into WordPress since version 5.0 (2018) and carries no additional cost. Second, plugin-based page builders such as Elementor, Divi or Bricks, which must be installed separately, licensed and maintained.

Anyone considering WordPress should first read the article WordPress for SMEs: What Really Matters — many questions about the platform itself are answered there. After that, the page builder question becomes much more concrete.

Gutenberg is a block editor. You work with predefined blocks — paragraph, image, column, video, quote. This is sufficient for most editorial content: text, blog posts and simple pages with a clear structure. Since WordPress 6.x, Full Site Editing (FSE) is also available, allowing headers, footers and entire templates to be designed with blocks.

Plugin page builders like Elementor and Divi go further. They offer greater design freedom, more pre-made templates, and more visual control over spacing, animations and responsive behaviour. The trade-off: higher load times (more JavaScript), an additional plugin dependency and ongoing licence costs.

For around 80 per cent of standard SME websites — company sites, service providers, small blogs — Gutenberg is sufficient. For agencies or SMEs that need complex designs with full visual autonomy, a page builder may be the right choice.

A plugin-based page builder makes sense when requirements go beyond what Gutenberg can cover with reasonable effort. This is less common than many assume — but there are clear situations where using one is justified.

The counter-question is at least as important. Page builders are often used out of habit or because the agency is familiar with them — not because the website actually needs one. This creates unnecessary dependencies and ongoing costs.

Typical situations where a page builder does more harm than good:

There is no objectively best system — only the right fit for each situation. The overview below compares the three most relevant options for Swiss SME projects. Anyone planning a professional website will find an overview of different approaches on the website creation page — regardless of which editor is chosen.

Bricks Builder is a fourth option growing in popularity among developers and technically oriented agencies. It produces the cleanest code output of the four and offers a lifetime licence from around USD 79. For SMEs working without an agency, it is less suitable — it requires knowledge of CSS and Flexbox.

WPBakery (formerly Visual Composer) is considered a legacy tool. It is still widely used but technically outdated. It is not recommended for new projects — the shortcode-based approach creates the strongest lock-in of all page builders.

Page builders do not directly affect SEO — what matters is content, headings, meta tags and structured data. What does directly affect rankings is load speed. And here, page builders are a relevant factor.

Standalone page builders load additional JavaScript and CSS, which ends up on the page in all cases — even when not all features are used. This affects Core Web Vitals, particularly Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). With active caching, lazy loading and a CDN, this can usually be compensated — but it requires knowledge and effort.

Gutenberg has the advantage here: it generates significantly less JavaScript overhead and tends to perform better on Core Web Vitals than plugin-based solutions. Divi 5 has caught up with its February 2026 rewrite — 84 per cent less JavaScript and significantly better PageSpeed scores are a genuine improvement.

Before a page builder is introduced, it is worth taking an honest look at your own situation. The following questions help in making the right decision — regardless of what the agency is used to or which page builder is currently being promoted.

1. Is Gutenberg sufficient for your specific requirements — have you genuinely checked this?
2. Who is responsible long term for updates, licences and maintenance of the page builder plugin?
3. How demanding are your load speed requirements — are there critical performance thresholds?
4. Do you want to adjust layouts independently as a team, or is content management through Gutenberg enough?
5. Are you prepared to stay with the chosen page builder — or might a switch be needed in two years?
6. Does the agency you are working with genuinely know the page builder well — or are they recommending their familiar tool?

For most new projects, Gutenberg is the sensible starting point: free, low-maintenance, and fully sufficient for the majority of SME websites. Page builders like Elementor or Divi become the better choice when two conditions apply: the client needs genuine visual autonomy without developer support — and licence costs and lock-in risk are consciously accepted. Anyone running an existing site on a page builder and struggling with performance or maintenance should evaluate a migration before the technical debt becomes more expensive than a clean rebuild.

The decisive question is not the tool itself, but: what does this website actually need long-term — and at what cost? A page builder can be the right answer. But it is rarely the only one.