You are looking at this colorful picture and think that Visual Composer is something easy-going, powerful, and just great. It is one of the best WordPress page builders. Now we are going to make an excursion around this tool and try to decide, whether it’s as good as it seems.
What Is a Page Builder?
Let’s start from scratch. Page builders are the plugins, which help to build web pages using drag-and-drop interface. It means that if you don’t have any coding skills, this is not a problem. With its help, you can create beautiful and user-friendly web pages without any programming knowledge. Just open your editor and build the website like a puzzle:). You see any change you make and can add new elements and blocks by selecting them in special spreadsheets and dragging them into the right places.
Visual Composer: Pros and Cons
Visual Composer is a great tool for WordPress, which helps people to use WordPress completely and create amazing websites according to their wishes and requirements. It has a lot of advantages and features. But also, like any other page builder, it limits your opportunities.So there are enough words, let’s go into details.
Pros of WordPress Visual Composer
Simplicity. It simplifies the life and process of page building for inexperienced users, and people without coding skills. It’s intuitive and well-understandable. Everything there is created to save your time and build the page without great efforts. Also, you can use the way you like: backend or frontend editor.
Flexibility and extensibility. It has many great features and allows you to integrate your plugin with any WordPress theme. It’s compatible with WooCommarce, Yoast, and Translate, and extendable with API.
Many amazing layouts and elements. Yes, if you are not a designer, but have some wishes and inspiration, you can create a really wonderful look of your website, and the choice of elements is large.
Responsive design. Here is the great news: if your theme is responsive, the pages built with Visual Composer will be responsive too.
Independence of the theme. If you create some pages using the specific theme, you are able to switch this theme, but all components of your page will be saved.
History saving. Another good ability of Visual Composer is that it saves the history. And if you even remove this module, it will save all your applied changes.
Google fonts compatibility. Google creates the Internet fashion and style. It’s true. Google fonts are in trend and are most used on the modern websites. So this is a great feature for everyone who wants to be up to date.
Cons of WordPress Visual Composer
A limit of opportunities. You can create wonderful layouts and user-friendly web pages. They will be responsive and include most of the necessary components, but you will be still limited. If you would like to get something custom, something that will be unique and has specific widgets, integrations, and functionality, page builder is not enough.
Don’t expect pixel-perfect design. It means that sometimes, while creating your beautiful web page, you’ll face one, not a pleasant moment – too much white space between the page elements.
Slow page loading. Why? – it’s all because the shortcodes that are used in the page builders. Such codes are usually buggy and dirty, so they slow down your website and create complexity for the web developers when they should change something on your web pages.
Sometimes it’s unpredictable. For example, when you need to save changes. Yes, it saves history, but when it comes to the design, sometimes the changes could be lost after reinstallation.
Only three services and types of prices. Exactly. You can set up only 3 services that you provide and 3 price packages, not more.
A lack of functionalities. You won’t be able to create responsive tables there, integrate your website with CRM, Google calendar or Outlook. So, if you need such things, a page builder is not the best solution.
It doesn’t come for free. You can buy Visual Composer regular license for $34 and extendable license for $170.
Conclusion
As we can see, Visual Composer for WordPress is a great tool for everyone who wants to build pages by himself, using frontend or backend editor, and do it quickly. And our Web4Pro team has already developed a project based on WordPress with a use of Visual Composer: EquityX. The cons are that it still has limits, as any page builder. If you want to create something custom and unique, you should hire a web developer and designer, who will make a really amazing web solution on a professional level. And it will have a clean code. This gives a point to custom WordPress development. But, it’s up to you. In any case, you can make something that meets your goals.
Wish you a great mood and inspiration for wonderful web pages!