website under construction with desktop computer vector illustration
EDITOR’S NOTE: Creating things like landing pages, website pages, and blog posts can be really confusing for those who are just getting started. One way to minimize the stress is by using drag and drop page builders. Drag and drop page builders allow you to create beautiful content or campaigns that suit your needs without needing a coder. Some of the best page builders for general website design include Elementor, Beaver Builder, and Wix. They are less expensive than other page builders and really cater to beginners. If you’re looking for some more advanced features or have coding experience, we recommend using Divi. Weebly is the best page builder for ecommerce sites, while Squarespace and Duda are great for freelancers. You can read through the different drag and drop page builders below to learn the pros and cons of each and find a page builder that really fits with your business goals. If you have any questions or want us to build pages for you, reach out to us at Prebuilt Sites or The BBS Agency. We’d love to help you out!
Written by Alex Girard @alexgirard19
Finding the best drag-and-drop builder for your website will help you create high-converting landing pages, web pages, and blog posts much more easily. The best part? No coding is required.
Anyone who knows how to use a computer and a mouse can use a drag-and-drop page builder. The only prerequisite is that you own or want to own a website. We’ll go over the benefits of drag-and-drop page builders, then cover the absolute best builders you can use on your site.
Let’s illustrate the importance of using drag-and-drop page builders with an example.
Let’s say you have a marketing campaign going live in just a few days. You’ve worked hard on the messaging and content for the campaign. You’ve mapped out the user journey and know where you want to drive traffic. You’ve set conversion goals, and all your content has been approved and signed off.
The final step: create the campaign pages and landing pages in your CMS. You start building out your page, and realize the only call-to-action (CTA) is hidden at the bottom of the page. You know that in order to hit your goals, you really need a CTA above the fold.
When you ask your dev team if they can help you get a CTA at the top of the page, they say they can prioritize that request sometime next week — after your campaign is scheduled to go live.
What seems like such a simple request can be difficult if your CMS doesn’t have a non-developer-friendly drag-and-drop page builder.
With that in mind, here are some of the benefits you can enjoy by incorporating this tool into your site:
Drag-and-drop page builders were popularized by website page builders like Wix and Squarespace, but more advanced CMS platforms, like WordPress and CMS Hub, have also adopted them. They help you prioritize the user experience by making changes to your content as you see fit.
Drag-and-drop page editing lets you easily:
Overall, drag-and-drop page editing puts you in control of your content and campaigns.
Not only are drag-and-drop page editors a win for your team, but they also free up your development team from handling one-off requests from your department. Without the need to ask your developer to rearrange a page template so you can publish a page, developers are freed up to focus on more mission-critical growth projects that can move your business forward.
Although everyone benefits from drag-and-drop page editing, the real benefactor is your customer. If you’re forced to build pages within a rigid template, your customer experience ultimately suffers. Drag-and-drop page editing helps you create pages that provide your website visitors with the critical information they need to progress through the buyer’s journey.
Photo: Blogspot
Using pre-installed themes in CMS Hub, you can create a flexible editing experience that gives you full control over your content. This includes not only drag-and-drop page editing, but also the ability to change the color, fonts, and imagery on your website without ever touching a line of code. With CMS Hub, you can also add custom modules to themes, which you can drag and drop onto a page just like any other module.
For example, if you have a standard “events listing” module built out by a developer, you can reuse that same module across any page, making page-level edits as needed. Using that module — or any custom module — is just as easy as using a rich text or image module.
What makes CMS Hub a truly powerful page builder where everyone wins is that it combines powerful tools that allow you to take ownership of your website, while still providing developers the flexibility to leverage the tools and technologies they’re accustomed to when building websites.
CMS Hub is the best all-around drag-and-drop page builder because of its ease-of-use and integration with the HubSpot CRM platform. You can create high-converting pages and immediately turn every lead into a contact in your CRM. CMS Hub is not only a drag-and-drop page builder but a full-scale marketing, sales, and service tool that will benefit everyone. The only downside to CMS Hub is that no free version is available.
14-day free trial; $23/month (Starter); $360/month (Professional); $1,200/month (Enterprise)
Photo: Blogspot
Elementor is a page builder for the WordPress content management system. Elementor stresses that their tool not only makes it easy to design your page, but it also produces clean code on the back end that ensures your site is performing properly.
Thousands of developers have contributed to Elementor and built themes and other add-ons to make it a more useful tool. One great feature from Elementor allows you to design forms within the page builder and integrate them easily with your marketing automation tools to generate more leads for your business.
Elementor is the ideal drag-and drop page builder for WordPress because of its wide variety of compatible themes, built-in templates, and add-ons. With five million active installations, it’s one of the most widely used WordPress drag-and-drop page builders out there. It’s also free to use. If you crave more features and functionalities, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.
Free; $49/year (Essential); $99/year (Advanced); $199/year (Expert); $499/year (Studio); $999/year (Agency)
Photo: Blogspot
Beaver Builder is a page builder for WordPress that allows you to make edits to your site quickly and easily. Page editing is done on the front end, so the editor is truly a “what you see, is what you get” experience.
To edit a page, you can drag columns of content onto your page and fill them with text, images, and more. Beaver Builder also has a large variety of templates that you can use to get started. Just replace the text and images with your own, and your site is ready to go live.
If you like Elementor’s user interface but don’t like the way the page builder makes your website perform (whether it slows down your site or otherwise), Beaver Builder is the next alternative. It looks nearly identical to Elementor but may be lighter on your website. Like Elementor, it’s free to use. You can upgrade once you’ve used the full extent of its features and functionalities.
