The Curse of the Page Builder

Feb 3, 2023

Last night’s The Apprentice struck a chord with this terrible attempt at a logo for their electric bike brand.

It’s the result of an enthusiastic amateur getting “creative” and it struck me that this is the biggest danger facing websites created with “page builder” plugins. Suddenly, the client can do whatever they like! They can spend hours (and it will take them hours) jiggling things around until the professional corporate site they launched with suddenly looks like a primary school project. Maybe the initially design-savvy contact at their office steps into another role, leaving a new recruit to take over the website management, and their eyes light up at the creative freedom they’ve suddenly acquired. That’s when you can end up with Zip Along in a Zap and bloody lightning bolts.

But isn’t that what they paid an agency for? A website they could easily manage in-house? And if so, why would a reputable agency charge for a site knocked together using freely available plugins and themes? (Hint: there’s no programming involved, so it’s cheaper to build).

I see this all the time; a charity contacted me recently asking for help with their new site. They had a list of fairly simple changes, but they couldn’t fathom out how to do it. I said I’d take a look and my heart sank when I logged in to the admin and saw the dreaded page builder.

Every page had been put together with multiple blocks and columns; within each, there were several separate elements, each of which opened up tabbed popup windows with countless options.

Making the simple changes took the best part of a day, but if the site had been put together by a developer who’d digested the client brief and worked out the best way to create a custom WordPress CMS so such changes could be made easily (more on that here), they would have taken an hour max. Instead, I’d disappeared down the rabbit hole of the page builder. And each change, once I’d found out the relevant settings to alter, had to be replicated across the entire site (so multiply the time by forty, the number of pages on the site).

If a developer is claiming something isn’t possible due to the limitations of the website theme, you – as client – should question if you’re spending your money in the right place. This is a giveaway that they’re using an off-the-shelf product.

The perception may be that a bespoke site will, like a bespoke suit, cost a lot more as there’s programming involved, actual PHP stuff, but that’s not necessarily the case. If your brief is clear, and the discovery stage is performed until both parties are satisfied, then a decent developer will plan out and design your site accordingly – both the front (what the client sees) AND the back ends (where you make the changes). The coding doesn’t need to concern you, and you’ll never even be aware of it, but the end result is that the things you need to change will be easy to change. You’ll save literally hours on website maintenance, and putting such a site together needn’t take any longer for a skilled developer than a less-skilled one will take wrestling a page-builder’s elements into position, so bear that in mind when comparing costs.

There’s also the issue of “bloat” – these plugins are HUGE, you’ll probably notice the delays when editing pages as the many megabytes of resources needed to make them work are loaded in the background. The front-end suffers too, as the code generated is many times larger than it really needs to be, so your customers may notice that your site is slower, and that can mean they’ll click away and take their business elsewhere.

So, to summarise, you should clarify before you sign the contract how your site will be built. A bespoke site and theme will be leaner, faster, and make your life easier. But if you have the creative chops, and the time, to deal with a page builder theme, then go for it.

Just bear in mind you might end up with a Zif Zaf.