Last year we wrote an article about whether or not you should use a Page Builder like Visual Composer or Elementor when building out your website. In that article we went through several pro and con scenarios and discussed which businesses/users would find the most added benefit from using a builder vs. building custom on WordPress.
Since that article was released however, FlowPress has become a champion of the BeaverBuilder Page Builder going as far as to recommend and implement the solution for Government Organizations and Multinational Enterprises. We have even brought it to the centre of our RFP/RFQ response processes.
But why? Why did we go from recommending ANY Page Builder for only specific scenarios to recommending ONE Page Builder for such scenarios?
We’ll lay out the core reasons below as to why and how BeaverBuilder has won us over. And it starts with stability.
Stability
As a WordPress user (or even a casual Google-er of WordPress things) you know that it is excruciatingly common for a plugin update or some sort of plugin conflict to break the visuals and/or functionality of your WordPress property.
In the past, after inheriting a web property using another page builder, stability has been a serious issue, with Beaver Builder, is it not.. At FlowPress we manage a rigorous pre-update testing process for WordPress and we have yet to encounter a situation in which Beaver Builder has left us with a broken site. It just doesn’t happen.
Support
I put support high on the list of any product I recommend to others because in order to receive a recommendation, the support has to be great. Beaver Builder has great support! A responsive, responsible, team and great documentation go a long way for us.
The Beaver Builder team has worked with us to implement fixes and upgrades we’ve done to Beaver Builder to further improve integration with our own framework and processes.
Code Output
All Page Builders have to spit out HTML and CSS so that the browser can read your site and display it properly to users. The issue with many builders is that the outputted code is often poorly formatted and horribly structured. When this “bad” code is crawled by bots from search engines like Google, it is common that your site will be penalized for it.
On the other hand, Beaver Builder puts out some of the cleanest HTML and CSS out of any of the top Page Builders and is therefore much better for SEO than their counterparts
Easy to Use and Easy to Train Clients
It kind of goes without saying that the purpose of a Page Builder is to make life easier for those of us that aren’t web designers and/or web developers. Secondary to that, we look to Page Builders to find ways to empower content teams and business owners to build a website that they feel is best going to promote their business. When Page Builders make it difficult to get the exact look you are trying to achieve, the premise of the product fails. It’s the only problem that needs to be solved.
We have found that Beaver Builder is one of the easiest Page Builders to use but more than that, the layout and structure of the product makes it incredibly easy for us to train our clients to use it properly and effectively.
Ease of Custom Development
One of the cons from our previous article that we felt hindered age builders for Enterprise and large sites, was bloat in both the user experience and code. Some Page Builders come with hundreds of modules to use. This is terrific for a one-stop-shop but if you are getting a lot of traffic, all of those modules, whether you use them or not, are getting loaded every time a visitor hits any page on your website. This can create some slow loading times for the user and extra bandwidth costs for you.
With Beaver Builders’ boilerplate offering and robust documentation, FlowPress custom develops only the modules that our clients need to keep their sites running quickly.
Security
In the past, some of the more well known Page Builders have been prone to have security lapses that required emergency updates. This has yet to happen with Beaver Builder. This track record plus the ability to develop custom solutions on top of the Beaver Builder leaves us confident in recommending Beaver Builder to our clients, Enterprise or not.
Conclusion
Since we previously mentioned that we didn’t find Page Builders to be an ideal option for many larger organizations, we felt responsible to be transparent in our usage of Page Builders recently and felt this update explaining our reasoning was the best way to do so. FlowPress does want to say that we do not in any way receive compensation from Beaver Builder though we have recently been added to their agency partners page.
We’ve linked to our previous post on Page Builders and to not seem too biased, we still recommend that you give it a read as there are still cons that go along with these pros even when considering Beaver Builder. We’ve just come to realize over the last 18 months that these pros’ outweigh the cons’ of using Page Builders.
