WordPress Themes and Page Builders

Our discussion in this article here is to put some light on the current WordPress Themes and use of page builders by them. Well for most reasons page builders are used to enhance the way people can post content and also lots of tabs, accordions and other items come automatically with it.

It is in a way an advanced editor which can be used for multiple purpose to lay your content in a visibly better way. The visual approach is better here and since its just drag and drop and use of elements already given inside the page builder it is easy for an end user to just use the elements and create whatever they want out of it.

Now there are various reasons why there is a love and hate relationship for page builders among end users as well as developers. Hence we are going to find this out in this article why WordPress themes need page builders and for some reasons they should be better than its current form.

The follow are the reasons we think why Page builders are Popular nowadays:

No coding required: Page builders are a way to develop content in your own way and without using any coding knowledge. They can be used to develop an interesting page with nice layout of content without the help of any professional developer or designer.

Hence these page builders are popular nowadays and WordPress theme developers try to add them within their themes as an additional feature. So that people with no knowledge of coding can easily add any elements they want and can create pages without being dependent on the designers.

Even designers can now develop WordPress themes for their clients: Designers earlier used to depend heavily on developers to develop websites and pages for them but with page builders this has become an easy way for them to just drag and drop and create the layout they want with as many sidebars they want or need and they can just add the elements they need like testimonials, sliders, accordions, tabs etc.

End users can now create their own WordPress theme website: End users used to be dependent on coders and designers even for small changes but now with the use of Page builders in WordPress themes even end users can do several changes themselves without being dependent on coders or designers. This is a good thing since they can now do the changes themselves whenever the need arises.

Another marketing tool to make WordPress theme stand out from competition: Yes this is another tool which adds immense functionality to a WordPress theme as it gives ability for designers as well as end users to be independent with respect to content as well as gives users freedom to add any kind of page they want in future.

Change of theme doesn't require any change in content: Since the content and page builder is a plugin it doesn't require any additional efforts when change of theme happens and hence you need not do anything while your content remains same only the design changes with the change of the theme.

Having seen the Pros and the benefits of Page builders and why they are becoming increasing popular themes days lets focus on the reasons why Page builders aren't ideal in every situation and why every WordPress themes need not be using it as a tool.

Reasons why some hate Page builders

Too much of learning curve: Page builders can have a lot of learning curve because it is yet another system within WordPress itself and acts independently of the editor that is by default provided within the system. Also not many people would be able to drag and drop a create layouts who are using WordPress for the first time and they may ask help of designers or developers to do this for them which defeats the purpose of page builders in the first place of making things simple. It may be simple for those who have got a hang of it but for new users things could seem to be awkward as well as too much.

Generates too much junk and unnecessary code: Page builders just care about visual appearance with little care for how the code would appear to search engines as well as how it will affect the page coding.

Page builders also do not apply any code commenting in between so for another developer to use it and do some changes he might have to check how it has been done previously and that in itself takes a lot of time. WordPress themes with page builders generate a lot of junk and unnecessary code in terms of shortcodes as well as scripts which look bad in terms of backend.

Slows down the page due to too much code: Too much of script usage and too much of shortcode reference from the functions file within a loop is but obviously going to reduce the time taken for the page to load. So if a lot of content is coming from the page builder and a lot of fancy stuff like accordion as well as testimonial slider or other lightbox is used then these will load their independent scripts as well which in turn will slow down the page and page speed test will show bad results for this page.

Future changes also need to be done using the same page builder: Page builders don't provide an easy way to output the existing content in some other form. So tomorrow in case you want to change your theme and use something else then you might use the new theme but the content has to come from the page builder otherwise you are required to manually copy the content and again redo these parts which makes it difficult sometimes and also your website becomes overly dependent on the page builder. Also you are using some other page builder with a WordPress theme and your new WordPress theme uses some other page builder then exporting of your data from one builder to another is a tedious task left to developers.

Not SEO friendly: Since a lot of junk code is generated plus it is generated in terms of shortcodes and haphazard scripts being used within content area to visually show a nice page it can effect your SEO as the SEO friendliness of that particular page is not that good.

Hence a few developers avoid use of Page builders in their respective WordPress themes due to this fact and the above as well.

So whether to use a Page builder or not to use a page builder within a WordPress theme one has to consider the merits and demerits of it and accordingly decide on the usage.

A Premium WordPress theme that can meet all ends and requirements is what everyone desires for the payment they make. This theme is both flexible in terms of functionality and its uses as well as adaptable for any type of industry and domains.