Page Builders plugins which give you a lot of front end (read: stylistic) design functionality either through blocks or templates. They tend to be convenient if you are not good at coding and inconvenient if you are. Use that to figure out if you need one or not.
(Update December 2022)
Table of Contents:
- What does a page builder do?
- Do I need a Page Builder or not?
- What are some popular Page builders?
- What are some down sides of Page Builders?
What does a page builder do?
Page Builders are themes or plugins which give you a lot of front end (read: stylistic) design functionality either through blocks or templates.
You install a Page Builder when you want to design the pages of your site in a visual manner in the CMS rather than coding. The Page Builder will provide the functionality to do this and allow you to add pre-made templates and specific and useful ‘blocks’ of design to customize sections of the templates.
Do I need a Page Builder or not?
If you are comfortable writing PHP, HTM, CSS and JS then no you don’t need to use a Page Builder. You have the kinds of skills which mean you don’t need a Page Builder.
If you don’t, which is the majority of WordPress users, then a Page Builder can really help to replace this knowledge.
What are some popular Page builders?
Reddit WordPress Group also recently (late 2022) did a poll on the best page builders and Elementor and Oxygen was clearly voted the best. You can see the full post here and read its comments if you want more details. One interesting addition or comment was simply to use Gutenberg as the Page Builder.
PROTIP: This is true to some extent but also the Gutenberg Editor which is part of WordPress is becoming more and more high quality with more options and now people are starting to use this to create their own custom blocks which potentially will eventually replace the need for most Page Builders. Consider using the Gutenberg Editor if you are an advanced user but if you are a newbie to WordPress its probably easier to use a Page Builder Plugin.
What are some down sides of Page Builders?
Page Builders come at a ‘cost’ in that they are often times slow with respect to page speed for the public user and cumbersome to use compared to being able to code in the CMS. If you don’t have the coding skills to replace the need for a a page builder then you can often alleviate the slowness in page load by taking some extra steps which I have outlines here in a Page Speed Optimization Process which is mostly for free in WordPress.
