Why We Don’t Use Page Builders When Developing Websites

Page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder and WP Bakery are popular because they offer an easy, code-free way to build websites. But over the years, we’ve seen all too many websites with bloated code and broken templates… and all too many website owners struggling to make them work.

However, there’s a better approach: Advanced Custom Fields (ACF). Here’s why we think ACF beats page builders every time.

The Tool That Promises Flexibility but Delivers Fragility

Page builders are everywhere. They promise easy editing, drag-and-drop flexibility and the ability to create beautiful pages without touching code. For many businesses, that sounds perfect, especially for smaller businesses without internal dev support.

We don’t use them, though, and not because we’re being difficult or old-fashioned! It’s because we’ve inherited too many page-builder-based sites from other agencies and seen firsthand what they’ve ended up with: fragile pages, bloated code and clients who are nervous about making changes to their own websites.

The Problems We Keep Seeing

When a client comes to us with an existing Elementor or WPBakery site that needs work, we see the same issues time after time:

• Pages break in unexpected ways – we’ve seen entire layouts collapse because of a single missed tickbox buried deep in Elementor’s settings. The person editing the page had no idea the option existed, let alone that unchecking it would break their homepage. This happens more often than you’d think and it makes clients afraid to touch their own content.

• The code underneath is bloated – page builders generate enormous amounts of markup to achieve even relatively simple layouts. A section that needs perhaps fifty lines of clean HTML might turn into three hundred lines of nested divs, inline styles, and framework-specific classes when a page builder’s used. This isn’t just untidy; it affects performance. Pages load more slowly, scores on tools like Google PageSpeed Insights suffer (not good for your SEO either!) and on mobile connections, the difference becomes especially noticeable.

• Updating becomes risky – because page builders insert themselves so deeply into the content, plugin updates can break existing pages. We’ve seen sites where the client was advised not to update Elementor because “it might cause issues.” That’s not a sustainable situation for a business-critical website.

• You’re locked into the tool – if you ever want to move away from a page builder, you’re often looking at rebuilding pages from scratch. The content is so tangled up with the builder’s shortcodes and structures in ways that don’t transfer cleanly to anything else that it’s often impossible to separate them.

How We Build Instead

Here at The Digital Maze, we use an approach based on ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) Flexible Content. The concept is straightforward: instead of giving you a blank canvas with infinite options, we provide a library of purpose-built blocks created specifically for your site by our extremely talented web design team.

It’s a bit like Lego (other interlocking plastic blocks are available) – a set of building blocks for your page, all professionally designed by our team of experts to offer the functionality that you need. You pick the blocks you need, arrange them in whatever order makes sense and populate them with your content. They’re designed to work in any combination and in any order, for example, a hero section, main content, a testimonial carousel, a two-column layout and a nice call to action at the end.

All the blocks are also built with clean, minimal code to do exactly what they need to do. There’s no bloating or unnecessary markup, and no random buried settings that can break your entire page!

Bespoke Web Development in Action

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What This Means in Practice

• Editors can’t accidentally break layouts – because the blocks are predefined, there’s no way to accidentally remove a crucial setting or create an impossible layout. Our clients tell us they feel confident making content changes, which is how it should be.

• Performance is dramatically better – clean code means faster pages. We’re not carrying the weight of a page builder framework on every page load. This matters for user experience, and it matters for SEO.

• Maintenance is simpler – core WordPress and plugin updates don’t risk breaking your page layouts, because the layouts aren’t dependent on a complex third-party builder.

• Scalability is built in – when a client needs a new type of block, we build it once and it’s available across the entire site. This component-based approach means the site can grow and evolve without accumulating technical debt.

The Trade-off

We do have to say here that our approach requires upfront investment in design and development. Also, you won’t be able to drag a random shape onto the page and resize it however you want. The flexibility ACF offers is structured rather than unlimited.

For most businesses, this is actually the right thing to do. You get a website that’s fast, stable and easy to maintain, but you also get enough flexibility to manage your content confidently. What you give up is the ability to create completely free-form layouts on the fly, but, in our experience, this often leads to inconsistent design and the problems we described earlier.

If you really do want to maintain pixel-level control over every element on every page, a page builder might make sense. But if you want a professional website you can update without worrying about breaking everything, structured flexibility beats unlimited chaos.

The Takeaway

Page builders do solve a real problem: they make it easier for non-developers to build web pages. But the way they solve this problem creates other problems, ones that become apparent over time as sites get harder to maintain and riskier to update.

We’ve chosen a different path because we’ve seen the results of both approaches. Our clients get sites that perform well, that they can confidently manage and that won’t fall over because someone unchecked the wrong box!