Customizing the look and feel of your page used to be a real challenge in the olden days of WordPress and you basically had to be really good with code, or had to know someone who was. Beyond that, there weren’t really any options. The introduction of shortcodes improved the situation to some extent but they were still not capable of truly changing the way a page looked. WordPress developers soon realized this and came up with page builder plugins. These plugins allow the user to customize the look of any WordPress page.
These page builder plugins come in many varieties so the options available differ greatly in terms of user-friendliness, options for customization and of course pricing. If you’re not entirely interested in trying out the different options out there, we’re going to save you the effort of finding the right page builder plugin.
Top 3 Page Builder Plugins
1. Elementor
Elementor is a relative newcomer to the WordPress page builder plugin market however it’s quickly become popular with designers for its ease of use and speed. This page builder has been developed with an emphasis on fast load-times and efficiency. There’s no bloat and it won’t slow down your website.
Many of the best page builders available feature what’s called a “live page builder”. A live page builder allows you to see the changes in real time, as you customize the respective change. This saves you from the hassle of previewing he changes every time you make a little tweak.
Elementor comes with a lot of pre-built website widgets that you can place on the page. The selection of widgets includes a nice diverse selection of different website elements that will allow you to build a page exactly as you want it.
Pros:
- Fast and responsive; negligible effect on website load times
- Large selection of widgets/elements
- Easy to use
Cons:
- On the pricier side
2. Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder is an easy-to-use page builder that features a large selection of website widgets and an intuitive live page editor with a drag-and-drop interface. The widgets themselves can be customized to fit your needs and they’re very resource efficient. It should be emphasized just how easy to use this page builder is. Anyone can use and become immediately familiar with it.
Pros:
- Resource-efficient
- Easy to use
- Good selection of widgets
Cons:
- Expensive
3. Visual Composer (VC)
Visual Composer is a popular page builder plugin for WordPress. You’ll often see it come pre-packaged with lots of third-party themes. Its popularity is mainly due to the level of customizability it offers and that it’s simply very familiar to use for many designers and developers. The team behind Visual Composer are fairly quick to update this plugin to compete with rivals.
Using it, we realized that this is not the slickest of page builders out there and it gets the job done very well, it’s just not very intuitive. Its effect on website load times is also noticeable. It is quite competitively priced at just $30.
Pros:
- Familiar and straight-forward user interface
- Plenty of widgets to choose from
Cons:
- Slow
- Increases page load-times