Elegant Themes Offers Unprecedented Flexibility and Rapid Wireframe Web Design with Divi
Divi 4 came out October 14th, 2019, with amazing new features to customize WordPress site-wide, which was a huge deal at the time. But much has changed since 2019. Read on to learn wheter Divi is the only theme you need five years later. Note: Divi 5 should be out sometime in Q3 2024, which is over two years late.
Beautiful WordPress websites grace us daily, and the Divi Theme forms many of the clean, modern, and easy-to-use designs we see.
With many paths to web design. Is Divi the only WordPress theme you need? And how does it work with real-time wireframe mockups?
Note that this post does not contain affiliate links.
Firstly, WordPress Is Huge!
Did you know WordPress is the most popular website software on Earth? It powers 43% of the internet and almost 65% of all Content Management (CMS) based websites.
Moreover, WordPress offers endless extensibility with plugins, themes, and custom coding options.
Divi emerged as a popular, lauded, and imitated commercial WordPress theme. Many other pagebuilders have adopted the essential idea and general approach to WordPress web design.
Similarly, the Elementor plugins may imitate many of Divi’s concepts. However, Elementor does not offer its ease of use nor the superior “visual builder.” Elementor uses an interface that doesn’t include as many time-saving touches. Also, the Divi design tools are significantly more powerful at making multiple changes easier than Elementor’s. For example, you can extend the same styling for all H2s on a page with a simple click in the visual builder. In Elementor, you must manually paste styles on a per-widget basis, which is annoying.
WordPress now incorporates basic “Divi-like” features, dubbed Gutenberg, starting with version 5.0, released at the end of 2018
But the reality is that WordPress is becoming more like Divi, not the other way around.
Later in this article, I discuss Divi 5 and its stronger integration with WordPress.
What Is Divi?
Divi offers a better way to create WordPress websites. Importantly, unlike its competitors, it utilizes an intuitive visual builder, where you can click on anything and be taken immediately to its settings.
The visual builder is easy to use for neophytes. Yet, it’s powerful enough that professionals massively benefit from its meticulously crafted experience.
The years of learning basic coding to build simple sites have passed. Divi offers an experience anyone can benefit from, regardless of the level of expertise.
The only downside is that Elegant Themes has stopped adding features while concentrating on releasing Divi 5. Meanwhile, their rivals, like Elementor, have gained much more features than Divi currently offers.
Regardless of its current shortcomings, the theme continues to be a cornerstone tool for creating websites for many web design agencies and professional web designers like myself.
If you have experience with CSS, JavaScript, and PHP, it multiplies and builds on the power of Divi’s tools.
Divi is also supported by dozens of talented developers who add functionality and flair to the platform.
An Outstanding Replacement for Website Wireframe and Mockup Tools
Creating beautiful, mobile-first WordPress mockups and wireframes is now possible without the traditional Adobe Xd, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Figma approaches.
Elegant Themes added a website wireframe design mode! The real-time visual wireframe building experience offers seamless integration.
This new way of working saves designers valuable time, money, and resources. Plus, it produces not similar but superior design results to those of the past.
Why would an organization spend time on static mockups when they can rapidly build working prototypes, even if Divi is not your final platform?
Nor can Photoshop and similar tools represent real-time mobile and tablet views.
In my opinion, using Photoshop to create mockups today is analogous to using a slide ruler for math.
Hundreds of Pre-Designed Templates to Kick-Start Your Designs
Elegant Themes also produces hundreds of professional templates to use in part or whole to fast-track your designs.
These layouts range from complete websites to specialty pages for many use cases. Even if you don’t want to use the entire design, they can be a great starting point for a project.
It is why Divi has become the go-to tool for many industry leaders. The only limit is the user’s imagination.
Even if WordPress is not your final project destination, all the design and layout work can be achieved with ease using Divi.
Divi Is Easy-To-Use
If you have ever played with LEGO kits, you will feel immediately comfortable using the interface. It’s that straightforward.
Using a modular building approach, one can execute designs entirely in the visual builder.
Divi works with modules that allow you to add gorgeous functionality for almost any purpose or use case.
Built-in design elements include email opt-in forms, portfolios, social follows, sliders, headers, shops, number counters, testimonials, videos, timers, and more!
Divi offers the tools to create complex web designs for professionals like myself, saving tremendous time.
Because the theme runs on WordPress, it has the power to do everything that the content management platform achieves.
Developers can tap into the Divi API‘s tremendous power for endless programming uses. This negates the naysayers who believe the theme is a “front-end” only technology.
User-friendly visual design tools are the centerpiece of Elegant Themes’ ideology.
