Hi hi! I am looking to find a lightweight alternative to Elementor and I’m looking at Divi. I’ve watched and read a handful of comparison posts, but nothing really digs into personal experience. **So I’m here to ask: what’s your transition experience been like?**
*Some context:* I LOVE Elementor’s functionality, but for personal reasons, no longer desire to do business with them. I am a very casual web developer…I make my own site and then don’t work on many other projects outside of that. I’m a fine artist and designer by spirit and education…But if I have a vision for a website, I figure out exactly what I need to execute it. I (almost) have a certificate in interaction design. I prefer to hard code things rather than add another plugin whenever possible, but I really do love all the ways I can make Elementor bend with add-ons.
*And bonus questions:* Looking to the future of WordPress, is Gutenberg where I should be focusing my attention? Or should I just cross that bridge when we get there, knowing I can very well rebuild my site myself when the time comes? I anticipate my site existing with few design changes for around 2 years before I revisit it.
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I would strongly recommend looking at Bricks builder. It really is a step above anything Divi or Elementor are currently putting out. It really is a page builder that lets you build exactly what you want without getting in the way and throwing restrictions in. It’s a class basses system so all the output is symantecly correct. Page load speeds are really low.
https://bricksbuilder.io/
Beaver Builder, robust and reliable … less stress, more done.
Get Bricks and good things will happen.
Don’t.
Absolutely not. Divi is much worse.
Even with Divi moving to v5 soon it’s still the same Divi just rebuilt underneath. There’s nothing that brings it inline with Bricks, Breakdance or even Elementor. I honestly feel Divi has missed the boat and it’s too late for it to catch up now
To those who know web dev, there are two builders considered garbage… Elementor and Divi. Sure they make some aspects easy for those who want Wix/Squarespace/done for you style stuff… but the code output is terrible.
If you enjoy a dabble… FSE/Blocks themes is the way to go, and you can probably get a lot for free. But you won’t get all the fancy effects, animated, sliding, bloated crap you get with El/Div. If you enjoy playing, learn to make your own, it’s not that hard if you lean into it.
Otherwise Breakdance is great for rapid builds and I agree Bricks is currently the best builder by a mile.
Just my thoughts… but on ‘is fse the way to go’… maybe. Done right, making WP more user-friendly and bringing more full-dev features to what was built as a blog platform is the right thing. Sadly, Automatic are so concerned with not creating breaking changes that they have made a complete disaster of WP. Part PHP, part Json, part React, CSS in multiple places, all to patch and work-around the fact that WP needs a total overhaul… instead it’s a toilet.
Unless they decide to brave it, and just fork-off a new WP people have to migrate to… I think it’ll be years before the frankensteins monster WP has become is made whole and coherent again. So the ‘lifetime’ of old themes, current builders and FSE may be the same.
My work has slowly turned away from Web dev, but if it was still my core business – I would be replacing WP altogether. Maybe process-wire, or one of the many flat-file CMS out there. So – if you’re interested in web dev, my advice is research, find the alternative that suits you and drop WP. In any case, don’t leave the horror of Elementor just to pick up the nightmare of Divi…
I just got away from Divi and moved into Kadence theme. No regrets
I’m a huge fan of Divi and have been using it for years. The term divi and lightweight can’t be in the same sentence.
I’m not so much a web developer either. But in my experience, Divi was a nightmare as it was very unresponsive at a certain point and was slowing down the website.
That’s when I switched to Elementor and never looked back. I would stick with that.
But if you’re really into coding, see if working with Gutenberg would work for you. It’s getting better over time.
If you ever want to move away from a page builder, choose WP’s block editor. Otherwise you are just going to waste your time and money. Block editor is there to stay, these page builders are not.
Personally, I would not suggest using a theme that has a page builder built in… I’ve had bad experiences with those type of themes over the 15+ years I’ve been working with WordPress. You’d be better off learning Gutenberg than using a theme like Divi.