A WordPress visual builder makes it easy for you to build and customize beautiful websites all on your own. It makes a cinch for even non-technical people to make and edit your own WordPress website. In this article, we’ll compare the most popular drag and drop WordPress page builders, so you can choose the best one for your needs and start creating your site.
Why Use a Visual Builder for WordPress?
Once you are familiar with the basics of creating websites, you might realize that the native WordPress page editor doesn’t include many customization options. If you want to fully customize your web pages on your WordPress website, you’ll need to install a visual builder or page builder in your account. WordPress offers many themes for starters as well as advanced users. You just install them, customize them, and you’re good to go. But with these default themes, your developers won’t have much flexibility when it comes to making design or functionality modifications on your WordPress pages. That’s where the functionality of a page builder plugin becomes important.
A WordPress page builder is a plugin that enables you to create and customize your page layouts in WordPress. They are installed into your account and used to design and develop new pages based on your site’s theme. Even if you don’t have any knowledge in web design, page builders make it easy to add an appealing look, feel, and functionality to your website pages.
What to Look for in a Page Builder Plugin?
- Compatibility: You must ensure that the page builder plugin you are going to choose is compatible with your current WordPress theme and WordPress editor. If you find any compatibility issues, then you might want to use a builder-compatible theme for your site.
- Mobile Responsiveness: Responsiveness is so important that it should allow you to create responsive, mobile-friendly pages right out of the box. Make sure that the builder you choose has options to view the page in a mobile preview. This way, you can make sure that your web design carries over to phone or tablet devices.
- SEO: You need to make sure that your page builder is creating SEO friendly layouts.
- Features: The best drag and drop page builders for WordPress will have both the functionality you need and the features you want. An easy-to-use page builder lets you to quickly build or customize pages with a drag and drop interface.
Now that you know what to look for in a WordPress page builder, let’s look at some of the best options available for 2023.
1. Elementor
Elementor is the first free and open-source advanced page builder for WordPress. With its drag and drop builder, you can easily drag and drop elements, edit them, and preview everything in real-time. Elementor is well-known for its high-speed performance, which makes it entertaining and easy to build with. With its considerable template library, you get hundreds of beautiful WordPress templates by their top-level designers, which can be exported to different websites through the page builder. Elementor supports all responsive mobile-friendly design, allowing you to build web pages that work great on any device. While the free plugin offers many useful options, you can always upgrade to Elementor Pro to get extra features.
Features
- For maintenance, you can get your site offline with its built-in maintenance mode.
- Supports undo and redo functions, so you can go back to any changes that you made earlier or use revision history to check and use all your previously saved versions
- Integrating your website with a third-party web application is a breeze using its Zapier integration.
Also read: Best Social Proof Tools and Plugins to Improve Sales in Your Website
2. Oxygen Builder
Oxygen Builder is a powerful visual editor WordPress plugin. One of the main features of this plugin is that it cuts out most of the main tabs and toolbars you would typically see from WordPress and focuses only on the page builder options like buttons for making containers, paragraphs, and text blocks. The plugin also has HTML elements that developers can use to further customize the options. It comes with an import/export feature that permits moving designs from one website to another.
Features
- Integrates well with Visual Composer, Beaver Builder, and Elementor.
- provides you a lifetime of updates and support, and you can use it on as many client sites as you want.
- Full control over WooCommerce store.
3. Brizy
Brizy is developed by Themefuse and is one of the newest page builder plugin available on the market. This is exclusively a front-end visual page builder that offers 26 basic elements. You also get additional elements for certain features, like a menu element when you’re building a header. There is a free version and pro version of Brizy. It offers a “global styling” feature that allows you to change elements on pages across your entire site simultaneously. This way, you can launch full site redesigns without needing to address each page individually.
Features
- Animated sliders in blocks
- Because of how Brizy’s interface works, there is no set formula for styling options like the other page builders.
- design popups using the Brizy interface and use conditions to control where/when they display.
4. Page Builder by Site Origin
SiteOrigin is yet another popular WordPress page builders in the WordPress directory, with over a million active installs. With SiteOrigin, building responsive, column-based content is a breeze. Your content will adapt to all devices, regardless of its screen resolution. Its drag-and-drop system paired with backend customization make it excellent for both beginners as well as advanced users. The SiteOrigin builder works smoothly with your existing WordPress widgets, so you can include all your favourite widgets to the websites you build. You can also find a lot of neat compatible WordPress themes built by the same folks behind the SiteOrigin plugin.
Features
- History tool to undo/redo changes
- Backend and frontend live page builder.
- The SiteOrigin Page Builder provides a sleek, simple toolbar that’s easy to understand. You can add the most important elements like rows and widgets.
Also read: Best Live Chat Plugins for Your WordPress Website
5. Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder is one of the finest drag-and-drop WordPress page builders that is especially suited for beginner sites. Its drag-and-drop page builder comes with pre-made and customizable templates and gives you the ability to create a website the way you want without owning any coding skills. You can drag and drop to build beautiful pages with ease. Beaver Builder also works with most of the WordPress themes giving you full control over your content. Even if you stop using the plugin, your content gets transferred to the WordPress editor, which is also known as WYSIWYG editor.
Features
- Beaver Builder comes with modules for adding useful page elements like special buttons, image sliders, accordion menus, etc.
- More than 30 pre-built landing and content templates
- Live frontend editor that allows you to customize your pages in real-time
- Comes with content templates like pricing tables, about page, services, portfolio, and team pages.
