The Best WordPress Page Builder: Why We Choose Gutenberg Over Elementor, Divi, and Other Page Builders
The Rise of the Visual Page Builder
Adding content to a website hasn’t always been easy. In the early days of the internet, you needed to be a web developer to create even the simplest web page—the only method was writing code directly. Over time, two major tools emerged to change that. The first was the CMS (Content Management System), which organizes and stores website content in one place, allowing for easy editing without writing code. This solved a number of problems but was limited to editing within pre-defined text areas on any given page. The second tool addressed a different challenge: the visual design of the page itself. Enter the visual editor. Visual editors show the content writer exactly how their content will look, letting them handle the layout at the time of creation—no developer required. Together, a CMS and a visual editor dramatically speed up web publishing and allow non-technical individuals to produce high-quality content without help.
At Windmill, it’s very important to us that clients can successfully publish content on their own. Many have complex products, services, and information to communicate, which means they need pages that display information effectively while supporting easy editing and frequent updates. In 2026, the WordPress landscape offers several visual builders to help. Which one should you choose? For the last few years, our organization has committed to Gutenberg, WordPress’s modern, native visual editor. Below, we’ll compare it against two major competitors—Elementor and Divi—and explain why.
History of WordPress Page Builders: From Divi and Elementor to the Present
The Rise of Third-Party Visual Builders (2010–2017)
In the early years of WordPress, content editing—while accessible outside of raw code—was still complicated and time-consuming. Anything more complex than simple paragraphs, bold, italic, and links required shortcodes, custom PHP templates, database fields, or other workarounds. This meant a marketer or copywriter with any desire for complex functionality or layout still needed a developer to assist. Over time, as the web matured, WordPress users began looking for better solutions.
The evolution of WordPress page builders began in the early 2010s as users sought more visual, drag-and-drop alternatives to the classic TinyMCE editor. Divi, launched in 2013, was one of the first major visual builders, introducing a theme-integrated system with modules for rows, columns, and elements like sliders and accordions. It quickly gained popularity for enabling non-coders to create custom designs without touching PHP templates.
Elementor followed in 2016, offering a free core plugin with a more intuitive drag-and-drop interface, widgets, and templates. Within two to three years, it had become WordPress’s top page builder. Other builders like Beaver Builder (2014) and Visual Composer (early 2010s) were also emerging during this period. These early options simplified the editing experience but often introduced code bloat and performance overhead.
WordPress Shifts to Gutenberg and Full Site Editing (2018–Present)
The landscape shifted dramatically in December 2018 with WordPress 5.0, which introduced Gutenberg as the default editor, replacing the classic, decades-old TinyMCE. Although initially met with resistance due to its block-based paradigm and rocky early years, Gutenberg aimed to provide a visual editing experience built around blocks—reusable components that could be nested to create complex page structures. This was the first phase of a multi-phase project: Phase 1 focused on editing posts and pages; Phase 2, starting in 2022 with WordPress 5.9, brought Full Site Editing (FSE), enabling block-based customization of headers, footers, and templates.
From 2019 onward, third-party builders like Elementor and Divi continued to evolve with features like pop-ups, forms, and AI tools, while Gutenberg’s adoption into core WordPress signaled a broader transition. Manual content entry was out; visual content design was in. Over the last seven years, Gutenberg’s functionality has steadily improved, evolving from a simple page layout tool into a genuine design powerhouse. Today, while third-party builders still have a place in the WordPress ecosystem, Gutenberg has established itself as the primary—and we believe the most effective—solution.
Our agency made the transition to a Gutenberg-forward approach beginning in 2022 and has been consistently happy with that decision. Elementor and Divi pioneered much of what we have today, but in 2026, it’s harder and harder to justify using a third-party tool. Many come with a host of complexities and problems, from slower performance to a less intuitive editing experience. Below, we’ll overview why we believe Gutenberg is the best visual builder for WordPress.
Why Gutenberg Is the Best WordPress Page Builder
1. Gutenberg is Native to WordPress
Because it’s built into WordPress core, it avoids page-builder conflicts and extra scripts while delivering cleaner code, faster performance, and stronger long-term compatibility as WordPress evolves.
