Divi is a visual builder chosen by many web designers for its ease of use, but today, it has a lot of solid competition in the WordPress builder market. Is it worth building websites with Divi?
Main competitors
The market for building websites with WordPress has been evolving, but some builders that offer unique features have stood out. Here are a few.
Elementor
This website builder has become very popular because it offers a relatively complete free version in the official WordPress repository. For more specific functions, the paid version is an annual subscription.
In help forums and Facebook groups, it is the Swiss Army knife for solving problems because it was one of the first to incorporate editing the entire website, from the header to the footer, without touching much code.
WPBakery Page Builder
The formerly called Visual Composer became a popular builder because it used to be bundled with the purchase of premium themes.
It is one of the most mature website builders that exist today. The so-called demos of premium themes can quickly help you build a website.
It has front and back-end editors to edit the content visually by filling in fields in pop-up windows.
There are many extensions to this website builder developed by other programmers.
It doesn’t have a very native way to edit the header and footer, but there are very cheap extensions to build and call up reusable sections, like Templatera.
It is not currently the most famous builder because it is aimed more at programmers to achieve specific functions.
Gutenberg / Site Editor
It is the builder under development by the WordPress community. It is 100% open source and free.
The exciting thing about this plugin is that the builder is already included by default with WordPress, so it loads quickly and integrates well.
Unlike other builders, it does not use shortcodes to build the content but rather an elegant solution based on HTML, which in some way protects the information and makes it easier to export than others.
The future of builders is undoubtedly Gutenberg since it will not only be restricted to being the content editor but will extend its functionality to other parts of WordPress, such as editing menus, the header, the sidebar, and even complete themes without the need for complex programming.
However, Gutenberg still has a long way to go to compete with Divi. If you’re an advanced CSS user, synched blocks, block groups, and columns are enough to lay out almost any site.
Advantages of Divi
Divi has many advantages to choose from as a website builder. Below, I list some of them.
Visual editor
Its strongest point is the visual ease with which each element you insert into the pages can be configured.
If you do not know CSS, its options menu is quite complete.
Fonts, colors, spacing, columns, repositioning of elements, effects, transitions, animations, responsiveness, and filters can be customized with clicks.
A feature that has just been seen in any builder is using visually editable global styles called Presets. With this configuration, it is possible to save a lot of time since editing an element’s style can be applied to the entire site immediately.
Full Website Library
It has hundreds of templates, so you don’t have to start from scratch. With one click, you can import an already programmed website to focus on replacing information.
They have focused on this point to prevent you from buying themes and convincing you to purchase a license.
It also includes a dynamic content builder to build blogs or more advanced sections without touching code.
Disadvantages of Divi
Server resources
It is known that it consumes a lot of server resources. Without a server with good memory and easy execution times, making a website with this editor will hardly be pleasant.
It generates heavy sites if it is not optimized with caching plugins and good practices.
Community?
It depends mainly on a company rather than on the community. Its community has reported features to its developers that are not attended to promptly.
Like Elementor Pro, its affiliate program makes users recommend it with little thought.
Conclusion
Divi is an excellent option to make websites quickly and without the need to learn programming if you have the resources to hire powerful web hosting and have no problem configuring your project in depth.
It has managed to stay on the market and will integrate well with Gutenberg.
This entry arises from WordPress Guadalajara Meetup #28: Getting to know Divi in-depth, modules, Theme Builder, and everything you need to hear about Divi. (in Spanish)
I thank Jefferson Maldonado for his time and heartily recommend his premium Divi courses and tutorials at UxDivi.
Jos Velasco.
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