Most WordPress sites are built with a page builder — a drag-and-drop layer that sits on top of WordPress and makes design possible without writing code. They’re genuinely useful. We use one on plenty of sites.
They have two costs that nobody mentions at the start.
The first is that your content stops being yours in a practical sense. A page builder stores your text in its own format. Switch the builder off and your carefully written pages turn into a mess of unreadable codes. You’re not locked in by a contract, you’re locked in by the file format, which is harder to escape.
The second is maintenance. A page builder is a large piece of third-party software with full access to your site. It needs updating like anything else. When a site stops being updated — which happens to every site somebody stopped paying attention to — the builder goes stale along with the theme, and stale software is how sites get broken into.
We recently rebuilt a small site that had been sitting untouched on an old theme for years. Rather than update the builder, we moved the site onto plain WordPress — no builder at all, using the editor that comes with it.
The result: nothing third-party left to keep patched, the content stored as ordinary web page code that will still make sense in ten years, and a site that loads faster because there’s simply less of it.
It isn’t the right answer for every site. A complex site with a lot of design in it needs the tools. But for a small site that mostly needs to say who you are, what you do and how to reach you, a builder is a dependency you’re carrying for no return.
Worth asking about yours.