As part of WordPress core since 5.0, Gutenberg requires no additional plugins, promoting seamless compatibility with most themes, plugins, and updates. This eliminates many of the conflicts that arise when Elementor, Divi, or their separately developed extensions attempt to integrate with other site functionality. Native integration means lighter resource use and guaranteed long-term support, making it ideal for scalable sites without extra maintenance overhead.
The native architecture also promotes site performance and code cleanliness. WordPress core functionality is increasingly optimized for Gutenberg specifically, and features like Full Site Editing—building headers, footers, and all other site-wide components—require certain Gutenberg capabilities that some page builders actually disable in order to function. Gutenberg also doesn’t require additional plugin scripts or third-party scripts to run when a user visits the site. They get content served directly from WordPress’s core architecture, which speeds up load times—important for users, search engines, and AI web crawlers alike. Gutenberg runs on core WordPress JavaScript and PHP logic, which promotes fast server response times and page load speeds: very important metrics in an era of accelerating performance expectations.
2. Gutenberg is Sleek and Performant
Gutenberg generates clean, semantic HTML with minimal DOM complexity, and leverages comparatively little JavaScript and CSS. The result is a simpler page structure, smaller file sizes, faster load times, and better Core Web Vitals scores compared to Elementor and Divi. Benchmark testing from wprapidly.com showed a basic Gutenberg site loading nearly twice as quickly as a basic Elementor site. Testing from kinsta.com shows load times roughly 40% faster on Gutenberg, with pages approximately 50% smaller in total size and far fewer requests to third-party resources—a smaller footprint, a quicker page, and a better experience for site visitors.
The impact of load speed on user retention and SEO is well-documented. Portent reports that conversion rates for a one-second load time are roughly three times higher than for a five-second load time. When load time moves from two seconds to five seconds, bounce rates rise from 9% to 38%. Google has also stated concretely that page speed factors into search rankings—so speed matters if you want your site found.
Beyond the performance benefits, there are developer-specific reasons to prefer Gutenberg as well. Take a look at the DOM tree of an Elementor site. Elements are often nested within nested elements within nested elements. The structure is bloated and complex, which inherently slows pages and makes the HTML harder to read—for both developers and designers. If you’re not a developer, this may seem like an abstract concern, but a more complex codebase will always be more time-consuming and expensive to maintain over time. The editing experience with Elementor and Divi is also often slower than working in Gutenberg. Let’s unpack that further.
3. Gutenberg Lets You Write, Edit, and Publish Quickly
Because it produces clean, lightweight pages with minimal DOM bloat and fewer scripts, Gutenberg typically loads faster, scores better on Core Web Vitals, and is easier to maintain than Elementor or Divi.
Last I tried my hand at editing Divi or Elementor content, I was shocked by how difficult it was to complete normal, repetitive, non-developer tasks that are easy in Gutenberg. The simplest example would be copy and paste. Copying and pasting elements in Gutenberg is as easy as selecting a block, copying it, and pasting wherever you want—on the same page, a different page, or even an entirely different site. Under the hood, Gutenberg uses a straightforward templating language directly in the HTML to render blocks, which makes copy and paste logic quick, reliable, and intuitive. In Divi and Elementor, pasting is cumbersome in the best scenarios and flat out doesn’t work in certain contexts—across pages or between sites.
On the developer side, creating custom styles for Gutenberg blocks is also dramatically more straightforward. The native block styling system allows developers to define human-readable block styles that content writers can toggle on or off directly in the editor. Have three different button designs you want available on a site? Code each as a block style, and any content writer can instantly switch between them—enabling fast, consistent design reuse without developer involvement.
Gutenberg also includes built-in tools like block patterns (pre-designed, reusable layouts), synced patterns (edits propagate across pages), and dynamic content blocks (such as a dynamic list of blog posts). These keep your site visually cohesive and speed up both page layout and content editing—without sacrificing any of the performance benefits described above. With Full Site Editing, every portion of your site can be built with Gutenberg: the header, the footer, repeated CTAs. Sibling pages can share the same template, keeping hero sections and modules consistent, while content writers remain free to customize body content—either as entirely original designs or using pre-saved patterns.
