…that’s me yelling this statement over the hilltops, lol.
i cringe everytime i hear about a 3rd party page builder. seriously, my body physically reacts to the thought of using a page builder outside of the wordpress core.
wordpress is a content management system.
it manages content including pages (& posts) and can be used both publicly (world wide web) and privately (secured &/or installed internally on your local computer).
by the book (link wcag org), this is fundamentally the proper formatting for every web page.
copy & paste code (coming soon)each of these <html> tags wraps our content with context. html syntax is very simple to understand. your webpage has a <header> & <footer> … and a <body>. the <header> & <footer> are stationary elements… meaning this content appears the same on every page of your website. the <body> contains dynamic information, so the content of each page within your website.
the content within the <body> also needs to be wrapped in context.
think about this way, a <div> is a block with no context… for every <div> on your web page, you are compromising the integrity of your content & usually breaking the rules of how to properly format your web pages. all of the page builders i’ve seen pile <div>s upon <div>s and bury essential tags (<h1>, <p>, <a>) within multiple tiers of <div>s… & this is part of the reason why i dislike page builders.
simple put, we don’t need to contextually degrade web pages to achieve design & the objective when building your webpage, is to avoid using <div>s. Not only is this considered best practice, but will have a dramatic affect on accessibility (device compatibility) & SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Not all devices are JS (Javascript) compatible. often i’ve seen page builders create dynamic page content on the front end using Javascript. so for example, a JS (Javascript) “listener” is controlling the output of (inline) style based on how large the screen window is versus allowing the css (Style Sheet) to do its inherit job. Another example, is JS (Javascript) injecting & manipulating content after the page has loaded. Imagine what happens to your content when you disable a page builder plugin… did your whole website break? did it have a domino effect and break other plugins too?
With the new wordpress, the perceived need for page builders has been eliminated. A word of caution, in an effort to streamline it is common for design agencies to package your website using a page builder. This tells me (as a wordpress developer), that they are not using the NEW wordpress. Instead, they are using an older, archived method of creating themes for wordpress.
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