4 Best Free Page Builders for WordPress

Designing your WordPress website in the past meant that you either had to rely on a theme’s style options, or know code. Over time, page builders for WordPress cropped up over the community, with the sole purpose to help people take control of their website’s look. In this article you learn a little bit about them, and a roundup of the best free page builders for WordPress.

What is a page builder?

A page builder is a tool for website designers and users to creatively brand their site with little to no coding. Some page builders include front editing design features, so the end-user can view their changes as they go.

Now, even though the designer may not need to know code, it may be good to have a good understanding of good web design practices, as well as have a decent imagination.

Page builders for WordPress come as either built into a theme, or as a stand alone WordPress plugin. They offer options like adding forms, widgets, columns, rows, icons, accordion menus, and more, in order for your website to look unique. Aside from offering those features, you can build general templates for specific pages, and even use styling options for each area you add through the page builder.

The concept of page builders, when it comes to design, is using design blocks to build each section of your site, kind of similar to drawing a design concept on paper. Usually the design had a header, content, footer, and sometimes sidebar area. Then within each area, are smaller areas that are for different content elements, like forms, blog posts, images, and much more.

What makes a good page builder?

Choosing a good page builder can be a bit difficult, because there are so many of them. Some are free, but have extensions you may need to pay for. Others may be premium ones. However, here’s a few tips on choosing a good page builder:

1. Read what other people are saying about the page builder.

2. Check out sites that use the page builder.

3. See if the developer has in-depth documentation and video about how to use the page builder.

4. Test out the page builder on a fresh WordPress installation.

5. Find out if the page builder is built into the theme, or can be used with any theme.

1. Read what other people are saying about the page builder.
Reviews for any product are super important, including page builders. Make sure to read what other people are saying before determining what is best for your website.

2. Check out sites that use the page builder.
Sometimes on the page builder developer’s website, they may have a showcase section, or even some pre-built options that you can use as inspiration for your own site’s design.

3. See if the developer has in-depth documentation and video about how to use the page builder.
Having documentation handy, especially videos will help you understand the page builder better, so you can quickly learn and build your own site.

4. Test out the page builder on a fresh WordPress installation.
Always test out new plugins, and themes, especially so with page builders. You will be the one to use it, and if you can’t, you may want to choose another page builder or consider hiring a web designer proficient enough in using the tool.

5. Find out if the page builder is built into the theme, or can be used with any theme.
Try to avoid page builders that are built into a theme. This means you want a page builder that is a plugin, and can be used for any theme. Now, even if you change the theme, you can use the page builder to remove or edit design areas you don’t need, and redo the general theme template. There are no page builder converters, so if you end up changing to another, you practically have to redo everything on your site.

4 Best Free Page Builders for WordPress

Before listing some of the best free page builders for WordPress, if it is a plugin, do not install two page builders at the same time.

They may conflict with each other, and even slow down your site. The only one on this list that you shouldn’t find a conflict with, is Gutenberg, as it’s built into WordPress, and because it’s the default content editor, the majority of plugins, including page builders, have been built to play nicely with it.

Elementor

Elementor is an extremely popular page builder with a lot of free pre-built templates to help jumpstart your designing. One you’ve selected a pre-built template, you can also choose other templates for different pages. From there, you can customize each template's design to suit your needs, by just dragging and dropping the elements into place. From each element that you choose, you can customize the look or style.

The friendly interface allows you to easily find what you need, and you can even edit your site’s design from the frontend of the site, so you can see every change as you go. The frontend editor of Elementor is probably the best selling point it has, so if you like to get a live view of your template’s design, then this page builder may be the one for you.

Page Builder by SiteOrigin

SiteOrigin is much like Elementor, but simple with its interface, and probably best for people who don’t need a fancier page builder. It offers a lot in the free version, and has some reliable free add-ons. SiteOrigin does offer some free pre-built templates and you can even build your own complex template using their layout builder.

The great thing about SiteOrigin is that you can select what content elements you want to use, in the plugin’s settings, while leaving other features inactive. This is really useful, in order to reduce your website’s load time. In comparison to Elementor, this section is easy to find and easy to understand for beginners.

The downside of SiteOrigin is that you may need to know more code, like CSS, because the styling options aren’t as in-depth.

Beaver Builder

Beaver Builder is a popular page builder, and has been around for a while. The community behind it is very solid and it has a lot of features. However, the free version has very limited selection on content elements. Most of these are basic content blocks.

So, if you don’t need anything outside of the following feature list, then the free version of Beaver Builder may be what you need.

• Basic content elements like photo, buttons, HTML and text editor.

• Layout options like full-width and content-sidebar

• Create rows and columns

• Add CSS classes and IDs.

• Ability to add WordPress widgets and shortcodes in to the content elements

Gutenberg

Out of this list, Gutenberg is not a theme or a plugin. It is completely free and is built into WordPress. While Gutenberg is designed to be a more true WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor, it has all of the concepts that a page builder has, including the fact that you can build content using different content blocks.

Most of Gutenberg’s content blocks are fairly basic, and if you know WordPress, easy to understand, but there are quite a few plugins in the WordPress plugin directory that offer some extensions to add more types of Gutenberg content blocks to your site. At the most basic level, Gutenberg includes all of the tools for basic content creators that don’t need a lot of extras.

Lastly, since WordPress version 5.9, full site editing has been possible, so now with Gutenberg, you can edit your site from the front end. Pretty cool, right?

In Summary

All page builders have one thing in common, and that’s to make the theme design process easier and faster. Whatever free page builder for WordPress that you choose, hopefully you’ll come up with a brilliant design!

Frequently Asked Questions