Do you prefer Thrive architect or Elementor and why?

CryptoDavid said:
I would appreciate if you could link to Ryuzaki's post that delves into this matter.

I am myself, a bit frustrated with page builders.
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I'm pretty sure he's talking about my post at the top of this thread.
 
Ryuzaki said:
I'm pretty sure he's talking about my post at the top of this thread.
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Ah, right, thanks for that.

He said in the orientation section and I went there searching. Now I feel ashamed.

Anyway, about your comment Mr. Ryu.

You are absolutely right.

But what would you say if a page builder can output static pages?
 
CryptoDavid said:
But what would you say if a page builder can output static pages?
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They all can with proper server-side caching. That's not really the problem. The problem is typically all of the extra JS and CSS files they enqueue that are render blocking.

You can concatenate them, you can minify them, you can do both, but you can't get around having to load all that crap before the page can render.

Say you use a page builder because you like the WYSIWYG design style, and you keep it very simple. You still end up loading CSS and JS for every bloated possibility they include. I'm sure some only enqueue specific files if the associated "blocks" or "widgets" or whatever you want to call them are in use. That's the way to do it. But even then they're never really written as efficiently as they could be if you wrote them yourself.

I think that people who can't write simple HTML and CSS tend to have the hungriest eyes.

They want the most cool looking features and crap that doesn't improve user experience and conversions. They're serving themselves, and page builders are happy to exploit that desire for a sale, and more and more bloat occurs.

I think that people who can write simple HTML, CSS, JS, jQuery, PHP... those are the ones that return back to simplicity and efficiency. Both of those attributes are what lead to higher conversions and UX. It takes experience to get there, having to learn a bunch of coding only to realize most of it should be shrugged off and left on the drawing board and not actually placed into action on the live site. By doing it yourself, you measure and realize that all the complexity is hurting you and your users.

That's when you start to embrace simpler design philosophies like flat design and minimalism. And then suddenly your site runs faster, your coding and design efforts are completed faster, your user metrics improve, and so does your bottom line.

It's the curse of being a noob. You want the most but couldn't have it because you didn't have the skills, until page builders dragged us back to the Geocities / Angelfire stone ages.
 
Ryuzaki said:
They all can with proper server-side caching. That's not really the problem. The problem is typically all of the extra JS and CSS files they enqueue that are render blocking.

You can concatenate them, you can minify them, you can do both, but you can't get around having to load all that crap before the page can render.

Say you use a page builder because you like the WYSIWYG design style, and you keep it very simple. You still end up loading CSS and JS for every bloated possibility they include. I'm sure some only enqueue specific files if the associated "blocks" or "widgets" or whatever you want to call them are in use. That's the way to do it. But even then they're never really written as efficiently as they could be if you wrote them yourself.

I think that people who can't write simple HTML and CSS tend to have the hungriest eyes.

They want the most cool looking features and crap that doesn't improve user experience and conversions. They're serving themselves, and page builders are happy to exploit that desire for a sale, and more and more bloat occurs.

I think that people who can write simple HTML, CSS, JS, jQuery, PHP... those are the ones that return back to simplicity and efficiency. Both of those attributes are what lead to higher conversions and UX. It takes experience to get there, having to learn a bunch of coding only to realize most of it should be shrugged off and left on the drawing board and not actually placed into action on the live site. By doing it yourself, you measure and realize that all the complexity is hurting you and your users.

That's when you start to embrace simpler design philosophies like flat design and minimalism. And then suddenly your site runs faster, your coding and design efforts are completed faster, your user metrics improve, and so does your bottom line.

It's the curse of being a noob. You want the most but couldn't have it because you didn't have the skills, until page builders dragged us back to the Geocities / Angelfire stone ages.
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I agree with you completely.

But I think you are missing one key aspect here, I feel you have a bit of a bias as you appear to be a proficient coder, and you seem to be able to put up a great looking website that loads fast.

I can tell you that even though my coding skills are pretty much shameful, that is not the reason (at least not the main one) why I am not coding a website.

It's mostly about the design itself and the ability to manage content easily.

You know, stuff like dragging and dropping etc.

I am not good with designing layouts, messing with columns, messing around with CSS for the design would be hell for me as I just get completely overwhelmed with micro design decisions.

Alignments, this and that, doing it with code I can't even imagine, as I don't have a designer heart.

But I am a designer hero when I use these page builders and templating systems.

Anyway, if you think I am wrong I would love to know more and I will just start coding websites.
 
CryptoDavid said:
Anyway, if you think I am wrong I would love to know more and I will just start coding websites.
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My opinion is you gotta pay the cost to be the boss.

