The Best WordPress Drag & Drop Visual Page Builders

If you’ve spent any time with the WordPress trying to make your website look beautiful, you know how hard it can be!

The truth is, the old core of the WordPress content management system (the classic editor) was outdated. It was really more like a word processor for the web. That is precisely the reason why Automattic (the company behind WordPress) has been pouring their efforts into their next gen editor, Gutenberg, which is now the default editor in WordPress.

While Gutenberg can be done right, for the average WordPress site admin, it can still be very cumbersome to design an smooth, elegant website.

Fortunately, there are a plethora of visual page builder plugins available for WordPress.

What Are WordPress Visual Page Builders?

WordPress page builders are plugins that replace the default WordPress editor with a custom interface for building complex and beautiful page layouts.

These layouts consist of sections and rows to define spaces for content vertically.

Within those rows, you can split the content area horizontally into multiple columns if you wish. Those columns are responsive and expand to full width on mobile device screen sizes.

Inside the columns, you can select from a large library of elements or blocks made available by the page builder plugin or WordPress widgets, drop them in, and drag them around.

What about the “visual” part?

All of the page builders that I’m reviewing here have a feature known as “front-end editing” which means you can see (visualize) what the page looks like as you are editing it.

There are some page builders that do not have front-end editing and only give you blocks inside the back-end “edit page” screen. We’re not going to talk about those.

WPBakery Page Builder

(Formerly called Visual Composer)

Visual Composer has been around a long time, and in early 2018 they changed their name to “WPBakery Page Builder” and gave the editor a slight refresh to the icons and interface color scheme.

But honestly, it can be a bit frustrating to use. Since I’ve used this one the most over the years, I can attest to it. The drag & drop is a quite obnoxious at times when you can’t quite hover your mouse is exactly the right spot and elements are jumping around the page. Also, the element properties popup box is cluttered with a lot of tabs and settings.

WPBakery Page Builder

Divi Builder

The Divi theme with the original back-end divi builder was introduced in 2013. When Divi 3.0 came out in 2016, they introduced a new front-end editing experience that was pretty nice. At that time, it only worked with the Divi theme, while their Divi builder standalone plugin only had the back-end editor. 5 months later, in 2017, they brought front-end editing to the standalone Divi Builder plugin.

Divi Page Builder

Oxygen Builder

Oxygen is a very compelling option for the power user. If you want total control and you’re also somewhat of a web developer, Oxygen might be for you.

Oxygen Builder

Beaver Builder

I’ve used Beaver Builder for a long time. The thing that impressed me most was just how easy it was and how good some of the blocks are right out of the box.

Beaver Builder

Elementor

Elementor is by far the most popular page builder out there right now, and that means its very stable and has a big community of people to support as well as plenty of 3rd party plugin options.

I have to say that Elementor is my current favorite. I’ve used it to redesign several sites’ home pages and they all came out beautiful!

Best of all, their free version has plenty of features for almost anyone.

Elementor

Brizy Builder

Brizy has been a more up-and-comer in the WordPress page builder market over the last few years. They have by far the most clean and minimalist interface while still having tons of functionality. It’s definitely worth a try.

Brizy Builder