Wordpress Page Builders

Owned by Cole Geerts (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Aug 16, 2023 by Jeff Hebert
3 min read

KalaPress

Kalamuna’s in-house starter theme, KalaPress, leverages the power of the built-in Gutenberg block editor for the page building experience. Using the default block editor provides many advantages over a third-party page builder:

  1. Speed: Gutenberg has repeatedly been proven to have a significant Page Speed boost compared to page building plugins.

  2. Site Health & Security: Popular page builders have had significant security breaches in the past.

  3. Content Lock-In: Once you choose a page builder, you are locked into that ecosystem until and unless you do a complete site rebuild. No easy, automated method of converting from a page builder back to default WordPress exists, greatly limiting your ability to control your content going forward. Using the default WordPress editor leaves you with many more options and more freedom as time goes on.

  4. Training & Usability: The promise of page builders is that they will make it easier to create custom layouts, opening up the editing experience to designers, interns, and other non-technical staff. But that comes at a cost in terms of training, as you now have to learn basic WordPress and an entirely new ecosystem. The layers of complexity add up quickly in terms of time, frustration, and functionality.

The Cost of Disentangling From a Page Builder

At the 2023 WPCampus conference, Engineer Steve Ryan of the University of Arizona summarized the real-world issues often experienced with page builders:

Coming from a university setup where we are actively attempting to disentangle ourselves from a page builder set up, I'll reiterate the dangers of content lock in. If the thing you are using to build your pages results in a whole bunch of garbage present on the page when you turn it off or activate a new theme... it's not a great situation.

In addition, we figured out the hard way that page builders represent a trade off in usability.

On one hand, they provide a really valuable tool to our content creators who wanted more control over their sites. Builder tools also leaned into the future of WordPress well in advance of the Gutenberg block editor curve and continue to demonstrate the possibilities that exist within that mentality of content design. (Moving from something that looks like a document to something that looks like blocks of content is a pretty big paradigm shift.)

However, with the addition of those tools, you also really increase the knowledge curve necessary to do non-design oriented content management. The layers of complexity needed to "design anything" using the builder just get in the way of the user who will occasionally want to change a handful of content areas on a page and be done. It represents an additional entire body of knowledge that they have to fight against in order to do the job. So... content updaters need to know WordPress.... but they also have to know which of icons in the purple bar to push in order to get to the window where their sentence exists.

In our experience, we found that the audience sizes are much more skewed toward the occasional editor rather than the true "page builder." Particularly when we add faculty websites to the mix.

When to Consider a Page Builder Over Tailored Gutenberg Block Editor

In general, we believe page builders are best used if you already are invested in that ecosystem and have a staff comfortable with using it. They are also good if you need to be able to make highly customized designs right in the CMS and do not have access to a development team that can convert designs into blocks and patterns for you.

Summary Chart

(Chart via https://wordpress.com/go/website-building/gutenberg-vs-page-builders-which-to-choose/)

Resources

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