If you don't want to learn how to code, you won't learn why I'm saying the things I'm saying, though I did explain them above. If you want the good stuff that you're not really entitled to, that means you have to accept the shortcut, and the shortcut is always packaged together with a poison pill.

Once you've learned how to get "the good stuff" you learn that the good stuff (even without the poison pill) is actually the bad stuff. It's not working in your favor. In web design, SEO, and conversion rate optimization, simpler is almost always better.

You can most certainly learn to code simple designs. But we aren't necessarily talking about learning to code up entire websites. We're just talking about not using bloated page builders. Gutenberg is a great alternative if you stay away from the crazy blocks and use the standard stuff.

The question is, should you invest the time it takes to learn to code custom blocks and design pages the way you want them, etc? Or is that time better spent elsewhere? You can grab simple and fast themes for your CMS, keep your content simple, use Gutenberg or the classic editor, and publish 5x as much content. There's no page builder that's faster the TinyMCE content editor or Gutenberg, as far as I know. Those exist for one reason only - to make the simple become complex while appearing simple and eating up your time clicking through all their wild ass user interfaces.

My own websites look a lot like a BuSo thread. White backgrounds, black text, and some images tossed in. They load fast, Google loves that, the users love it. They stay on the page for crazy long amounts of time, view a lot of ads, click a lot of affiliate links, view multiple pages. I have a site netting me on average a $50 RPM. Another one does $30 RPMs. I don't have my own products or anything like that either with massive ROI. It's low commission affiliate stuff like Amazon and ads.

The other thing to realize about all of this is probably 70% of all of our (me, you, the reader of this post) traffic is mobile on a thin 300px - 450px wide screen. They don't even experience any of the fancy ass design these page builders are trying to offer you. It's one thin column of text. A fancy four column block is collapsed back to your typical one thin column of text for 70% of your users. Nobody cares, and more than half never even see the fancy shmancy stuff.

Just make your site fast and provide engaging content and you'll succeed.

I've said it in the past here on the forum: this is something the industry has known for a long time. Just Google "ugly design converts better":

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Look at the age of some of these posts. 2010, 2013, all the way up to less than a week ago.

When people say "ugly design" they don't mean "ugly". They mean it as the opposite of "pretty" and by "pretty" they mean complex. The opposite of complex is simple and minimal. That's what makes you more money.

My proposition is page builders are hurting your revenue, sucking up your time, tanking your page speed, hurting your user metrics, etc. There's better solutions.

That's why I answered "which page builder is the best" with the answer "none of them".

They're a solution to a problem that didn't need solving. The industry already learned this lesson once, which is why WYSIWYG editors went the way of the dinosaur in the late 90's. The way we solved it the first time around was to all stop injecting heroin in our arms. Now it's back and people think the solution is to provide clean needles to the junkies.
 
@Ryuzaki, And don't you think we could have a simple builder that has some built in blocks and even templates that just outputs sane plain HTML?

I can't design stuff from scratch.
 
Elementor I've only used a few times, I haven't used Thrive Architect at all and used Divi for a few sites. Divi is very heavy. I generally try to use Gutenberg or Oxygen builder.

I generally want to keep things as simple as possible with the design.
 
I know this post is 3 months old at this point but let me tell you this.

I've been using Thrive Architect for a few years now and I love the features. With that being said, my website has just over 30 articles and a database over 1.5GB!! That is nuts. You get all out e-commerce sites with a database smaller than mine. And trust me, my website is not a kid's canvas. It only has a few boxes here and there for each article and that's it.

Thrive (and I assume all page builders for that matter) duplicates all your content so that it can still be delivered when you disable the plugin. I remember wondering why the word counter plugin was showing double the words, before reading on Thrive's website what is really going on.

I am steering away from page builders and I truly believe you should, too.

EDIT: It also takes around 30-60 minutes to post a 2000-word article because you have to post each paragraph one by one (or so I am doing it at least). In the long run you will waste a ton of time publishing articles. With this in mind, imagine you want to pay someone to post your articles. You either have to 1) drop the page builder altogether when your website is already established, 2) pay him way more per a single article than you would have normally paid him (because posting takes more time) or 3) get less bang for your buck for the same reason - posting takes more time, so less work can be done with the same amount of money.
 
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My biggest regret: I started off with 30 blog posts made with elementor. What a mistake. Every update changes something. Theres tons of errors and bugs if you want to change things. The pages that use them are significantly slower than gutenberg for me. Ads dont show correctly on them half the time and I miss out on ad revenue because elementor changes the div in some way when it updates or get disabled/reenabled for troubleshooting as a plugin.