Free (Lite Version); $99/month (Standard); $199/month (Pro); $399/month (Agency)
Photo: Blogspot
Wix is one of the most popular web page builders available. Its drag-and-drop interface doesn’t rely on columns like many page builders. Instead, the editing experience is very similar to editing a Google Slide.
Out of the box, Wix provides you with a long list of modules and styling options so you can quickly create the exact website you’re looking for. Wix is certainly not a tool for developers, but any user will love the flexibility it gives them to quickly make the edits they need to their site, in an interface they’re familiar with.
We highly recommend Wix for new website owners and beginners who are getting familiar with the process of designing and maintaining a website. Why? Because you can simply sign up and start designing. Even if you don’t end up using Wix as your drag-and-drop page builder, you can use it to get experience without dealing with the details of publishing a website (such as finding hosting or a domain).
Photo: Blogspot
Squarespace is another page builder that lets users take control of their websites. It has a long list of templates that you can use to get your website started in no time. Once you choose a template, you can create pages by either using a premade layout following that template’s theme, or you can build a page from scratch.
Much like other page builders in this list, Squarespace doesn’t have many options for developers to customize your site, but it does provide you with a long list of web elements that you can use to build out your webpages.
Squarespace is the ideal drag-and-drop page builder for freelancers (marketers, writers, bloggers, artists, designers, and so forth) who want to create a professional website. With Squarespace, there’s no need to look for a theme, download a separate page builder plugin, or deal with security requirements. Squarespace makes it easy to design and publish a small website. However, we don’t recommend it for big business websites.
Photo: Blogspot
Divi is another popular page builder for WordPress. With Divi, you can make edits in a WYSIWYG page editor, and drag and drop a number of custom elements to meet your needs.
If you install Divi, you can make custom design changes, and developers can also combine Divi’s visual design controls with their own custom CSS. It also provides a number of filters and design options to make designing a web page more of a creative process.
We highly recommend Divi for small-to-medium businesses with advanced web design needs. If you’re looking for a premium WordPress page builder with thousands of templates and advanced functionalities, look no further than Divi. While Elementor and Beaver Builder both have free versions, Divi doesn’t. However, it’s so feature-rich that the cost is worth it.
$89/year (Yearly Access); $249 one-time fee
Photo: Blogspot
Weebly is a drag-and-drop page builder built specifically for ecommerce. Weebly also includes a shopping cart, a secure checkout process, and a means to track your inventory. It offers you the ability to take full control over your site’s HTML and CSS for more advanced changes that cannot be made through the drag-and-drop editing interface.
Weebly is one of the best drag-and-drop page builders for ecommerce sites due to its built-in ecommerce tools (no need to install a separate plugin). Like Wix, it also allows you to simply sign up and start building, so there’s no need to look for a web host or a separate page builder plugin. As such, we also recommend it if you’re just now starting your ecommerce business and are looking to launch a site as quickly as possible.
Free (with Weebly subdomain); $6/month (Personal); $12/month (Professional); $26/month (Performance)
Photo: Blogspot
Designed to speed up every stage of the site building process, Duda is a drag-and-drop page builder built specifically for agencies. Duda allows you to import content from an existing site or web page, and define global settings for text, buttons, images, backgrounds, and colors. It also offers a Developer mode where you can edit any site element’s HTML, CSS, or JavaScript.
You can choose from over 100+ templates to customize — but within limits. Instead of being able to add elements anywhere, you can only make changes within the “rules” or guidelines of the template’s layout.
In addition to design and development tools, Duda offers an array of tools for collecting customer feedback, setting custom user roles and permissions, and reducing time to publish.
We highly recommend Duda for freelancer web designers who create websites for other business owners and professionals. The platform allows you to restrict access to certain editing tools and allows you to communicate with clients directly on the drag-and-drop page editor.
$14/month (Basic); $29/month (Team); $59/month (Agency); Custom
Photo: Blogspot
With the GoDaddy Website Builder, you can start with a template and drag and drop sections to rearrange them. You can also add and edit sections — like image galleries, price lists, menus, scrollable content blocks, and YouTube or Vimeo videos — to customize your website. You’ll also have the ability to change text, colors, styles, and font.
The GoDaddy Website Builder also allows you to switch back and forth between mobile and desktop layouts. That way, you can create a website that looks good on any device.
Its editor is missing some key elements, like an undo button, and more advanced design options, which can be frustrating for users building a site.
However, it makes up for this frustration by including a built-in analytics tool called GoDaddy Insights. It’s a simple, user-friendly tool that assigns a score to your website and compares your sites with similar ones in your industry.
GoDaddy’s web page builder is a good fit for website owners who want to see their site’s performance but who aren’t familiar with analytics tools. For instance, some professionals already use some tools to measure performance, such as Ahrefs and Google Analytics. If that doesn’t sound like you, GoDaddy can give you a scoring system you can use even if you’re not familiar with website analytics.
$6.99/month (Basic); $10.49/month (Standard);$13.99/month (Premium); $14.99/month (Ecommerce)
A drag-and-drop page editor can empower website owners to control their content and campaigns without the need for developer intervention. The best page editors, however, combine ease of use for marketers and flexibility for developers, who might want to add custom modules or set global settings. Selecting the right editor for your business can help you create, manage, and optimize your website for your unique audience.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in June 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
Originally posted on Blogspot.
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