Should we still be using WordPress builders in 2026?

As a’web hosting specialist WordPress, What I can already say with certainty is that sites made with builders are slower and generally more vulnerable to attacks than others. But if that hasn't 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 are popular because they promise to create rich, complex pages without touching a single line of code, thanks to visual editors. And, on the whole, they deliver on this promise.

But this is achieved at the cost of many sacrifices, while making less and less sense in the face of the native.

Builders« rendered useless by Gutenberg

WordPress now includes the Gutenberg editor, which lets you customise 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.

And’entertainment and blocks light and often free of charge exist to take things further.

In this context, it makes less and less sense to add a builder overlay, which can sometimes cost money and run counter to the way WordPress works natively.

Builders« go against the grain of WordPress

Builders modify the native operation of the WordPress CMS. In this sense, they are inevitably less durable.

Native WordPress functionality

With the native WordPress editor, called « Gutenberg« with its block system for 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 and therefore has 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 for each page, which also requires additional resources.

The major disadvantage: The code generated is cumbersome for both the server and the visitor.

Particularly 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 problem with your builder that is really blocking you and you want to go back to the native builder (without the 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 need to completely redo it.

What's more, builders generally have to be paid for on an annual subscription basis. Having paid for your builder, you have no intention of going backwards and will do everything in your power to make it work - you want to make the most of it.

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. We have therefore 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 delays

During my 5 years' experience as a web-hosting facilities manager for a 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.

During tests with/without builder, I observed a slowdown of around 10 to 40 with their builder activated on server load times. It's just dramatic.

But visitors are also slowed down. The many heavy scripts (js) and style sheets (css) generated by builders take time to download and then have to be interpreted. In doing so, 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 (processors) are occupied, the more energy is wasted.

While the situation is improving with builders' optimisation patches and caching plugins (which avoid certain server consumption), performance is still not up to scratch compared with a native site.

Time is money

We all know that 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 move on to another site.

There is also good reason to believe that search engines favour the best optimised sites.

So by weighing down your site with a builder, you're potentially damaging its success.

Undeniable ecological impact

WordPress powers more than 43% websites worldwide. Many of these sites include builders, generating an overconsumption of server resources in the region 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 are trying to make’green web hosting, It 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, wasted on 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 site, But I still chose to avoid the builder altogether.

Builders à outrance: The art of chasing flies with a flamethrower

Trying to create 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.

In many cases, the end customer is also required to work on their 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 the pages.

With the native Gutenberg editor, everything is simpler and clearer. Given the increased convenience, the teams went back to posting more. Which goes to show that doing away with a builder also has unsuspected advantages.

However, some people still have the systematic reflex to build. Even on an extremely simple site.

The No. 1 rule of optimisation: use only what you need. A little minimalism never hurt anyone.

What you need is a site that's easy to maintain, reliable, secure and quick for visitors to view, and above all contains the useful information your visitors are looking for, for good SEO ranking (on Google and other search engines), and with as low a carbon footprint as possible.

Conclusion: Go native in 90% of cases

A builder is certainly not a criterion for the success of your site, in fact the opposite is true.

Many native themes, often free, are capable of offering a clear and pleasant visual experience and already allow an excellent level of customisation. 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, etc.

What's more, with Gutenberg, WordPress now offers the «Full Site Editing» function, so that, with compatible themes, you can 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 way of working of WordPress, I adopted Gutenberg as soon as it came out, despite the bugs and limitations at the time. Now there's no doubt about it, it's the best site editor.

More and more of us believe that builders are already dead. Quite frankly, builders are out of date, 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 site, I'm starting to become a specialist in this area. Web Design ! Contact me via the 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 make it more secure with a top web hosting ! With webmastering WordPress available to make everything secure, including adjusting the cache and optimising it for maximum performance.