#81 – Which Page Builder is Right For Your Site?

This week Gael is joined by Lewis for his first appearance on the podcast.

Lewis has been a writer for Authority Hacker for the past six months. His main job is doing the review content. Basically, we buy him some tools, he plays about with them for a month or so and then writes up what he thinks.

Mixed up in there are a whole bunch of experiments to get a real working experience of what the tools can and cannot do in the real world.

Over the past few years, we have used Thrive Content Builder extensively and recommend it to our members as the best tool to help grow their sites.

However, recently there have been a number of new entrants to the market along with some of the more established players updating their offerings. We noticed that, in certain areas, TCB was starting to lag behind the competitors.

So, with Thrive Architect being released this week, we are going to be discussing page builders in detail to find out what is the best builder to grow your site.
What is a Page Builder?
A page builder is a design tool in the form of a Wordpress plugin.

It gives you a visual environment to build your site (usually using drag and drop elements) without worrying about complex code.

It makes it easy to create buttons, columns, tables or whatever else design elements you want to use to make your content more useful for your readers and better than the competition.

Page builders allow you to work within the page itself rather than using the Wordpress default editor. This allows you to make edits and view them immediately rather than make a change, view the preview, adjust it slightly, view another preview and so on until you are happy.

No, what page builders do is to render the page the same way it would show for the end user, while you are editing the post.
What Happens if the Developers Go Out of Business?
These are private companies in the tech space. Some of them will fail, it is inevitable. So, you have to be very careful about tying your fortunes to a private company that could go out of business.

This is especially important to consider if you are creating evergreen content. Some of this content can still be ranking and making money 10 years down the line.

But, if you think about it, 10 years is a lifetime in the tech industry. There are no guarantees that any of these companies will still be around in that time.

So, it is important to examine what happens to the content if this were to happen.

In some cases, if a page builder goes out of business or the company stops maintaining the builder, it can render your existing content completely useless. All it leaves is a mess of nonsensical Wordpress shortcodes – we’re looking at you Visual Composer.

However, some of the builders preserve your content well. These companies have ensured that the pages are put together in such a way that they are compatible with the default Wordpress editor. They are not perfectly preserved by any means but it is still a workable solution.
Does it Slow Down Your Website?
Some page builders can produce what is known as bloated code. This essentially means that it takes them 10 lines of code for an element that should take 3 or 4 lines of code.

This translates to your browser taking longer to render the visuals and slows down the site.

You want a page builder that focuses on producing lean code. Code that is efficient and doesn’t force the browser to jump through hoops will lead to faster load times.

The two best page builders at doing this are Elementor and Thrive Architect.
How Do They Work With Other Plugins?
In most cases, the page builders work relatively well with other plugins.

However,