One provider offers you a site built with Elementor, another talks about Divi, a third about Astra, and the last one about a theme developed for you. On the mockups, all four look alike. Yet they don’t do the same thing, and the difference shows up mostly after launch, when the site has to be edited, kept fast and updated.
Three families people confuse
Elementor, Divi and Bricks are page builders. They replace the WordPress editor with their own: you place sections, columns and modules with the mouse, seeing the result as you go. The layout of each page is saved in the builder’s format.
Astra and Blocksy are multipurpose themes. They provide the header, the footer, the colours and the typography, and let you fill the pages with the WordPress block editor, or with a page builder if you add one. Both are free on WordPress.org, with a paid Pro module for advanced options.
A theme built for the site, finally, starts from your design and your content. Each planned section (a team, an offer, a testimonial) exists in the theme, with its variations. You fill in fields, and the theme takes care of the layout. That is what we develop for our clients.
What Elementor and Divi do well
They are popular for good reasons. You can put a page together in a few hours, without a developer, seeing exactly what the visitor will see. Ready-made templates let you start quickly, and the community is huge: tutorials, add-on plugins, providers who know them.
For a marketing team that creates its own landing pages every week, without waiting for anyone, a well-framed page builder makes sense. Same for a tight-budget project that has to go live quickly. If your team already works with Elementor, Bricks or Divi, we can build the site with it, the right way: global styles and templates, few added plugins and pages optimized for speed.
What a page builder costs later
The price of a page builder isn’t on its pricing page. It shows up over the years.
Weight, first. To offer every layout option with the mouse, a page builder adds stylesheets, scripts and levels of nesting that the visitor downloads on every page. Elementor and Divi have made progress, but a page built with them is still heavier than the same page built for its content. A caching plugin and good settings make up part of the gap, rarely all of it.
The licence, next. Elementor Pro renews every year, like most of the add-ons that come with it. Divi offers a yearly subscription or a one-time payment. The amounts are modest. The real risk is the forgotten licence: without it, no more updates, and a page builder that is no longer updated becomes a way in for attackers.
Locked-in content, above all. Elementor saves the layout in its own format, separate from the WordPress content, and leaves only a plain-text copy in the editor. The day you remove it, you are left with the text and images, stacked up, and every page has to be rebuilt. Divi 4 left something worse: its shortcodes, displayed in plain sight on the pages. Divi 5 dropped them, but Elegant Themes, its publisher, warns that if you leave Divi 5 for another theme or page builder, you start from a blank slate.
Finally, there is the layout that breaks. A page builder lets you change everything, including what shouldn’t be changed. Each person who works on the site adjusts a margin here, a text size there, a colour picked by eye. Over time and with each new person involved (the original agency, an employee, a freelancer), the pages lose their visual consistency: headings and text no longer have the same size from one page to the next, and the brand colour sometimes exists in several shades. Add the packs of extra modules, each with its own updates, and the site becomes fragile. We cover this in our article on essential WordPress plugins.
Astra and Blocksy, the reasonable compromise
These themes play a different role. Lightweight and free in their basic version, they work with the WordPress block editor: Blocksy presents itself as fully compatible with it, Astra as compatible with the editor and with page builders. For a small site, with simple pages and a tight budget, one of these themes with the native editor is a defensible choice. We recommend it over a page builder.
Their limits show when the site grows. Settings pile up in the customizer, the useful options are often reserved for the Pro module, and Astra’s starter templates install an extra blocks plugin (Spectra) or assume a page builder. Every specific need is solved with one more plugin, and the site ends up looking like many others that started from the same template.
A theme built for your site: who is it for?
For a business website meant to last several years, it is our choice, and we stand by it. The theme contains only what your site needs: pages are lighter, there are fewer plugins to update, and speed and accessibility are handled in the code, not through a series of settings.
Day to day, each section has its fields (title, text, image, button) and a few planned variations, such as the side of the image or the background colour. You change the content without risking breaking the layout, because the layout isn’t in your hands.
That is also its limit, and it is better to know it upfront. You can’t invent a layout that wasn’t planned: a new section requires a developer. The upfront cost is higher than with a ready-made theme. In return, the site stays fast and consistent, and it doesn’t depend on any page builder licence.
| Page builder (Elementor, Divi) | Multipurpose theme (Astra, Blocksy) | Theme built for the site | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Getting started | Fast | Fast | Longer: design and development |
| Upfront cost | Low | Low | Higher |
| Layout freedom | Total | That of the block editor | The planned sections and variations |
| Risk of breaking the design | High | Medium | Low |
| Page weight | The heaviest | Light | The lightest |
| Yearly licence | Yes, for the Pro version | For the Pro module, if you take it | None for the theme |
| Leaving the tool | Pages to rebuild | Fairly simple theme change | The content stays in WordPress |
If your site already runs on Elementor or Divi
No knee-jerk redesign. A site built with Elementor can gain a lot of speed: unnecessary plugins removed, scripts deferred, animations lightened, caching set up properly. It is often the first thing to try, and it is the principle of our speed optimization, which starts from the site as it is, page builder included.
A redesign is justified when the foundations can no longer keep up: every change breaks something else, the site stays slow despite optimization, or your needs have changed. We detail those signs in our article on redesigns. In that case, rebuilding the site with the same page builder and the same habits often brings back the same problems.
How to choose the foundation of your WordPress site
Start by asking who will create the pages. If your team composes new layouts every week, a well-framed page builder makes sense. If it mostly updates text, images and news, sections planned in advance are enough, and they protect it.
Then think about the life span of the site. For a campaign site or a first site, Astra or Blocksy with the native editor do the job. For a company’s main website, meant to last, the foundation matters more than the upfront price.
Finally, look at what the site has to bring in. If it attracts your clients through Google or advertising, its speed turns into requests, and a theme built for its content has a head start.
If you are still unsure, ask the provider to show you the admin of a site they delivered, and try editing a page yourself. Ten minutes are enough to know whether the tool suits you. On the WordPress sites we develop, you test the editing before launch.
