Are builders obsolete?
Elementor, Divi, WPBakery: Web agencies, webmasters, everyone's using their builder, even in 2025. WordPress revolution in the past, and now a monumental mistake: what does your WordPress Webmaster ?
Builders are losing out to native on maintainability, stability, performance, security, ease of use, ecology and price. They are useless and outdated in most cases by 2025.
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As aweb hosting specialist WordPressWhat I can already say with certainty is that sites built with builders are slower and generally more vulnerable to attack than others. But if that hasn't already put you off using a WordPress builder, read on carefully.
What is a WordPress Builder and why use it?
Builders are visual editors designed to facilitate site layout.
They're popular because they promise to create rich, complex pages without touching a single line of code, thanks to visual editors. And they generally deliver on this promise.
But this comes at the price of many sacrifices, and makes less and less sense in the face of the native.
Builders" rendered useless by Gutenberg
WordPress now includes the Gutenberg editor, which lets you customize an entire website without code, with increasingly rich designs.
Clearly, 90% of what can be done with a builder can also be done natively or with a few plugins.
Andanimations and blocks light and often free of charge exist to take you even further.
In this context, it makes less and less sense to add a builder overlay, sometimes at a cost that runs counter to the way WordPress works natively.
Builders go against the WordPress grain
Builders modify the native operation of the WordPress CMS. In this sense, they are inevitably less durable.
Native WordPress operation
With the native WordPress editor, called " Gutenberg" its block system enables rich page layouts. With full site editing and a compatible native theme, you can completely change the layout and appearance of your site. It now includes Google Fonts (downloadable locally).
The major advantage: The code generated is HTML, so there's no cost in terms of performance or loading time.
How builders work
In contrast, a builder will generate hundreds of tags which must be interpreted by all the builder's PHP code, then dynamically converted into HTML code before being sent to the visitor. This has a significant cost in terms of server resources and performance.
Some builders will also generate scripts (js) and style sheets (css) on the fly, depending on the page, which also requires additional resources.
The major drawback: the code generated is heavy for both the server and the visitor.
Especially when js and css are dynamic: in some cases, if you activate a cache, it will slow down each page load to compress these elements before sending them.
WordPress "Builders" imprison you
Using a builder means adding a critical software dependency to your site.
If one day you come across a really blocking problem with your builder and you want to go back to native (without builder), or choose another builder : You're totally stuck. It's a tragedy.
No standards, no interoperability between different builders. And above all, no display if the plugin is deactivated.
Without its builder, your site is out of order and you'll have to completely rebuild it.
What's more, builders generally come with an annual subscription fee. So, having paid for your builder, you have no intention of backing out and will do everything in your power to make it work for you.
So, have you really benefited from using a builder to shape your site, or are you just trapped?
The impact on performance... And ecology.
Let's look at a concrete example. At the beginning of 2025, I was putting the new de Villeneuve Lès Béziers which has just freed itself from Elementor: the site is literally 4x lighter and faster to load for visitors, even though I'd already managed to make it 4x faster than before. migration on a LRob web hosting. As a result, we've divided the site's loading time by 16 since the start. The redesign was technically demanding, however, as each of the many pages had to be redesigned.
More or less extreme slowness
During my 5 years' experience as a web-hosting outsourcer for an host,I was approached by a number of WordPress customers complaining about the slowness of their sites. The servers weren't saturated, but their sites had one thing in common: they used WordPress builders.
In tests with/without builder, I observed a slowdown of around 10 to 40 with their builder enabled on server load times. It's just dramatic.
But the slowdown also affects visitors. The many heavy scripts (js) and style sheets (css) generated by builders take time to download, and then have to be interpreted. In the process, they take even longer.
Time is energy
Load times are calculation resources and therefore energy consumed by the server and your access device (smartphone, PC). The more CPUs are occupied, the more energy is wasted.
While the situation is improving with builders' optimization patches, or caching plugins (which avoid certain server consumption), performance still falls short of that of a native site.
Time is money
As we all know, retaining visitors to a site depends on its speed. We've all seen the statistics: if a site is too slow to load, more than half the visitors will switch to another site.
And there's good reason to believe that search engines favor the best-optimized sites.
So by weighing down your site with a builder, you're potentially undermining its success.
Undeniable ecological impact
WordPress powers over 43% websites worldwide. Many of these sites include builders, generating an overconsumption of server resources on the order of x10 (or even x40). Builders therefore have a considerable carbon footprint that it would be interesting to measure objectively. I wouldn't be surprised if this increased Internet energy consumption by 10% or more.
In an era when we're trying to makegreen web hostingIt seems absurd to unnecessarily load millions of websites with builders that have become useless.
Reliability and safety
Many of the failures observed on sites during updates are due to the builder. You'd better have a good backup host. All this is additional maintenance, lost to the webmaster and/or the customer.
What's more, as builders are popular, security flaws are regularly discovered. So if you update, you risk breaking the site, and if you don't update, you risk a hack. What do you choose?
Personally, I can restore from a backup, or repair your hacked sitebut I choose to avoid the builder altogether.
Builders à outrance: The art of chasing flies with a flamethrower
Trying to make basic pages with a builder is like trying to chase flies with a flamethrower. It's a waste of time.
And yet, how many basic sites have I seen made with a builder...? Where a simple native theme would have done better.
So, in many cases, the end customer also has to work on his site, updating pages and publishing articles. On the town hall site mentioned in the previous point, performance was not the only criterion. The teams were wasting time with the unnecessarily complex builder when editing pages.
With Gutenberg's native editor, everything is simpler and clearer. Given the increased convenience, the teams went back to posting more. Which just goes to show that doing away with a builder also has unsuspected advantages.
Yet some people still have the systematic reflex to build. Even on an extremely simple site.
The #1 rule of optimization: use only what you need. A little minimalism never hurt anyone.
What's needed is a site that's easy to maintain, reliable, secure and quick for visitors to view, and above all, that contains the useful information your visitors are looking for, for good SEO (on Google and other search engines), and with the lowest possible carbon footprint.
Conclusion: Go native in 90% of cases
A builder is certainly not a criterion of success for your site, and in fact the opposite is true.
Many native themes, often free of charge, are capable of offering a clear and pleasant visual experience and already allow an excellent level of customization. And that's enough in almost all cases.
Native is better than most themes in many respects: ecology, performance, maintainability, stability, security, ease of use...
What's more, with Gutenberg, WordPress now offers the "Full Site Editing" function, enabling you, with compatible themes, to arrange each part of the site as you wish. This is the case with the default WordPress theme Twenty Twenty-Five, which I use on almost all WordPress sites (including LRob.fr).
Personally, I've always refused to go against the native functioning of WordPressI adopted Gutenberg as soon as it was released, despite the bugs and limitations at the time. Now there's no doubt about it, it's the best site editor around.
More and more of us believe that builders are already dead. Quite frankly, builders are outdated, and it's time to call it a day, so as not to fall further behind.
Native ironing
If you're looking to redesign your builder-based site into a native one, I'm starting to become a specialist in this area. Web Design ! Contact me via dedicated page.
Improving performance and safety
If you're using a builder and your site is slow and vulnerable, it doesn't have to be. We can speed it up and secure it with a top web hosting ! With webmastering WordPress available to secure everything, including cache tuning and optimization for maximum performance.
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