Seriously, Why You Shouldn’t Use Page Builders
Folks love page building plugins for WordPress these days. For non-coders, they allow you to create things your theme isn’t capable of doing out of the box, and give you the ability to create (extremely bloated) code by just dragging and dropping elements on the screen. For non-designers, well, I don’t know…they basically allow you to make a really ugly site.
But there are more reasons than just a poor user experience and downgrade to your SEO status with Google (yes, those things are also true, too.)
For example, what if you’re using a theme builder like Fusion, which works with the Avada theme…and then eventually want to use a different theme? Here’s what your page builder content will now do to your website:
Bummer, that isn’t content, that isn’t content at all! But, that’s what you’re stuck with, unless you want to go back to the Avada theme.
“No, no, that’s not true!” I hear some folks stating. Okay, maybe the page builder will continue to work, if it never gets deactivated in your list of plugins. If it does, and you try and reactivate it, you’ll see this handy error message:
Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Class 'Fusion_Downloader' not found in /wp-content/plugins/fusion-builder/inc/lib/inc/class-fusion-cache.php:100
Stack trace: #0 /wp-content/plugins/fusion-builder/fusion-builder.php(410): Fusion_Cache->reset_all_caches() #1 /wp-includes/class-wp-hook.php(286): FusionBuilder::activation('')
#2/wp-includes/class-wp-hook.php(310): WP_Hook->apply_filters('', Array) #3 /wp-includes/plugin.php(465): WP_Hook->do_action(Array) #4/wp-admin/plugins.php(177): do_action('activate_fusion...')
#5 {main} thrown in /wp-content/plugins/fusion-builder/inc/lib/inc/class-fusion-cache.php on line 100Awesome!
Oh and then you’re also going to see this happening, should you care what Google thinks about your site:
Maybe you’re not worried that your site is taking forever to load on a phone? It’s not like we all have them in our pockets these days…
Not looking much better on desktop…
Look at all of those files?! Just to load a single webpage…oh yeah, it’s a page builder-built site.What that image is essentially saying is, “The folks who built your theme builder have no idea what they’re doing, and don’t care, because you bought their products and they know you don’t know.” Imagine if you bought a car and it would only go 25mph, that’s what we have here. Except with page builders, we have a bunch of drivers on the road who have no idea why they’re going so slow and wondering why other businesses are in the passing lane to success while they’re stuck somewhere in Kansas waiting for a tow truck to show up.
And see that Defer unused CSS bit at the bottom? Well, that’s because in order to code endless possibilities, you need endless amounts of code.
In case you’re wondering, this very page is an example of what you want to see if you plan to win at Google:
These are the scores for this page. Now, not everyone will have high scores and it certainly takes more work than just not using page builder plugins, but…If your sole purpose in owning and maintaining a website is to drive people away, then by all means, install all of the page builder plugins. Otherwise, just stay far away, I’d say!