Chapter 9: Best Drag & Drop WordPress Page Builders

Drag and drop WordPress website builder makes it easy for you to create and customize beautiful websites all on your own.

We’ll compare the most popular drag and drop WordPress page builders, so you can choose the best one for your needs and start creating your site.

Note: Instead of a WordPress page builder, if you’re looking for a complete CMS/ website builder platform, then check out our collection of best website builders.

9.1 Why Use a Drag and Drop Page Builder for WordPress?

When starting a blog, many beginners find it difficult to customize their WordPress page layouts.

While a lot of premium WordPress themes come with different page layouts, most of them are extremely hard to customize for anyone who does not know code (HTML / CSS).

Well, there are several great drag and drop page builder plugins available for WordPress.

They allow you to create completely custom website designs in WordPress without writing a single line of code.

Since there are so many different WordPress page builder plugins in the market, we decided to compare and rank the top WordPress page builders, so you can choose the right solution for your need.

Let’s take a look at what you should keep in your mind when comparing the best WordPress page builders, so you can choose the right one for your needs.

  • Compatibility:

If you’re not interested in changing your existing WordPress theme for a page builder plugin, then the first thing you need to check is whether the builder you want to use is compatible with your WordPress theme.

If you find any compatibility issues, then you might want to use a builder-compatible theme for your site.

  • Features:

You need to understand the unique quality of each builder when comparing the features.

For example, some builders are shipped with a lot of built-in layouts while others offer dozens of animation effects.

  • Responsiveness:

You need to make sure that the page builder you choose allows you to create responsive, mobile-friendly, layouts out of the box.

  • SEO:

You need to make sure that your page builder is creating SEO friendly layouts.

Having said that, let’s take a look at the best page builders for WordPress in the market.

  • Beaver Builder: Beaver Builder is a premium drag and drop page builder plugin for WordPress. It is by far the best WordPress page builder in the market.

It is extremely fast and comes with a built-in onboarding tour to help you quickly familiarize with their interface.

Beaver Builder comes with a live drag and drop interface.

You get to see all your changes as you add them by simply dragging elements from the right sidebar and dropping them on your page.

You can click on any element on a page to edit its properties.

There are modules that let you add almost everything you may want including sliders, carousel, backgrounds, content blocks, buttons, and more.

It also comes with over 30 finely designed templates for landing pages that make it super-easy and super-fast to create stunning website layouts.

Beaver Builder has been updated well along with the Gutenberg project.

So, it works fine with your new Gutenberg editor.

Pricing: Starting from $99 for Unlimited Sites.

  • The Divi Builder: The Divi Builder is a powerful WordPress page builder that lets you build any type of design on your website with drag and drop. The Divi Builder is made by Elegant Themes, a renowned WordPress themes, and plugins company.

The Divi builder works on almost any WordPress website.

It gives you endless possibilities to create the most advanced layouts without having to touch a single line of code.

The plugin is bundled with 46 builder modules, 20-row types, and 3 section types, all of which can be combined and arranged to create just about any type of website.

With its advanced design settings, you can customize every element to a great extent.

That being said, if you want to make real-time changes on the design, then you might want to use the Divi theme.

With the theme, you can build your page with the frontend editor, so your pages can be updated right from the frontend without having to switch back and forth from your dashboard to your website.

Pricing: Starts at $89 (includes 100+ website packs)

  • Elementor: Elementor is the first free and open-source advanced page builder for WordPress. With its quick drag and drop builder, you can make instant page edits from the frontend of your site. Elementor is well-known for its high-speed performance, which makes it fun and easy to build with.

With its extensive template library, you get hundreds of beautiful WordPress templates by their top-notch designers, which can be exported to different websites through the page builder.

Elementor supports responsive mobile-friendly design, allowing you to build web pages that work great on any device.

Some other cool features of Elementor are:

  • Canvas: You can build a brand new landing page without header or footer, optimized for high conversions.
  • Maintenance mode: For maintenance, you can get your site offline with its built-in maintenance mode.
  • Zapier integration: Integrating your website with a third-party web application is a breeze using its Zapier integration.

Pricing: Starts at $49 for a single site license.

  • Themify Builder: The Themify Builder comes with a drag and drop interface that helps you create any layout you can imagine with ease. The builder comes with over 60 prebuilt layouts and animation effects that you can choose from. This means you can quickly build beautiful pages without having to start from scratch. All you have to do is simply import the layouts you want to use, replace the images and text, and you’re done.

The builder comes as a standard feature for all Themify themes.

You can also use their builder plugin with any third-party WordPress theme.

From the compact backend interface, you can use the drag and drop feature to build modules quickly and easily.

In the frontend, you can preview the design and make live edits to your modules.

To enhance the capabilities of the Themify Builder, you can find tons of different add-ons which can be purchased separately or as a bundle.

Pricing: The core plugin is free. $39 for the addon bundle

  • Thrive Architect: Thrive Architect is a page builder that’s built for conversion-focused websites. Thrive Architect is developed by the same folks behind Thrive Themes, a company that sells conversion oriented WordPress themes and plugins.

Thrive Architect is shipped with a drag and drop editing tool and 271 prebuilt landing page templates.

With Thrive Architect, you can quickly create a stunning homepage, sales page, blog posts, and everything you could ask for.

Pricing: Starts at $67 for a single site license or $19 per month for Thrive membership

  • SiteOrigin: SiteOrigin is one of the most popular WordPress page builders in the WordPress repository, with over a million active installs. With SiteOrigin, building a responsive, column-based content is a breeze. Your content will adapt to all devices, regardless of its screen resolution.

The SiteOrigin builder works seamlessly with your existing WordPress widgets, so you can add your favorite widgets to the websites you build.

The builder works perfectly with any WordPress themes.

The best part about SiteOrigin is that you can find a lot of neat compatible WordPress themes built by the same folks behind the SiteOrigin plugin.

The flexibility is one of the main benefits of the plugin.

Using its advanced row builder, you can choose the exact number of rows for each column you add.

Pricing: Free

  • WPBakery Page Builder for WordPress (formerly Visual Composer): The WPBakery Page Builder for WordPress, formerly known as Visual Composer, is one of the most popular page builders in the CodeCanyon marketplace, a leading hub of premium WordPress plugins.

If you need a premium WordPress page builder that offers lifetime updates, look no further than WPBakery Page Builder.

It comes with both frontend and backend editors, making content editing quick and easy.

The WPBakery Page Builder works seamlessly with popular WordPress plugins, including Yoast SEO and WooCommerce.

It is also compatible with powerful translation plugins such as Polylang and WPML, so you can easily build multilingual websites powered by the builder.

Pricing: $46 for a single site license

Conclusion:

Almost every builder plugin out there comes with a drag and drop builder on the backend and a live editor on the frontend.

It’s important to understand what makes each WordPress page builder unique.