My Love-Hate Relationship with Page Builders
Eliot Dill
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My Love-Hate Relationship with Page Builders<br>(Until I Started Using This AI Website Builder)
Eliot Dill<br>May 18, 2026
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There are taxes in the WordPress world that nobody talks about upfront.<br>One is plugins and one is themes.<br>Once you’re deep enough into Elementor, you’re paying it every year whether you realize it or not.<br>I’ve been building WordPress sites for 20 years. I’ve watched every major wave in this ecosystem. From Hand-coded themes, to Genesis frameworks, to ThemeForest premiums, then the rise of page builders, Gutenberg’s rocky launch, and now the rise of using AI to build websites.<br>In that time, Elementor has become the go-to tool for a large percentage of web developers, and thus one of the most dominant pieces of software in the WordPress ecosystem.<br>Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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I use it and understand the allure after many years of denying it (in favor of my old faithful Divi).<br>But after two decades and hundreds of client sites at my agency, I can tell you exactly how the lock-in happens, why most people don’t see it coming, what it costs over time, and what I eventually built to solve most of it.<br>First, the Love
Elementor has over 10 million active installs and powers north of 18 million websites worldwide.<br>They added nearly 3 million new sites in a single year, according to their own 2024 recap. That’s not luck. That’s a product that solved a real problem.<br>Before Elementor and its predecessors, building a professional WordPress site meant hiring a developer or spending months learning HTML, CSS, and PHP. Premium ThemeForest themes helped, but the customization ceiling was low and anything beyond basic tweaks required code.<br>Elementor changed the game. Drag-and-drop is genuinely intuitive. The visual editor shows changes in real time. The template library gives you a starting point instead of a blank canvas.<br>And it doesn’t replace WordPress. It sits on top of it. Your SEO plugins, WooCommerce, user roles, and integrations all keep working. You gain a visual layer without losing anything underneath.<br>Throw in a massive third-party ecosystem of add-ons like Essential Addons, Unlimited Elements, and PowerPack, and you can build almost anything including:<br>Custom pricing tables
Testimonial layouts
Animated counters
The Plus Addons alone has 120 widgets. The ecosystem is enormous.<br>Gutenberg loyalists will tell you Elementor is bloated. Divi fans will tell you it’s too expensive. Classic WordPress developers think all page builders are an abomination. And yet Elementor quietly powers a large part of Internet’s WordPress sites, because it actually works for real people building real things.<br>But the cracks show up once you’re close enough — especially with AI being used for coding and websites these days…<br>The Dark Side of Page Builders Nobody Talks About
It’s Still Slow
Here’s something nobody in the page builder world wants to admit: building a website from scratch still (even with a builder like WordPress) takes hours or even days.<br>A simple five-pager? Maybe an afternoon. An ecommerce site? At least a week.
You’re still making hundreds of tiny decisions the whole time. Section spacing. Typography scale. Color consistency across widgets. Hover states on buttons. Column gaps on mobile.<br>The hero padding that looks perfect on desktop and completely wrong on a 375px screen. Whether testimonials should be a slider or a static grid. Whether the sticky header behavior on scroll looks intentional or accidental.<br>Each decision is small but it totals a lot.<br>Website builders made web design easier than custom development. It did not make it fast. Those two things are not the same, and the difference matters a lot when your calendar is full.<br>For freelancers juggling multiple clients, agencies at capacity, or founders with a launch date in two weeks, “faster than before” is still not fast enough now with AI.<br>The speed problem also compounds with experience. The more you know about web design, the more decisions you make consciously.<br>A junior designer might be fine with default spacing. An experienced developer will tweak every section, every breakpoint, every detail until it’s right.<br>Plugin Bloat Sneaks Up On You
A typical Elementor page generates 1,500 to 3,000 DOM elements. Its Core Web Vitals pass rate sits around 25 to 35 percent, below the WordPress average of 33 to 40 percent.<br>The plugin adds roughly 40ms of overhead before you’ve installed a single add-on.
That’s manageable with good hosting and caching. The problem is what happens to your stack as the site matures.<br>The older ones were notorious for loading every widget they offered on every page, whether you used it or not. Install one plugin for a specific carousel widget and suddenly your site is carrying JS and CSS for 80 other widgets you never touched.<br>We had this with Divi 3 in 2016 where it would...