WordPress Event Ticketing

Page builders. End users love them; developers love to hate them. But who's right? Pages have dramatically increased in their popularity over the past couple of years starting with Visual Composer taking off. Ever since then developers have muttered how they're insecure, lock in your content and are difficult to work with. Whereas they've also allowed the less technically inclined to build their own websites without needing a designer and developer.

One of the biggest issues with page builders has always been content portability. Most Page Builders use a shortcode based structure. Meaning as soon as you deactivate the page builder, you're website will be a mess of shortcodes with no real output. Not great eh? Luckily there are some steps you can take to ensure the portability of your websites content.

Before you build your site

Before you head off and create your site, have a plan, what pages do you want. How do you want the website to look? By having a plan in place, you can pick the most appropriate page builders for the job rather than just going straight in the deep end and being left with one you aren't happy with. This is vital to ensure you don't have the issues with content portability.

One of the main problems with content portability is people jumping about. You know you aren't meant to change your theme every two months, right?

There's no "right" amount of times to change your site, but keeping to your original plan should help you stick with the page builder you went for, for longer. Pick a page builder that is also a plugin. While most page builders use shortcodes, many also come as separate plugins meaning you aren't tied into using the same theme forever.

Some of the more popular page builders that also come in plugin form include:

• Cornerstone created by Themeco who also develop X. Cornerstone is a front-end page builder that works with any theme!
• Visual Composer  created by WPBakery - Visual Composer is one of the most popular page builders and one of the first to come to market. Works with any theme and offers front-end and admin side page building.
• Divi Builder - The Divi Builder is the plugin version of the popular WordPress theme Divi. While it's only back-end, the theme itself is front-end and admin side leading to some confusion. Overall though the Divi Builder is a robust plugin and there's a wide array of add-ons and freelancers specializing in it.
• BeaverBuilder - just like all the above BeaverBuilder works with any theme and there's also purpose developed BeaverBuilder themes available. BeaverBuilder is incredibly easy and straightforward to use. While also allowing complex layouts to be built, making it perfect for the build your own site crowd and the developer.

By using one of the above page builders as a plugin you'll be able to switch to any theme, and your page will still look the same (hopefully!). Do remember though that some themes have specific integrations with page builders with specific style sheets which means when you switch to another theme you may lose some of that styling. Though any styling can always be re-applied through the use of Custom CSS.

Use Make

What's Make you ask? Make is a WordPress theme (https://thethemefoundry.com/wordpress-themes/make/) with built in Page Builder functionality unlike most page builders, Make outputs clean HTML without resorting to using shortcodes and allowing you to switch from Make at any point and still have all your content intact.

Don't default to using a Page Builder for everything

Your favorite page builder may be fancy and have a ton of different elements which you just love to use, but do you really need to use it for absolutely everything? The answer is, most probably not. If you're writing a plain blog post, you don't need to use a page builder even if you want a CTA; just add a button using HTML. That way the button will always be there even if you switch. It's not fun writing hundreds of blog posts over the years using a page builder and then going back and having to update each one to remove the shortcodes left behind.

Themes are aesthetics. Page builders are functionality

Many WordPress developers always believe themes should only ever be pure aesthetics and layouts while plugins bring functionality. That's why most page builders now offer individual plugin versions even if they initially started off in themes. For both portability of the content and to more closely follow WordPress Development guidelines. While there are exceptions and the odd case where it makes sense to have everything in one, often it's best to have a theme plus a plugin.

Keep a copy of your content before adding it your site

I'm sure not everyone does this, but personally, I always keep a copy of any content I write for my websites in plain text and HTML. This allows me to quickly add it to a new site and change as required without getting caught up in needing to remove a bunch of shortcodes added by a page builder.

It's always a good idea to keep "clean" plain text versions of your content rather than going straight in and adding everything to a page builder.

But remember to keep multiple copies! Hard drives can fail, leaving you with a huge issue if you lose all that content you've spent such a long time creating.

Conclusion

Switching themes when using a page builder doesn't have to be a headache. Just do your research first. Pick one that comes as a plugin, and then you can change themes as often as you want. Have you had issues when switching themes after using a page builder? Or maybe you have an awesome page builder to share? Let us know in the comments below.