WPBakery Page Builder Review: A WordPress Developer’s Perspective

This WPBakery Page Premium Plugin Plugin. WPBakery Sell and Supported any other company. This is my honest opinion as a professional WordPress developer, who builds and manages WordPress websites for a living.

This review is part of our full WordPress page builder comparison, which gives in-depth reviews and comparisons of WordPress’s largest page builders.

Is WPBakery Page Builder Good?

Heck no. WPBakery Page Builder (formerly Visual Composer) is solidly in last place as the worst of the four major page builders we’ve reviewed. It’s also one of the worst widely-used software projects in WordPress, of any kind.

If you just want to know what to use instead, here’s your answer: Beaver Builder is our personal favorite, and we also like Elementor.

To see how WPBakery Page Builder stacks up to those options, check out our full page builder comparison:

https://wpshout.com/wordpress-page-builder-review/

WPBakery Page Builder Review Table

Below is a detailed breakout of WPBakery Page Builder’s strengths and weaknesses from our page builder comparison table:

WPBakery Page Builder
User-Friendly?	3.2	-You can generally squint at it and see how it's supposed to work, whether you have a tech background or not. -Best if you squint.
Feature-Rich?	4.6	-High quantity of available modules. -Market leader status means lots of built-in integrations.
Well-Built?	1.5	-Shortcode architecture a massive liability. -Consistent lack of effort to integrate smoothly with its environment. -Sloppy execution extends to inaccurate helper text and other basics.
Reliable?	1.3	-Inaccurate previewing, important randomly missing features, endless bizarre bugs: a nightmare if you need to get things done properly.
Overall	2.4	-The clear worst among WordPress's best-selling page builders.

See more detail about how WPBakery Page Builder stacks up against WordPress’s other largest page builders in our full WordPress page builder comparison.

Full WPBakery Page Builder Review

With the at-a-glance summaries above taken care of, here’s our full WPBakery Page Builder review.

WHAT WE’RE REVIEWING

This review focuses on the premium WPBakery Page Builder plugin, version 5.4.7.

To review WPBakery Page Builder, we put it through the same test (duplicate the landing page of an app named Tile) that we use for the other page builders we’ve reviewed.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Hi! I’m Fred Meyer, co-editor-in-chief of WPShout. I’ve been a professional WordPress developer for six years, and I’ve written hundreds of WordPress tutorials for developers here on WPShout since 2013.

Links to WPBakery Page Builder in this article are affiliate links. My opinions of both WPBakery Page Builder’s strengths and weaknesses are my own. In both this review and my related WordPress page builder comparison review, I’m telling you the plain truth as I see it about which WordPress page builder to use, when, and why. Thanks for reading!

SECTIONS OF THE REVIEW

Click on a section below to navigate this WPBakery Page Builder review.

• Pros: Things I especially like about WPBakery Page Builder.
• Cons: Where WPBakery Page Builder falls short.
• Summary: WPBakery Page Builder review summary.

WPBakery Page Builder Review: The Good

NICE GESTURE TOWARD MOBILE-FIRST INHERITANCE

I like WPBakery’s way of dictating responsive behavior where the default is that things inherit their properties from the next smallest size. This dovetails nicely with the idea of “mobile-first” development, which assumes people are on a phone, and changes things as devices get larger, rather than vice-versa.

Notice:

• The one-second or so pause after I set the background image, before it fills in the empty gray square.
• How my changes will not live-preview without me clicking “Save changes,” and the moderate pause even after the button click.
• The three-second or so pause after I click “Update” before the green save bar gradually filters in.
• The final one-second or so pause when I click to exit the builder.

Some of the issues above are because the plugin is simply slow—presumably because it dumps vast amounts of CSS, JavaScript, and markup onto the page.

The most serious source of UI drag is the clunky, awkward, everything-by-hand previewing and updating process.

However, the most serious single source of UI drag is not slow, bulky code, but rather the clunky, awkward, everything-by-hand previewing and updating process. In the WPBakery page builder, absolutely nothing—changes to content, formatting, or layout, changes to modules, rows, or pages—live-previews or live-updates. You have to push everything through yourself with a button press (or more than one), and wait anywhere from one to several seconds for an updated version to come back. This gives the entire user experience a draining, laborious, rotary-telephone feel.

This is presumably because the WPBakery front-end builder is actually doing the equivalent of pressing “Update” on the post and then redrawing an iframe to show your changes, rather than doing any sort of more intelligent JavaScript previewing. That also carries other consequences, such as making text filters very slow to apply (more on that later).

Using the WPBakery Page Builder feels like trying to run underwater.

The sum of this and numerous other UI slowdowns is that using the WPBakery Page Builder feels like trying to run underwater.

AWKWARD, UNINTUITIVE, AND CLUNKY

The WPBakery page builder is not just slow, it’s also awkward and unintuitive on almost every level imaginable.

Quick, tell me what each of the “pluses” down the middle do. Bonus points if you can explain the yellow one that’s mostly hidden by WPBakery’s own layout elements.

GIF

Using the WPBakery page builder, I frequently feel annoyed and hemmed-in in a way that is very different from all of the other builders reviewed.

Using the WPBakery Page Builder, I frequently feel annoyed and hemmed-in in a way that is very different from Divi Builder, Beaver Builder, and Elementor, all of which have invested strongly in intuitive, coordinated user interfaces. I feel like I’m using MS Word ’95.

Let’s take another example of bad UI: in WPBakery’s (mostly rather sensible) “Image Gallery” module, you have a chance to choose image sizes for your gallery images. How do you choose? A dropdown of available image sizes, right?

No:

Yes, it’s a text field, for you to type in the slug-ized name of the image size you’re looking for—that is, assuming you know what image sizes are registered in your theme, and how to use WordPress’s slug conventions for size names like “Medium Large.”

Of course, since WordPress’s existing PHP functions make it easy to access a list of registered image sizes, the choice to make this a text field rather than a dropdown of size options is as nonsensical as a “Date of Birth” field that expects a MIDI file. By itself, this single design choice won’t break anything (unless the user typos), but the accumulated weight of it and dozens of similarly careless choices make the WPBakery page builder a gnat swarm of frustration even in those instances in which it technically “works.”

Speaking of which:

EVERYTHING IS BROKEN

To use WPBakery Page Builder is to immediately invite baffling bugs and errors into your workflow and website.

To use WPBakery Page Builder is to immediately invite baffling bugs and errors into your workflow and website—even an environment as clean as, in this case, a stock, customization-free starter theme and no other running plugins.

The first thing I noticed was that my page developed a horizontal scrollbar. This means that something’s pushing the page out to be wider than it wants to be, and so you have to scroll left and right on every device to see the full content. This is ugly anywhere, but it’s an especially efficient way to ruin the user experience on mobile devices.

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