If you have a blog that is content rich and you monetize it with ads, then a page builder designs like Divi, Beaver and Wix may not be suitable.
Page builders are really popular if you wish to build professional looking websites yourself. Even many web developers utilize page builders to build websites that their client want.
However, if you have a blog with a lot of blog posts, then you may notice it is not suitable and wonder why. Could it be something wrong with you that you do not seems to agree with the majority?
Well, I am here to say that you are not wrong in your thoughts.
Granted, page builders create awesome sites- hence they are very suited if you wish to create sales pages, landing pages, homepage, call-to-action page like to subscribe for a newsletter and portfolio page. They are also suitable for company websites whereby design is very important…. and usually such websites are not wordy.
I speak of this from my personal experience- I have attempted to switch the theme of one of my blogs to Divi by Elegant themes. However I had some problems with the blog post format. After switching to the theme, I find that the blog post format is no longer that optimized- whereby my usual ads placement looked awkward and are stretched:
Then I switched back to Thesis and found to my horror that the Divi theme left a lot of coding mess to my page. Fortunately I did not go to far ahead hence I was able to manually correct the mistake (I know that installing the Divi builder plugin will help but I find the plugin a bit intrusive).
I am still a loyal Thesis wordpress theme users because I am used to the Skin Editor function to create my own custom pages and sidebars.
Later I did try to experiment with a page builder because I would want certain pages to appear in a more well designed look. I tried Elementor and find that it integrates well with Thesis.
I just download the free version of the Elementor plugin and build selected landing pages like this one using Elementor and was quite happy with the look and feel of it.
Initially, I made some of the landing pages that I have build using Elementor as my homepage but eventually, I removed changed back to the original versions because:
- the page loading time of my main pages increased increasing bounce rate
- I dwell more into my Analytics and figured that the visitors are coming for the content more than the presentation. I write blogs on Health and Travel where visitors find my site because they were searching for information or solutions to certain issues that they are having.
- I want to continue to serve the interest of the readers and somehow, if I used page builder format, I am not able to freely display the elements that I want such as lists of other articles they could read
- between 50% to 60% of my readers are accessing to my site via mobile. In a mobile browser, most pages looked similar. The most important thing is that they must be responsive.
- it is harder to integrate ads seamlessly into my blog post. In a page builder, ads looked very obvious.
Above are the factors that made me switch back to my regular theme. The setup is simple and the navigation links are clear. And I could then focus on what I do best, which is coming up with content.