4. Gutenberg Offers a Better Editing Experience
Because it uses a modern block-based editor with an intuitive, responsive interface, Gutenberg lets non-developers build and style complex pages faster and more flexibly than the Classic Editor or many heavier page builders.
While there’s a small learning curve to block-based editing, Gutenberg’s interface becomes intuitive and efficient once you understand the basics. Contextual toolbars and a drag-and-drop interface feel slicker and more responsive than competing builders. Compared to the Classic Editor (WordPress’s legacy WYSIWYG editor), the difference is night and day. A decade ago, complex pages required a mix of hard-coded elements, shortcodes, static text, and awkward manual HTML and CSS. Gutenberg now gives non-developers an enormous range of options for styling a page: full-width sections, custom typography, increased white space, background photos and videos, embedded media, and more. Third-party block libraries extend these capabilities even further, allowing a novice user to hand-craft pages with carousels, sliders, tabs, dropdowns, animated elements, and more.
5. Gutenberg is Open Source
Because it’s open source and core to WordPress, Gutenberg has no subscription lock-in, benefits from a massive developer ecosystem, and keeps your content portable instead of trapped in proprietary builder formats.
Gutenberg is licensed under the GPL, the same open-source license that governs WordPress itself. The entire codebase is publicly available on GitHub, where thousands of developers collaborate on its direction. When something breaks, you’re not submitting a ticket to a private company and waiting in a queue—you can read the source, identify the issue, and in many cases resolve it yourself.
Contrast this with Elementor Pro and Divi, both of which operate on proprietary licensing models with annual subscriptions. Stop paying, and you lose access to updates and support. With Gutenberg, there’s no subscription fee, no license key, and no premium tier gating core functionality. The full editor ships with WordPress, free of charge.
The open-source model also fuels a healthy extension ecosystem—developers worldwide build and distribute free Gutenberg block plugins without needing to conform to a proprietary framework, resulting in more choice and better compatibility with the broader WordPress ecosystem. There’s also the matter of content portability. Gutenberg stores content as lightweight HTML markup directly in the post database, meaning your data isn’t trapped in a proprietary format. With Elementor and Divi, content is often stored in serialized data structures that become difficult to migrate without the original plugin active. Choosing an open-source, core-integrated editor is, at its heart, a choice to keep your content yours.
6. WordPress is Committed to Gutenberg
Because it’s the long-term roadmap for WordPress core, Gutenberg keeps improving with every major release and stays aligned with block themes, plugins, and hosting for better stability, performance, and longevity.
This might be the most important point on this list. Gutenberg is not a side project—it is the central focus of WordPress core development, and has been for nearly a decade. Phase 1 delivered the block editor. Phase 2 brought Full Site Editing. Phase 3, focused on collaborative editing, is actively underway. Phase 4 aims to bring native multilingual support into the core. Every major WordPress release in recent years has included meaningful Gutenberg improvements.
This commitment shapes the entire ecosystem. Default WordPress themes have been block-based since 2022. Plugin developers are building with the block API in mind. Hosting companies are optimizing for Gutenberg’s architecture. When your editor, your theme, your plugins, and your host are all aligned around the same system, the result is a more stable, more performant site.
It’s also worth considering longevity. Third-party builders exist at the mercy of their own business models—companies get acquired, products get sunset, pricing changes. Gutenberg’s future is tied to WordPress itself. Building on Gutenberg means building in the direction WordPress is heading, not alongside it. That alignment reduces long-term technical debt and ensures your sites benefit from every core improvement WordPress ships, automatically.
Gutenberg vs. Elementor and Divi Today
Divi, Elementor, and other third-party builders played a critical role in pushing WordPress beyond its early limitations, and their influence is undeniable. But in 2026, Gutenberg has caught up—and in many areas, surpassed—what those tools offer, while carrying none of the baggage. It’s native, it’s faster, it’s open source, and WordPress is betting its entire future on it. Our agency made this transition years ago, and the results have been clear: faster sites, simpler maintenance, and a development experience that improves with every WordPress release. The gap between Gutenberg and the alternatives closed years ago. Today, Gutenberg is miles ahead.
If you’re considering a website redesign and want to see the Gutenberg block editing experience in action, reach out. While we support clients with pre-existing sites using other editors when needed, we’d love to show you what this approach can do.