WordPress Theme Builders: Pros and Cons

We at Beluga are website makers, so, as you might imagine, we prefer all things custom. Anything default and premade is usually beneath our development team, but still, we can’t ignore the growing popularity of WordPress theme builders. Today we’ll take a closer look at them, trying to objectively describe their pros and cons.

WordPress theme builders: Pros and Cons

First things first. What are WordPress theme builders? Who uses them?

Theme builders exist to help designers build a website. They don’t require special skills — only somewhat decent knowledge of web design. If you know the basics and have a general idea of what your website should look like, it’s enough. Coding is (mostly) not required. A theme already has a set of fonts, elements, and functions.

WordPress theme builder: Pros

• Build a website yourself; no developers are needed
• Your website will get upgrades and support from the company that made the theme
• You can use all the pre-built functionality

WordPress theme builder: Cons

• Themes exist to be useful to a maximum number of users, a kind of one size fits all. That makes them bloated due to a huge number of features, which results in slower load times.
• Loads of CSS styles and heavy JS code make a website slower, impacting SEO (Google and users prefer fast websites)
• While having a dedicated support team is good, it’s rarely fast, so when some issue arises with your site, it can take a long time to get fixed

A lot of WordPress web development companies make use of theme builders to save time, but it rarely works. Once, we did try to use a builder, but the resulting website never looked exactly right. In order to fix the uneven distance between the blocks, we had to come up with custom CSS, which wasn’t fast. We gave up: it was faster and easier to start anew and make everything ourselves.