WordPress page builders compared: 5 ways to build your website.

Choosing a page builder is one of the first decisions on a WordPress project. It shapes design quality, how fast the site loads, and how comfortable you'll be editing it.

What is a WordPress page builder?

WordPress keeps your content in a database, and a theme decides how it looks. A page builder sits between the two. It's the screen you use to lay out a page and edit what's on it, such as sections, columns, headings, images, buttons and forms, without writing code. Depending on the builder, you either arrange those pieces visually on the page or fill them in through simple forms.

Strictly speaking, not all five here are page builders. The Classic Editor is WordPress's original text editor, and the Block Editor is the one WordPress comes with today, which has grown into a builder of its own. Divi, Elementor and WPBakery are plugins added on top of WordPress. We've included the two built-in editors because plenty of business sites run on them, and because they're the obvious alternative to adding a builder at all.

How a builder is set up matters as much as which one you pick. A developer can hand you a builder full of generic settings, or one where each part of the page is a custom piece that only asks for your content. Most of the difference in what it's like to edit your site comes from that choice, and it's why the same builder can feel easy on one site and frustrating on another.

Who this comparison is for

We've written this for the person who looks after the site once it's built. We assume that's you: you won't design the site yourself, and you'll mostly change text, images and links, and now and then add an item to a list, like a new team member or FAQ. Whatever you change has to look right on phones and tablets too, without extra work.

We also assume each site is built by a capable WordPress developer using the builder the way a professional would: custom blocks for the Block Editor, custom fields with the Classic Editor, Elementor Pro, and custom components for WPBakery. We cover the five in alphabetical order, then score them side by side and hand out a few awards.

If you're still deciding whether WordPress is the right platform in the first place, start with our look at WordPress in 2026.

Block Editor (Gutenberg)

The Block Editor is the editor that comes with WordPress. It was developed under the project name Gutenberg (after Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press) and replaced the old editing screen in WordPress 5.0, released in December 2018. The launch was rough. Many long-time users and developers pushed back hard, which is why the Classic Editor plugin exists at all. Since then it has grown from a post editor into a full site editor: WordPress 5.9 in January 2022 let you edit headers, footers and templates with blocks too, and WordPress 7.0, released in May 2026, brought further editor and admin improvements. Real-time collaboration, Google Docs-style, was meant to headline 7.0 but was pulled a few weeks before release and moved to a future version. It's where WordPress itself is putting all its effort, so new features land here first, and most new plugins and themes are built with it in mind. On a professionally built site, the developer usually adds custom blocks for the site's own sections, so you fill in content rather than style it.

The catch is the editing screen. Your text sits on the page, but a block's settings live in a sidebar, and selecting the right block inside nested groups takes practice. It's quicker than it looks once you know it, but it takes longer to get comfortable with than the forms of a WPBakery or Classic Editor site.

Official site: wordpress.org/gutenberg

Classic Editor

The Classic Editor isn't a page builder. It's the single text box with a toolbar that WordPress used for its first fifteen years, kept alive by an official plugin from the WordPress team. The plugin appeared in late 2017, while the Block Editor was still in development, as a way for sites to keep the old screen when 5.0 arrived. It was supposed to be a bridge: the original promise was support until the end of 2021. That was extended, and the plugin page now says it will be maintained "until 2024, or as long as is necessary." It was last updated in May 2026. Most of the sites still using it are older ones, sites built on themes that expect it, or teams that write long text content and never wanted blocks. Layouts on those sites usually come from the theme or from shortcodes, not from the editor.

That's what limits it to simple sites. Everything you edit lives in one long block of text, so a page can't be much more than text and images unless a developer builds a fixed layout for it. Anything richer or more varied goes back to the developer, and editing inside that long block is easier to get wrong than it looks.

Official site: wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor

Divi

Divi is made by Elegant Themes, a company Nick Roach started in 2008 selling WordPress themes. Divi launched in 2013 as a theme with a built-in drag-and-drop builder, and the builder was later sold as a standalone plugin too. It grew on a simple pitch: one membership, every design tool, unlimited sites. That made it a favourite of freelancers and small-business owners building their own sites. In February 2026, after a long public alpha and beta, Elegant Themes released Divi 5, a ground-up rewrite aimed at the speed and code-quality complaints that followed Divi 4 for years. Divi 4 got six months of critical fixes after the launch.

For an owner, keeping a Divi site on-brand is the hard part. Every module has its own colour, font and spacing settings, often set separately for desktop, tablet and phone, and those hand-set values override the site's global styles. Over time pages drift from the brand, and a rebrand means hunting down every stray value page by page.

