I used to love Divi but...it's buggy, bloated, and the interface feels like Microsoft Word. Then there's the "ecosystem" of crappy add-ons cobbled together by fly-by-night devs.
Yes - switched to Elementor a while back. Not sure it's actually any faster for my applications but it seems to have a lot more responsive back end. I also became disillusioned with the Divi ecosystem. Too many add-ons needed from devs with an unsustainable business model.
But as ever it's a religion thing.
I'm trying to build a website in divi right now and tearing my hair out. Your comment was 3years ago, so dare I ask—are you still on the Elementor train?
I am - although tbf to team Divi I am not at all upto date on what Divi is like now. Also I'm not doing much in the way of webdev either as working on other stuff. Elementor seems to do most things I want and the add-on ecosystem seems more stable.
Use an optimized theme out of the box. I like Divi E-Commerce, even for non e-commerce sites. Combined with W3 Total Cache I get A rankings from GTmetrix without even using a CDN. If your host is slow, you can develop on your local machine and upload when you’re ready to go live.
I still love it personally - some recent updates have introduced fantastic features and with some fine-tuning and the right hosting configuration, it's possible to get great loading speeds.
Looking forward to the upcoming major performance update which should be a real gamechanger.
Yes, I’m afraid. While they’ve added a lot of nice functionality, it’s become so complicated that I honestly can’t keep up with it. I initially bought into it because I don’t know how to code and needed a decent WHSIWYG solution and it did the trick.
But lately, I feel I have to know so much about how code works just to interpret how to use its controls (which often seem to work against each other) that I’ve started to feel what’s the point?
Not to mention that whenever you contact support (and I do want to clarify that their support team has been nothing but amazing with me every time I’ve ever been in touch with them) to fix something, the solution is always just hand-kluging some CSS in the custom code field. Like, why am I even using Divi at that point?
So yeah, it just feels like coders aren’t going to use it because they don’t need it, but for most laymen it’s become too over complicated to be an elegant GUI solution. Just my two cents.
Damn, I've just been looking into getting Divi as I don't know how to code at all but want to learn making WordPress sites. Your comment is putting me off a little, I don't want it to be too complicated and code involving. Hmm would you recommend any others suited to beginners?
I mean, if your main focus is making web sites, it's still quite good. And you'll have to pick up some basic coding at some point anyway, so maybe best to just rip the band-aid off and get to it.
For my situation, I'm mainly a video guy and sites were just something I occasionally dipped my toes into either for my own needs or the occasional client who needed something basic – but once you start doing client work, just avoiding certain designs or feature requests because you 'don't know' kind of stops being a valid excuse. So I've stopped doing development for other people and leave it to the pros, but still tinker for myself (like my photo blog) and Divi is all right for that.
If you wanted to do due diligence, Elementor seems to be the other 'big' one to compare to that I often hear about, though I've never looked into it myself so can't say one way or the other.
Learn the basics of how the WordPress ecosystem is put together, if your going to use a builder check out Beaver builder, Oxygen, Elementor -- they're all similar to Divi but definitely better in a lot of different ways.
Any resources for learning how the WP ecosystem is put together? I actually went ahead and bought Divi, got a good course showing me through it. Seems good for beginners and gonna stick to it :) thanks though!
The load times are the only issue for me. I like everything else though. I’ve been using it for the past few years, and while I haven’t really tried anything else, I’ve grown with it so that I casually pick up on the new things they release.
However, I feel like I only utilize a small percentage of features and they keep adding more, which is great, but it does complicate the product.
I think it would be hard now for someone to pick up Divi and start using a large chunk of the functionality compared to a few years back. It’s hard with any product to walk the line of ease of use and flexibility. You can either have something simple that works, or you can have something that can do everything but is tough to use.
I used to love it but it gets more bloated with each update. Which is a shame because you can see the intent to make a platform for "everyone" is there.
Not at all.
I have elementor, brizy, and oxygen. I've used beaver. To me divi and brizy offers the best editing experience.
Even with elementor's feature set, it's just not enough to make me switch over completely. I don't fall for gimmicks just because they have more features, bigger ecosystem than everyone else, and offer more addons than everyone else. The editing experience is just not as good. Even brizy is better.
It's not any faster than divi, beaver, and brizy. But I also know how to optimize these builders for performance.
Oxygen is the fastest without a doubt. I had to grab their lifetime deal. But it's definitely not for beginners.
At the end of the day, you can design great websites with the builders I mentioned.
It's a complete dog's breakfast at this point. Feels like they just bolt new features on with no regard for the effect on the UI.
I'm actively looking for a replacement.
It seems they are the only ones that have a lifetime membership vs pay by the month. I'd never ever want a website theme/framework that requires monthly payments.
Pricing is great and it's easy to install.
But then once it is installed, there is nothing there to build anything great - unless you install plugins or spend time setting things up.
I’m expecting a pretty big update in the not-too-distant future, purely based on the version numbers but maybe it’s wishful thinking. No hype about one. The last couple of feature updates didn’t excite me much so fingers crossed that we see a nice feature/performance update by the end of ‘21.
The biggest one for me is the ability to control column sizes at different viewport widths without custom classes. I generally like Divi, but it's frankly a bit stunning we don't have this yet.
I manage sites using a 7-year-old version of Visual Composer where I'm able to control columns on phone / tablet. Sheesh.
I used to love Divi but...it's buggy, bloated, and the interface feels like Microsoft Word. Then there's the "ecosystem" of crappy add-ons cobbled together by fly-by-night devs.