Gutenberg has improved so drastically recently, that if you’re using wordpress there is absolutely no reason to use elementor or thrive for blog posts. Pagebuilders work great for a homepage or landing page, but as @Ryuzaki has mentioned they are slower than the passing of the second stimulus bill, especially when compared to gutenberg and I regret ever touching that ‘thing’ for blog posts...

You can always use ‘elementor blocks’ inside a gutenberg page when and only when you need it if you aren’t a page speed nerd. Which you should be.
 
I've used both thrive and elementor. Personally would go with elementor because there's just less steps as compared to thrive editor.
 
Regarding speed... I recently moved to a WP Host account on Knownhost that uses Litespeed Servers and the LS plugin on your site. Using Litespeed with almost all of the options turned on (minify html broke me for some reason) and Quic cloud CDN, I am able to get 97-100 speed scores mobile and desktop on a site with Thrive Architect in play.

Still getting rid of that builder though. Not a fan of Thrive. Too much show, not enough go.
 
CorporatePuppet said:
Regarding speed... I recently moved to a WP Host account on Knownhost that uses Litespeed Servers and the LS plugin on your site. Using Litespeed with almost all of the options turned on (minify html broke me for some reason) and Quic cloud CDN, I am able to get 97-100 speed scores mobile and desktop on a site with Thrive Architect in play.
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You had me excited to try them, then I saw the usual scummy/scammy "visits per month" metric on their pricing.
 
Darth said:
You had me excited to try them, then I saw the usual scummy/scammy "visits per month" metric on their pricing.
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I was considering it too. What is wrong with that metric though?
 
Upsilon said:
I was considering it too. What is wrong with that metric though?
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It's basically a pricing model for hosting companies to make 10x or more margin off you because its "Wordpress hosting"
 
Darth said:
You had me excited to try them, then I saw the usual scummy/scammy "visits per month" metric on their pricing.
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I have Knownhost manageable VPS (nor WP) and we got Litespeed package a couple months ago, but there is nowhere any mention of traffic. Only flat fixed pricing.
 
Darth said:
You had me excited to try them, then I saw the usual scummy/scammy "visits per month" metric on their pricing.
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I have been finding that it's not as bad as you think... I had the same "what is this bullshit?" thoughts about both visitor limits and "Wordpress Hosting" in general before moving to it. I called them before moving and asked some questions.

The visits per month thing is just a way for them to give a resource level limit in layman's terms. It comes down to the number of cpu cores you get. If I remember right, the first tier (up to 100k visits) is 1 core and the second tier is 2 cores. I think the ram is the same, but I can't remember for sure. Pretty sure they are both cloud instances on their inhouse cloud infrastructure. I guess it's better marketing for a beginner to see a traffic level than a number of cores. Most people buying dedicated WP hosting would't know what number of cores means.

As for the Wordpress hosting label - At knownhost, it's plesk with "Wordpress Toolkit". Plesk has good videos on youtube about the Wordpress Toolkit features. A little bit of a learning curve but nothing difficult. Just different.

I used wordpress toolkit features to create a staging area last night for free. I was about to spend money on a staging plugin or try and diy something... and then figured out toolkit made it possible by watching a Plesk youtube video on it. You just clone to a subdomain.

The thing I like about knownhost though, is the support you get from a managed service. Always been good for me when I needed it. I had a VPS with them for a long time. I'm only about a month into the WP hosting but so far so good.
 
Knownhost is fine for managed VPS. I use to love wiredtree till they were bought out. For non mission critical sites I just use OVH/Hetzner servers managed by runcloud.
 
I've been using Oxygen Builder for over a year now and it's a joy to use and extremely performant. I actually enjoy making websites again! Lately I've been able to pull off 90 - 99/100 scores on PSI with every site I touch.

My basic stack usually looks something like this:
  1. Oxygen along with Hydrogen Pack, OxyToolbox, OxyExtras for extra Oxygen functionality & builder tweaks
  2. Advanced Scripts
  3. Insert headers and footers
  4. Classic Editor (can't stand Gutenburg's interface and it's necessary with Oxygen)
  5. Fluent Forms Pro (super light weight and more convenient, powerful alternative to contact form 7)
  6. WP Rocket
  7. Asset CleanUp
  8. WPVivid Backup Pro
  9. Yoast SEO - Although I'm on the fence about switching over to RankMath. Would love opinions on this.
I try to use lifetime deal plugins as much as possible with the exception to the above stack being WP Rocket.
 
Elementor, because it has a lot of learning material on youtube, and a myriad of free templates that can be easily edited.
 
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