Beaver Builder Review: Does This WordPress Page Builder Live Up To The Hype?

TLDR: Beaver Builder is the absolute best page builder for WordPress

There are a lot of page builders for WordPress from Visual Composer, Page Builder by Site Origin, Themify Builder and more.

For a lot of the non-coding folks, these page builders the are the go-to weapon of choice for building out an attractive looking website for their clients.

The Problem With Many Page Builders

Unfortunately, many “premium” themes come with page builders bundled inside that rely on shortcodes for their functionality.

The problem with these “premium” themes is that you can never switch themes without having to manually recreate the shortcode functionality in your new theme. Essentially, your posts and pages will become a littered mess of unused shortcodes and your layouts/components are gone.

Beaver Builder has made quite an impression in the WordPress community because it addresses this problem while still allowing for the flexibility to create virtually any layout you can dream up.

How Is Beaver Builder Better Than The Rest?

Beaver Builder integrates seamlessly with the WordPress content editor and adds another tab called “Page Builder” which lets you use all of the awesome modules and row layouts.

Four Reasons Why I Prefer Beaver Builder

1. Premade Layouts

If building custom layouts isn’t really your thing and you just want to edit a ready-made theme Beaver Builder’s got you covered. You can add any one of the 15 pre-made Home Page layout templates or 13 pre-made Content page templates.

The premade content pages include gorgeous layouts for About Us, Our Services, Photo Portfolio, Design Portfolio, Business Contact, Meet The Team, Personal Contact, FAQs, Blog Standard, Blog Grid, Blog Gallery, Pricing, and Sign Up pages.

The creators of Beaver Builder were wise enough to realize that their main audience of web designers and developers tend to create the same pages over and over again for different clients. These content and home page layouts allow you to easily create the boilerplate “About Us” page that you will build for most client sites without having to create custom page templates each and every time you want a page to have a custom layout.

Premade layouts not your thing? No problem! You can save any of your own custom layouts as a template to reuse over and over again. Simply select the “Blank” layout template, or an existing template and modify it till you see fit.

2. Built In Responsive Grid System

Beaver Builder comes with a built in robust and responsive grid system. The built-in grid system and allows you to build pages with flexibility simple not possible in WordPress’ native content editor. In order to create a multi-column layout without a page builder like Beaver Builder you either need to write HTML directly in the content editor, use shortcodes or custom fields. None of these options are simple for a client or code-allergic web designer to do.

Interestingly, I noticed that the Beaver Builder grid isn’t mobile first. I think this may have something to do with preserving compatibility for older versions of Internet Explorer. Despite the desktop-town approach to writing media queries, the grid remains robust and lightweight.

If you happen to disable Beaver Builder and you’re using the column layouts all markup is removed and the content will simply stack as it normally would into a single column leaving no messy shortcodes or markup behind. This is a big deal! Especially if you’ve ever used something like X-Theme’s page builder and tried to switch themes you’ll understand. Shortcode hell should be avoided at all costs.

3. Tons Of Really Cool Modules

You can insert virtually any kind of content you can think of with Beaver Builder. Heading, Photo, Separator, Text Editor, and Video are categorized as Basic modules in the plugin interface.

Need a slider in a random spot for absolutely no reason? No problem! There’s a component for that. Anything from maps to pricing tables, to accordion tabs are quick and easy to add using the Advanced Components.

It would be incredibly difficult to find a piece of content that isn’t suited to one of Beaver Builder’s modules. If you need some custom code you can use the HTML module to insert any of your own code. The images above are just a few examples of what’s behind the different modules. There are many more modules that for the sake of brevity I will not include images of in this post. If you’d like to see what Beaver Builder has to offer in greater detail watch my video review below.

4. Avoids The Messy Shortcode Trap

Most page builders will leave behind shortcodes that [look_like_this] littered throughout all of your content when you disable the plugin. Thus you’re left with two options, keep using the plugin indefinitely or clean up all the shortcodes.

If you happen to disable the plugin you’ll find that your content simply adjusts to how it would look if entered unformatted in the native content editor. In the image above you can see the accordion module with the plugin enabled and how the accordion tabs behave when the plugin is disabled. There isn’t a single trace of Beaver Builder left after disabled the plugin. It offers a true page builder experience without holding hostage the functionality of your entire website.

Beaver Builder And Genesis

Beaver Builder works nicely with the Genesis Framework, however, you’ll want to also install Genesis Dam Buster to ensure that there are no compatibility issues with full-width layouts.