Official site: elegantthemes.com/gallery/divi

Elementor

Elementor was founded in 2016 in Israel by Yoni Luksenberg, Ariel Klikstein and Yakir Sitbon. Its free plugin went up on WordPress.org in May 2016, and the timing was good. The WordPress editor was still the Classic Editor, the Block Editor was two years away, and Elementor offered what most people wanted: drag something onto the page and see exactly how it will look. A free version that did most of the job, with a paid Pro version for theme building, forms and pop-ups, turned it into the default choice for a lot of people building their first site. In March 2026 the company released Elementor 4.0, which rebuilt the editor around reusable variables, classes and components (it calls this the Atomic Editor). It has been the default for new sites since April 2026. No other builder has grown as fast over the past six years, and none comes close to its size.

For an owner, maintaining an Elementor site is the hard part. Content ends up spread across pages, Theme Builder templates, components, pop-ups and add-on packs, and many sizes and spacings are set per device. Changing one thing means first finding where it lives, then checking it on three screen sizes.

Official site: elementor.com

WPBakery Page Builder

WPBakery is the oldest builder here. It launched in 2011 as Visual Composer, sold on Envato's CodeCanyon marketplace, and it was one of the first tools to give WordPress a proper row-and-column layout editor. Its real growth came through ThemeForest: premium theme authors licensed it and bundled it with their themes, so a very large number of sites got Visual Composer without anyone choosing it directly. In late 2017 the developers launched a separate product and Envato's licensing rules meant the two couldn't share a name, so the original plugin was renamed WPBakery Page Builder. The Visual Composer name went to the new product. That bundling history is why it still turns up on so many older sites, and it's also where its reputation for being clunky comes from: most people met it through a theme that exposed every setting at once. Built with custom components, where each part of the page only asks for its content, it's a very different tool to edit. It's still sold as a one-time license, not a subscription, which is rare now.

Built with custom components, it's easy to maintain because you only ever fill in content: text, images, links and new list items, with the design and every screen size handled inside the component. It stays hassle-free because WPBakery's own updates rarely touch those components, so the site keeps working the way it did on launch day. The catch is that all of this depends on the developer. Many sites get WPBakery bundled with an off-the-shelf theme instead. Without custom components, you see every setting at once and get none of these benefits.

Official site: wpbakery.com

Other WordPress builders worth knowing

Two smaller builders come up often enough to mention. Beaver Builder has a loyal agency following for being stable and conservative. Bricks is still small but growing fast, mostly among developers who care about clean output and performance. Neither has the reach of the five above. Either can be the right tool in the right hands, but it's harder to find another developer to take over a site built on them.

Bilingual and multilingual WordPress sites

If you sell into Quebec or serve customers in both official languages, your site probably needs to be in English and French. On WordPress that usually means WPML, the most widely used translation plugin, and it works with all five builders here. What changes is how smooth it is day to day.

With the Block Editor, WPML handles WordPress's own blocks out of the box. With WPBakery custom components or Classic Editor custom fields, the developer registers each component once, and from then on translators see only the text while the layout carries over to the second language untouched. Divi 5 and Elementor 4 are both supported, but WPML has spent this year catching up with their new versions, and a few gaps are still open. On Elementor sites, templates, add-on packs and separate desktop and mobile versions of a section can also mean translating the same thing more than once.

Side-by-side comparison

The scores are ours, based on building and maintaining sites on all five, and they assume the owner and the professional build described at the top. The total gives a quick overall picture, but weigh the rows that matter most to you. If you'll be the one updating the site every week, the first three rows count for more than the rest.

Cost is scored 10 for free, 9 for a one-time price, and 3 to 6 for a yearly subscription depending on the price. Divi scores 9 because of its $249 lifetime license. Elementor has a free version, but most professionally built Elementor sites need Pro, from $49/year. WPBakery is $82 once per site. For context on how widely each builder is used, HTTP Archive data for April 2026 puts Elementor on 32.67% of WordPress sites, the Block Editor on 20.62%, WPBakery on 8.52% and Divi on 5.72%, and the Classic Editor has more than 8 million active installs on WordPress.org. Trouble-free for the next 5 years is how likely a site built today gets through the typical life of a website without the builder forcing a rebuild, a migration or a support problem.

Our awards

Badges

Which WordPress page builder should you choose?

There are two clear winners, WPBakery and the Block Editor, and we choose WPBakery for its stability. The Block Editor changes with almost every WordPress release, and custom blocks need regular updates to keep up. WPBakery changes slowly, and custom components keep working the way they did on launch day. That's why Fifth and Missing builds most client sites with WPBakery and custom components. We design the site, build or reuse the components it needs, and hand over an editor where you update text, images and links and add new items to lists, without being able to knock the layout out of shape. We explain the reasoning in more detail in our look at WordPress in 2026.

Planning a new WordPress site, or wondering whether the one you have is built on the right foundation? See our WordPress design work and web design in Barrie, or tell us about your site and we'll give you a straight answer.

Written by Martin Reboledo