I am a web developer, but I mostly work with Sanity/NextJS. But, I am going to implement a wordpress project in the coming months.
I am considering using elementor or similar. The customer has graphical design background, and wants to be able to customize certain pages.
What are the costs of using tools like Elementor (in addition to their subscription fee)? Can code generated in these pagebuilders become bloated? In my experience these WYSIWYG page builders can create an enormous amount of code that is sent to the client, is that still true? It of course depends on the author and how the use the tool. Are there other things that might impact site performance or developer experience when using tools like this? Any experience with this good or bad is appreciated 🙂 Also: What page builder would you recommend for a rather small site?
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Every code can become bloated if you don’t use it properly, even if it’s manually written so you basically answered this question yourself. What impacts the site performance the most is the hosting quality and best building practices which are unrelated to any theme / builder. Like sizing and optimizing images before the upload, caching plugins and configurations, knowing what your theme / main plugins can do and not adding 5 different plugins for one and the same feature, loading fonts from site, etc etc etc, the list really goes on and on.
Depending on the website’s functionality as well as the design, it’s possible you don’t even need the pro version of Elementor, just the right theme with advanced options and yes, there are such themes for free in the WordPress org repo.
But really, without knowing the features or even seeing the design along with some explanations as how they imagine things are supposed to function, even us who are overly familiar with such tools can’t give you a straight answer – just general guidance
Performance is a real problem with elementor. I find it also very unconsistent, meaning the same setting for one element is to be found on totally different place for another element. This drives me crazy and and I hate working with it. I use Thrive Suite actively. Pricing is kind of insane now but I have a deal from 3 years ago which was much better then it is now. They keep performance in mind and are conversion focused. But there are other builders like Bricks which can be a good option when it comes to performance.
I personally switched from Elementor for my clients. I prefer something with less bloat and atleast with a lifetime license. Currently use Bricks, Gutenberg (with a blocks plugin like Kadence or Spectra) or Divi for my clients. It really comes down to the type of website, for example if my client like yours wanted to edit themselves and therefore needs something with ease of use – Divi would be the choice. They own the plugin after since I’m able to cover it from dev costs. Only annual plans I do are maintenance which uses subscription plugins and hence.
If clean code, accessibility, speed, and SEO are a concern, I’d look past Elementor.
For clients, you can build with ACF pro and a custom theme, or alternatively I’d recommend looking into Bricks+Bricksforge. Those two together lets you output clean, well-built sites very quickly. You can then choose what parts of the builder clients have access to.
So IMO, use Gutenberg with ACF Pro, or Bricks with ACF pro.
Elementor does not only charge you but also sucks every bit of joy off you.
The more you prepare for customization the more more wrappers and containers you need to avoid having clients messing with the structure itself.
That’s why “easy to use” page builders have deeper component trees, the prebuild layout components you can drop into their canvases are already prepared to be easily customized.
If you want to avoid it best pick a more “Webflow like” builder like Bricks thats more like an interface directly on top of CSS, this way you have more control over the complexity of the components, like with CSS.