Elementor, WP bakery page builder, and Beaver Builder are all popular drag and drop layout page builder plugins for self-hosted WordPress websites. There are 2 problems with these plugins:
- They are obsolete
- They bulk up the html code exponentially
Let me explain.
Drag & Drop Plugins are Obsolete
Since the release of WordPress 5.0 in December of 2018, the “classic” word processing-like editing interface has been pushed aside for the Gutenberg editor – a block-based editing interface. With each new release, this block editor has improved. Most recently a ‘reusable blocks’ feature was added that puts Guttenberg in an extremely competitive position to any existing drag and drop plugin.
Drag & Drop Plugins Bloat Your HTML
The biggest downfall to the plugins like Elementor, WP bakery page builder, or Beaver Builder is the excessive amount of code they produce to achieve relatively simple layouts. For example, here is the code created to build a menu in Elementor Pro:
And this is the code required to build a similar menu using WordPress core functions:
The difference is staggering. Now apply this level of code to every Elementor element on the page and you can understand why WordPress websites that use these drag and drop plugins are frequently very slow to load.
Ditch the Drag & Drop Builder to Boost Google Page Speed Score
Since Google Page Speed Score penalizes websites with excessive unused javascript, it’s important to get rid of anything you’re not using. Unfortunately, it’s rather difficult to unload features on any of the drag & drop plugins.
To unload unused javascript, you have to install another plugin that is built to unload scripts. Adding another plugin inherently adds scripts to the site, so you need to make sure you’re unloading more than the plugin adds.
Duplicate Features
Another reason these drag & drop plugins are not a good idea is becuase they are duplicating functions already built into the core WordPress package. This plays directly into the bloated site size.