The Divi Theme Is Much Faster These Days
On August 18th, 2021, Elegant Themes announced a series of Divi Theme performance optimizations, significantly improving page loading speeds.
Until the update, the primary criticism of Divi was “code bloat,” which empowers its many features and ease of use. Elegant Themes addressed its users and the naysayers by releasing the most comprehensive and practical reconstitutions of any WordPress theme at the time.
When it released these features three years ago, Divi outperformed page builders like Elementor, Avada, and Beaver Builder in performance. However, during that time, Elementor became significantly faster than Divi. Also, the Gutenberg-based tools like Kadence, are much faster than Divi.
In the next section, I will explain how Divi 5 will again put Divi at the top of the page loading podium.
The changes in theme performance are exceptional, and I feel even more comfortable recommending Divi for wider use cases where speed is critical.
Divi 5 Is Coming In 2024
Divi 4 came out in 2019, which is an eternity in Internet time. It was greatly improved over Divi 3 and offered far more options, including the Theme Builder. However, competing page builders have also adopted these improvements.
As of the spring of 2024, Elementor Pro has a laundry list of features that Divi does not, and that’s a problem, as Elegant Themes is losing users. Elementor offers extremely important tools for website development, like its loop builder and carousel loop builder.
The Divi 5 update will take the product to the next level regarding WordPress integration. While many details are unavailable, we know that Elegant Themes is rewriting the theme from scratch using JavaScript React, which WordPress and Gutenberg use natively.
It also means that the shortcode-based system Divi relied on for years will be gone, and the biggest potential pitfall is that Divi 4 sites will need to be converted to Divi 5. We can only hope that the conversion process is smooth, but in my experience with these things, I believe there will be many issues a the beginning, and it will likely take a few months for Elegant Themes to work out the kinks.
Moreover, every plugin that extends Divi’s functionality must be rewritten to be compatible with Divi 5’s codebase. Many older plugins will likely never be updated, making their functionality incompatible. However, the most prolific Divi developers have been working on this conversion process for a long time.
Divi 5 will also eliminate the shortcode system it has used since its beginning in 2014 and offer a robust API that gives third-party plugin and extension developers a significantly more robust toolset to extend the theme’s capabilities.
A Huge Community of Support
A fantastic product and experience are meaningless without the company’s support and the community that uses them.
The Divi community offers support, tutorials, and more in Facebook groups and YouTube videos.
Whatever the design goal, someone has a tutorial to help you.
Elegant Themes directly offers hundreds of video and blog tutorials to help you build sublime websites you’ll be proud to show off.
Elegant Themes has a library of hundreds of pre-made free layouts for all theme users. and a litany of helpful videos. Divi is one of the easiest page builders to get up and running from scratch.
What Have You Done Using Divi?
As a professional website designer and developer, I use Divi for many of my client’s WordPress needs. Using it in over fifty web development projects reflects my feelings on why it’s one of the best WordPress theme choices.
Divi works well with WooCommerce (for most applications), the primary WordPress e-commerce solution.
Divi has always been one of my first choices for any project. Check out my Portfolio for examples of the theme in action.
Is the Divi Theme Perfect?
While Divi is one of my first theme choices for many projects, some platform shortcomings exist that mainly affect e-commerce.
Unfortunately, Divi does not support nearly as many Advanced Custom Fields out of the box as Elementor or Bricks. However, Divi Engine is a fantastic plugin for Divi, allowing full integration of Dynamic Content and Advanced Custom Fields. It’s quite similar to Dynamic Content for Elementor if you are familiar. Their plugin makes creating dynamic data Divi sites significantly easier.
Like Elementor, the Divi Theme does not support using any streaming platform as a background image. For example, you can’t use a Vimeo, YouTube, or similar video as the background of a hero section. However, you can do it with custom coding.
In general, there are some more advanced aspects of the WooCommerce e-commerce solution for WordPress that the Divi Theme does not do as well as Elementor.
While roughly a third of my WooCommerce projects use Elementor, many e-commerce sites work exceptionally well with Divi. You can learn about my views on Elementor here.
Try Divi Out
Are you planning a new website?
With the above said, many more options are available than in years past. Divi is a wonderful tool; I believe it still has the best design experience. However, I find Divi is best used for brochure sites, as tools like Elmentor Pro do a better job with WooCommerce and dynamic data. The Kadence Theme and plugins are another outstanding option, although it is more cumbersome to work with Gutenberg tools, and they have a higher learning curve.
Divi can be the best WordPress theme if your needs match those described above. I am excited to see how Divi 5 may shake up the page builder market.
Are you looking for a WordPress web designer and developer for your next project, or do you need help with a current project? Use the button below to contact me for details of how I can help you achieve your goals!