6. Divi Builder
The Divi Builder by Elegant Themes is a popular drag and drop page builder plugin that enables you to preview your design as you build. You can use this module to embed a video on your page, furthermore, you can also embed multiple videos together in a rotating carousel. The plugin comes with 46 builder modules, 20 row types, and 3 section types, all of which can be combined and arranged to build any type of website. With its advanced design settings, everything is customizable using this plugin. To install the Divi builder plugin on your website, you’ll need to purchase their yearly membership plan.
Features
- Divi comes with a number of content elements like pricing tables, audio player, calls to action, buttons, and more that you can use to build the perfect WordPress site.
- Editing within the website’s frontend, rather than opening a settings panel.
- If you have CSS knowledge, you can add custom CSS code to any element.
7. SeedProd
SeedProd is a freemium drag and drop landing page builder plugin for WordPress as well as the best WordPress coming soon plugin. Building a landing page on your site with SeedProd is a child’s play thanks to its user-friendly drag-and-drop builder. The plugin also lets you select from 100+ landing page templates, including sales, coming soon, webinar, etc. Since it’s mobile-ready and responsive, your landing page will work great on any device. The free version of the plugin is available to download from the WordPress repository and the premium pricing starts at $31.60. So if you are looking for an easy to use, quick, and powerful landing page plugin, you can surely go with this option.
Features
- Many impressive landing page templates that convert including optin, sales, webinars, thank you pages, and more.
- You can always go back to any previously saved point and even see who made the changes
- Seamlessly integrate with autoresponders
- reCAPTCHA spam protection
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8. Themify Builder
Themify Builder is a free page builder plugin that offers a simple yet powerful drag-and-drop page builder. Even though it’s a drag-and-drop setup, Themify builder lets you customize almost every aspect of your web page. The builder comes with nearly 60 prebuilt layouts and animation effects that you can choose from. This helps you to build beautiful pages like a shot without having to start from scratch. All you have to do is simply import the layouts you want to use, replace the images and text, that’s it. Themify also provides several ready-to-use modules you can add to your pages and posts.
Features
- 25+ premium add-ons to extend its functionality including WooCommerce, Slider Pro, Bar Chart, Contact, and Progress Bar.
- Lets you edit your pages from the backend or frontend. In both cases, you can move modules around easily and customize them fully.
- It provides a tool where you can hide some website elements depending on the device being used.
9. Visual Composer
Visual Composer is a complete website builder for WordPress and is a great tool for both beginners and developers that are looking for an easy way to customize the look of their site. The plugin provides both frontend and backend visual editors. The frontend solution shows you real-time results as you adjust your website, while the backend editor is more of a grid-based interface with modules to drag and drop. You can also add stylish backgrounds like parallax, gradient, slideshow, carousel, use flexible rows and columns to create grid layouts, and more.
Features
- Compatible with almost any WordPress theme and the newest WordPress editor
- Use flexible rows and columns to create grid layouts; and you can even edit your logo, menus, headers, footers, sidebars, etc.
- Visual composer allows you to hide elements and save them for later, cleaning up your design area and reminding you about the module.
10. Thrive Architect
Thrive Architect by Thrive Themes is a page builder that is built for conversion-focused websites. One significant module offered by this builder is a countdown timer. You can set up a promotional offer or launch, then create a timer that drives urgency around your offers and motivates your customers’ buying decisions. Thrive Architect also comes with a drag-and-drop editing tool and 271 prebuilt landing page templates. With Thrive Architect, you can quickly create a stunning homepage, sales page, blog posts, and everything you could ask for.
Features
- Comes with customizable buttons, countdown timers, testimonials, and lead generation forms
- Thrive Architect also offers true inline text editing.
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11. WP Page Builder
WP Page Builder is a new offering from Themeum, an established WordPress developer. Though the plugin is new, it is developed by a team that’s been around in the WordPress world for a while. WP Page Builder grants users strict control over their page layouts with pre-made templates, customizable rows and columns, and even a library to save any layouts you create. The toolbar of the plugin is very easy to understand making use of rows and columns even easier. The add-ons are created to perform a specific set of tasks and are able to execute them with perfection.
Features
- It allows you to hide any existing element to clean up later and will allow you to save them for later use.
- The page builder focuses on frontend editing to provide its user with a great visual of their work.
12. Bricks
Bricks is a new entrant into the page builder market. It assures you a faster, more customizable and performant tool to visually design your entire site. Unlike most other builder plugins, the project is bundled as a theme. You can visually design your entire site without any coding knowledge. But if you know how to code, you can do even more. Pricing currently starts at $59 for a lifetime license. New users can test it at Free Bricks Playground.
Features
- You can do visual full site editing and edit like a document.
- Blazing fast as it runs on the most modern Vue.js 3 framework and is Gutenberg compatible.
- You can populate your site with dynamic data from plugins like Advanced Custom Fields, Pods, Meta box, CMB2, or any other WordPress custom fields.
Conclusion
When it comes to WordPress page builders, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. The right page builder tool will save you the time of creating pages from scratch, the effort of learning your site’s backend, and the cost of a developer. We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress page builder for your needs. If you enjoyed this article, you might also love reading the best CDN services for WordPress.
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Visual Composer is flying under the radar. So many new features released lately. It is going on par with other good builder like Beaver Builder
Zion Builder definitely deserves to be at the top of the list for its impressive performance on every website I’ve built with it. It’s a noticeable improvement from my experiences with Elementor, and I also appreciate that it has some similarities to Oxygen. Overall, I’ve had great results with Zion Builder and highly recommend it to others.