Why we dropped Elementor.

Quick one. We don't build with Elementor, WPBakery, Divi, or any of the page-builder family. Here's the reasoning.

The pitch vs the reality

The page-builder pitch is: empower non-technical users to edit pages without calling a developer. Real benefit in principle.

The reality is closer to: produce sites that look fine at launch and visibly drift over the following eighteen months as the page builder updates, third-party plugins update, the theme updates, and nobody knows which combination broke the layout.

What actually goes wrong

The page-builder loads its own visual editor inside the WordPress admin. That editor is opinionated about how blocks work, what CSS they produce, and how they relate to the underlying theme. When any of those layers updates independently, and they all update independently, the layout you signed off can shift without warning.

We've inherited sites where the only fix for a broken section is to rebuild it in the editor because nobody knows what the original combination was. That's a maintainability tax that compounds over the years.

What we build instead

Custom Gutenberg blocks with locked variations. The block schema lives in the theme, owned by us. Editors get a real CMS, they can change copy, swap images, reorder sections, but they can't break the layout because the layout is constrained by the schema.

For sites with heavy interactive content, we go further: headless WordPress with a Next.js front-end. WordPress stays as the editor, the front-end is independent, no plugin can ever break the visible site.

Are we just being snobs?

Maybe a bit. But the maintenance pattern is real. Every Elementor site we've inherited has the same story: 'it was fine at launch, then it just kept getting weirder.' Custom blocks have the same content-editing benefit without the same drift pattern.

The shortcut isn't worth the long tail.