Page Builders: What You Need To Know Before Using

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Envious of great-looking sites others have here in Wealthy Affiliate, I bought a premium theme from Elegant themes almost a year ago. It was Divi at $80+ price.

I was so confident I can easily use the theme and hopefull that money will come crashing in. Unfortunately, aside from my being busy with my offline business, I wasted a lot of time designing, changing, and editing my landing page using that theme.

I should have spent those time creating content and marketng.

Just recently, after a regular update with the theme, I was shocked to find that all of my customizations were reset. I am very sure it's the culprit as I don't remember doing anything other than making an update to the theme.

Realizing that if I continue using the theme, I will have to experience the problem again and again, I changed the theme without hesitation to Omega by Themehall, a free wordpress theme.

Here's what I got...

As you can see here in this screenshot, all the remains of my home landing page were codes, bare codes. Sometimes I wonder if content in a landing page created by Divi can really be indexed or ranked by Google bots.

I remember being warned here before that these page builders, whether they are plugins or through a theme like Divi, once you start using them you should you're like getting married to them for life.

These themes are very special, they run on special codes. I am not a technical person, I just can imagine that the system involved in these kind of themes goes like this...

By using special codes, the web page or website are instructed to display special web designing system that's quite different from how ordinary free wordpress themes work. That if you stop using these plugins or premium theme and shift to an ordinary theme, you will start getting trouble displaying the webpage properly.

Bare codes will appear.

I hope this experience of mine teach others here a lesson that if you want to use Elementor page builder plugin or Divi page builder theme, make sure you are willing to be tied with them forever.

Are you familiar with the song Hotel California by Eagles?

That's it. Using Elementor plugin, or any other related plugin, using Thrive or Divi theme, can be compared to entering Hotel California...

"You can check in anytime you like, but you can never leave."

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Recent Comments

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UPDATE: It's funny, I'm back at using Divi. lol

Now there is something to think of. I do use plugin, Elementor. I am satisfied with it.

However, I do keep all of my "original" posts written here in the site content, so if anything goes wrong, I can "simply" c/p them to my site.

I understand it can get messy if there are hundreds of posts involved. That is why good customer and tech service is important for any theme or plugin you choose.

I hope your site will recover and that you learned something from this experience, no matter how hard or heavy it is :)

Best wishes,
Dalibor

Is this an issue that a child theme would help to avoid?

Sadly no, the codes that Gomer is seeing are the special mark-up codes Divi uses to define its internal blocks.

Unfortunately, if you build with Divi then try to use something else, you're left with the mark-up code in your page text.

This is actually why I abandoned using Divi for my own site. I wanted the flexibility of switching themes until I was happy with whatever I settled on.

Plus, I was never happy with the page speed rank of my Divi based sites.

Thank you, I appreciate the response because I had only been hearing good things about page builders. This will be very useful when I make a decision about a premium theme upgrade in the future.

I actually use Divi for client sites (I'm a web developer) - it's fantastic for building custom page layouts but even though I use them a lot for business websites, I don't think they're good for affiliate marketing.

You take a hit to your page speed, and I found I was spending more time messing with the page to make it look pretty than I was writing content.

And then there's the problem if you ever want to use a different theme.... eek!

I am getting used to Guttenberg now, it seems to have a little extra design element with block quotes which is already enough to distract me. I have installed on my siterubix MMO type site elementor but never got around to caring to do much with that.

I'm really starting to LOVE Gutenberg.

I'm using it A LOT in my blog posts.

I write my content in Site Content, publish it, then edit it in Wordpress. I convert the text to blocks and then fine tune it.

I am contented with WordPress free themes.

I think it's better to spend money on premium themes such as from Studiopress.

Sorry for that misadventure...I want to buy a theme but after reading this, I kinda doubt now.

Great Post and well explained as well. I have used the Divi Builder quite a lot in the past and noticed something was wrong when the Contact Page was not working but I was unaware until people started saying that I never responded, but I was totally unaware.

Yes, I now use Elementor, much simpler.

Good Luck in future endeavors

Tim.

What annoyed me and the reason I discarded it even I have paid $80 using borrowed money for the theme is, I discovered that with a single update like that I can find myself re-doing again my preferred design like the size of the fonts, the color of the blocks, etc. Do I have to start all over again customizing the theme everytime there's an update? That's very annoying.

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