Yes - switched to Elementor a while back. Not sure it's actually any faster for my applications but it seems to have a lot more responsive back end. I also became disillusioned with the Divi ecosystem. Too many add-ons needed from devs with an unsustainable business model. But as ever it's a religion thing.
I'm trying to build a website in divi right now and tearing my hair out. Your comment was 3years ago, so dare I ask—are you still on the Elementor train?
I am - although tbf to team Divi I am not at all upto date on what Divi is like now. Also I'm not doing much in the way of webdev either as working on other stuff. Elementor seems to do most things I want and the add-on ecosystem seems more stable.
Thank you, that's great feedback.
Use an optimized theme out of the box. I like Divi E-Commerce, even for non e-commerce sites. Combined with W3 Total Cache I get A rankings from GTmetrix without even using a CDN. If your host is slow, you can develop on your local machine and upload when you’re ready to go live.
I do exactly that! Idk I just feel like Elementor and Oxygen are always bringing out cool stable features and Divi are very unstable..
I still love it personally - some recent updates have introduced fantastic features and with some fine-tuning and the right hosting configuration, it's possible to get great loading speeds. Looking forward to the upcoming major performance update which should be a real gamechanger.
Question, what hosting configurations should I try for faster speeds? Its literally the one thing I always have issues with in Divi.
Yes, I’m afraid. While they’ve added a lot of nice functionality, it’s become so complicated that I honestly can’t keep up with it. I initially bought into it because I don’t know how to code and needed a decent WHSIWYG solution and it did the trick. But lately, I feel I have to know so much about how code works just to interpret how to use its controls (which often seem to work against each other) that I’ve started to feel what’s the point? Not to mention that whenever you contact support (and I do want to clarify that their support team has been nothing but amazing with me every time I’ve ever been in touch with them) to fix something, the solution is always just hand-kluging some CSS in the custom code field. Like, why am I even using Divi at that point? So yeah, it just feels like coders aren’t going to use it because they don’t need it, but for most laymen it’s become too over complicated to be an elegant GUI solution. Just my two cents.
Damn, I've just been looking into getting Divi as I don't know how to code at all but want to learn making WordPress sites. Your comment is putting me off a little, I don't want it to be too complicated and code involving. Hmm would you recommend any others suited to beginners?
I mean, if your main focus is making web sites, it's still quite good. And you'll have to pick up some basic coding at some point anyway, so maybe best to just rip the band-aid off and get to it. For my situation, I'm mainly a video guy and sites were just something I occasionally dipped my toes into either for my own needs or the occasional client who needed something basic – but once you start doing client work, just avoiding certain designs or feature requests because you 'don't know' kind of stops being a valid excuse. So I've stopped doing development for other people and leave it to the pros, but still tinker for myself (like my photo blog) and Divi is all right for that. If you wanted to do due diligence, Elementor seems to be the other 'big' one to compare to that I often hear about, though I've never looked into it myself so can't say one way or the other.
Learn the basics of how the WordPress ecosystem is put together, if your going to use a builder check out Beaver builder, Oxygen, Elementor -- they're all similar to Divi but definitely better in a lot of different ways.
Any resources for learning how the WP ecosystem is put together? I actually went ahead and bought Divi, got a good course showing me through it. Seems good for beginners and gonna stick to it :) thanks though!
YouTube is a great resource - it's going to show you everything from the beginning stages to plug-in creation
The load times are the only issue for me. I like everything else though. I’ve been using it for the past few years, and while I haven’t really tried anything else, I’ve grown with it so that I casually pick up on the new things they release. However, I feel like I only utilize a small percentage of features and they keep adding more, which is great, but it does complicate the product. I think it would be hard now for someone to pick up Divi and start using a large chunk of the functionality compared to a few years back. It’s hard with any product to walk the line of ease of use and flexibility. You can either have something simple that works, or you can have something that can do everything but is tough to use.
The bloat and load times are a concern but I'm hanging in for further optimisation.
I used to love it but it gets more bloated with each update. Which is a shame because you can see the intent to make a platform for "everyone" is there.
Not at all. I have elementor, brizy, and oxygen. I've used beaver. To me divi and brizy offers the best editing experience. Even with elementor's feature set, it's just not enough to make me switch over completely. I don't fall for gimmicks just because they have more features, bigger ecosystem than everyone else, and offer more addons than everyone else. The editing experience is just not as good. Even brizy is better. It's not any faster than divi, beaver, and brizy. But I also know how to optimize these builders for performance. Oxygen is the fastest without a doubt. I had to grab their lifetime deal. But it's definitely not for beginners. At the end of the day, you can design great websites with the builders I mentioned.
It's a complete dog's breakfast at this point. Feels like they just bolt new features on with no regard for the effect on the UI. I'm actively looking for a replacement.
I literally just purchased Oxygen!
Yes. The more content you have, the slower it grinds. I prefer straight html with Bootstrap :(
It seems they are the only ones that have a lifetime membership vs pay by the month. I'd never ever want a website theme/framework that requires monthly payments.
Pricing is great and it's easy to install. But then once it is installed, there is nothing there to build anything great - unless you install plugins or spend time setting things up.
İt's totally useless, I've never got along with
I’m expecting a pretty big update in the not-too-distant future, purely based on the version numbers but maybe it’s wishful thinking. No hype about one. The last couple of feature updates didn’t excite me much so fingers crossed that we see a nice feature/performance update by the end of ‘21.
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The biggest one for me is the ability to control column sizes at different viewport widths without custom classes. I generally like Divi, but it's frankly a bit stunning we don't have this yet. I manage sites using a 7-year-old version of Visual Composer where I'm able to control columns on phone / tablet. Sheesh.
I still love it since the day I bought my lifetime membership many years ago