Page Builder

Page builders are plugins or themes that add a visual editing interface for building web page layouts. Instead of writing HTML and CSS, editors drag components into place on a canvas — columns, text blocks, images, buttons, sliders — and the builder generates the corresponding markup. In WordPress, the most widely used page builders include Elementor, Divi, WPBakery (formerly Visual Composer), Beaver Builder, and Oxygen.

Page builders solve a real problem: they let non-developers build and modify page layouts independently. For many businesses and agencies, that’s genuinely valuable.

The Migration Problem with Page Builders

The difficulty with page builders in a migration context is that they store content in proprietary formats. Elementor, for example, stores page data as serialized JSON in the wp_postmeta table. Divi uses shortcodes embedded in the post content field. WPBakery uses a different shortcode syntax. None of these formats are portable — you can’t take Elementor content and open it in another CMS.

This means that when you migrate a page-builder-heavy WordPress site, you’re not migrating templates. You’re extracting the actual text, images, and other content from within the builder’s proprietary storage format, then rebuilding the page layouts in your new system. The visual design can often be recreated, but it’s design work, not a database export.

Sites built heavily with page builders also tend to score poorly on Core Web Vitals. Elementor and Divi, in particular, load considerable JavaScript and CSS regardless of whether a given page uses those features. This performance overhead is one reason teams sometimes choose to migrate.

What Statamic Offers Instead

Statamic doesn’t have a drag-and-drop page builder in the same sense, but it has flexible content tools. The Bard field type is a rich-text field that supports embedded content blocks — so editors can mix text, images, and custom components in a freeform layout. The Replicator field is a row-based system where editors pick from a set of defined block types. Both tools give content editors meaningful layout control while keeping the output clean and in templates you control.

The key difference is that in Statamic, layout logic lives in your templates, not in a plugin. What you render and how it looks is entirely in your hands, which means your site’s markup quality is only limited by your templates, not by what the builder generates.

For sites migrating from heavy page builder usage, expect to plan layout rebuilds as a defined part of the project. See WordPress to Statamic Migration for how we approach this.