Page Builder.

A page builder replaces the simple text editor of a CMS with a visual interface. Pages are built from sections, columns and widgets (heading, image, button, gallery, form, slider) and adjusted directly in the preview. In WordPress, Elementor, Divi and WPBakery are the most widespread; the built-in block editor 'Gutenberg' follows a similar idea but with leaner output. For agencies and freelancers the advantage is obvious: design ideas can be implemented without a developer, and clients can later create pages themselves.

The price is paid in the output. Page builders nest building blocks in several layers of containers and often load their styles and scripts on every page, even where a particular widget does not appear. That increases the amount of data the browser has to process and affects the Core Web Vitals, especially LCP and responsiveness. Newer versions of the major builders have improved here, but the basic structure remains heavier than hand-written HTML.

An example from an earlier project: the website of Leo Ristorante in Zurich runs on WordPress with Elementor. The food, dessert, wine and bar menus are PDF files on the menu page and can be swapped in WordPress without rebuilding the page. That works well as long as content stays in fixed building blocks. It becomes difficult when, over the years, every page has been clicked together individually: then no two pages are alike any more, and a later redesign means rebuilding every page one by one.

The honest distinction: a page builder is not a mistake but a trade-off. It pays off when a small team without developers frequently designs new pages and load time is not the bottleneck. It does not pay off when the website above all needs to be fast, lean and maintainable over the long term. Switching page builders is practically a rebuild, because every builder has its own data structure: so-called builder lock-in, a form of vendor lock-in. DLM Digital builds new websites neither with page builders nor on WordPress, but to the DLM Digital standard with Next.js; how that works is explained under Have a website built.