If you’re frustrated by your WordPress theme’s limitations, you don’t know how to or don’t want to write custom code, or you want a lot more flexibility in your website, you might want to consider a page-builder plugin for WordPress.

Benefits of page-builders

1. You don’t have to know HTML, CSS, PHP, or JavaScript to design your own webpages

Although these are the four most used things to build your website and webpages behind the scenes you don’t have to know them in order to create webpages.

Having a tool that makes it so you don’t have to think about those things makes it easier for you to just build your pages.

2. A page-builder makes web-design fast with WYSIWYG drag-and-drop editing

WYSIWYG stands for “What You See Is What You Get” and is an approach used not only on page builders but also in most word processing apps. It makes it so easy to change the font, colors, borders and many other aspects by dragging and dropping to get just what you’d like to see while you’re making it.

If you want a box for example with a colored background and a certain border with text inside you can do so in less than 60 seconds. Page builders allow you to make the page look and act as you want it while taking care of the coding for you without any direct input to coding needed by you.

You don’t have to write code, save, refresh and go back and forth between tabs to see what it will look like. Page-builders eliminate all of that extra work.

3. A good page-builder can be used anywhere on your site

Most of the page builders offer the opportunity for you to do this.

Let’s say you’d like to use a common element in different places like a newsletter sign up or a call to action. A good page-builder will be able to let you make this and then call it into use where you need it without having to rebuild it again and again.

In the case of Divi it uses shortcodes to allow you to place the content where you need it quickly.

4. A page-builder lets you build sections and pages “in your own image”

If you want your background color to be purple for example then you can have the background as purple as you’d like. You can make the pages look just like you’d like them to regardless of what the theme you’re using may have set as a color.

Speaking of colors; One of the best design concepts you can learn is contrast. Making sure that things that need to look different from each other do so. And things that are supposed to be connected look similar.

The way that two different colors work together is very important too as to not only how the page looks overall but also how well it can be read. Contrast also applies to fonts as you don’t want to mix fonts that crash with each other either.

5. Page-builders will probably someday integrate directly into the Gutenberg editor

I know a lot of people don’t like the Gutenberg editor as it’s so different than what you may have grown used to with the old WordPress editor. But even if it bothers you I suggest that you work with it as much as you can because it works in much the same way that page-builders work. So, if you can use Gutenberg then you can use a page-builder and vice versa.

The way things are going with the development of Gutenberg and page-builders we may well see the day where instead of working in a page-builder outside of the WordPress editing screen it would instead be integrated right inside. This would allow you to make changes all in one space and adding in a page-builder would open up new functionality.

Start with a page-builder now so you’ll be ready for it when that sort of functionality arrives.

Tips for using a WordPress page-builder

1. Ensure your theme is compatible

Most page-builders work with most WordPress themes but there may be some conflicts. You’ll need to check for this before committing in case there’s a conflict that might break your site.

2.