Page builders — Elementor, Divi, WPBakery, and their many cousins — promised a revolution. Anyone could build a website without writing code. Drag, drop, done.

For clients who need to manage their own content, I understand the appeal. For professional development work, I've stopped using them. Here's why.

The performance problem

Page builders generate bloated HTML. To make drag-and-drop work across infinite possible combinations of elements, they output a lot of markup that isn't specific to your design — it's generic structure that supports the builder's flexibility model.

The result is pages that are structurally heavier than they need to be, often loaded with inline styles and JavaScript that the builder requires even for elements you're not using. This creates performance problems that are difficult to fix because the bloat is baked into how the tool works.

Performance matters for SEO. Google measures Core Web Vitals — load time, visual stability, interactivity — as ranking factors. Sites built on page builders frequently underperform on these metrics, and fixing it usually requires either fighting the builder's output or abandoning it.

The flexibility ceiling

Page builders feel unlimited until they aren't. You can do everything they support until you need to do something they don't.

When a design requires a custom layout that the builder's components can't produce, you start fighting it. You're editing raw HTML in a visual editor that wasn't designed for that. You're adding custom CSS to override the builder's CSS. You're writing shortcodes or custom blocks that partially integrate with the builder's system.

At that point, you're not building faster — you're building around constraints that a hand-coded site wouldn't have. I've spent more time wrestling a page builder into compliance with a design requirement than it would have taken to build the same thing from scratch.

The maintenance problem

Page builders couple your content to their specific data format. Your posts and pages don't just contain HTML — they contain the builder's proprietary data structures.

When the builder updates, things can break. When you want to switch themes or migrate to a different platform, the migration is significantly more complex. When the builder plugin gets abandoned by its developer — which has happened to several of them — you're left with a site that depends on software nobody's maintaining.

Hand-coded templates and clean HTML have none of these dependencies. The content is the content. The layout is the layout. They're not entangled with a commercial product's roadmap.

When page builders are fine

I'm not against page builders categorically. For a small business owner who genuinely needs to update their own layouts regularly, and who accepts the performance and flexibility tradeoffs, a page builder gives them real independence. That's a legitimate use case.

For client projects where the developer controls the output, the performance targets matter, and the site needs to be maintainable over years — I'd rather write the code.

What I do instead

For content management, I build custom admin interfaces where the client manages content — text, images, structured data — without touching the layout. The layout is code. The content is data. They don't overlap.

For the frontend, I use Tailwind CSS, which gives me the flexibility of arbitrary styling without the overhead of a visual builder. Blade templates in Laravel are clean, version-controlled, and maintainable by anyone who knows HTML.

The result is a site that's faster, more maintainable, and more flexible than one built on a page builder. It takes slightly longer to build from scratch. Over a two-year lifecycle, it saves more time than that in maintenance and avoidance of builder-related headaches.

The honest version

Page builders became popular because they filled a real gap: clients who needed to update content without a developer. That gap still exists, and there are still cases where a builder is a pragmatic choice.

But the developer community has largely moved past them for professional work — not out of snobbery, but because the technical tradeoffs don't hold up for projects that need to perform and last.

If you're evaluating options for a web project and wondering whether a page builder is the right call, I'm happy to talk through it. The answer depends on your specific situation, and sometimes it is.