2 September 2022
Considering Beaver Builder for your WordPress site?
This in-depth Beaver Builder review will help you decide if this popular page builder is the right choice for your needs.
Beaver Builder is a popular page builder plugin for WordPress. Using its visual, drag-and-drop interface, you can quickly create visually stunning designs without writing a single line of code.
Furthermore, beyond individual page creation, it also offers a powerful Beaver Themer extension. This extension allows you to customize core theme elements such as headers, footers, single post layouts, and archive pages.
In general, Beaver Builder focuses on nailing the essential features of a page builder and building a rock-solid interface. It is also one of the lightweight page builders in terms of out-of-the-box optimization, which is excellent for performance.
While Beaver Builder has many advantages, it is not ideal and lacks the functionality, design possibilities, and templates seen in other popular builders such as Elementor and Divi.
Overall, Beaver Builder can be a good option for some users, but others may prefer other builders.
In our Beaver Builder review, we’ll look at everything, including:
Let’s get started!
Let’s start our Beaver Builder review by looking at how it works and highlighting some of its most valuable features.
However, before we delve deeper, it’s important to note that the developers provide a comprehensive Beaver Builder demo. This allows you to experience the features firsthand. You can access the demo here.
Beaver Builder’s main attraction is its visual, drag-and-drop builder. This lets you build your own custom designs without having to write a single line of code.
When you first launch Beaver Builder, you’ll see a full-width preview of your design along with a toolbar at the top:
To add new modules or templates, click the plus icon to expand a menu. To add a module to the page, simply drag it to the desired area:
Beaver Builder, like most other page builders, includes three types of page elements:
To open the settings for any element, click on it. Here, you have complete control over the design, spacing, text, and much more:
Further, for text content, You don’t have to open the whole settings to edit text. You can simply click on the page and type. Beaver Builder also includes a comprehensive set of keyboard shortcuts to help you speed up your workflows.
One great feature of Beaver Builder is that it lets you personalize the interface layout, which not many other page builders provide.
For example, if you prefer a fixed sidebar, simply drag the options panel to either side of the screen. Beaver Builder will make it fixed and constantly displayed at that location:
Another feature we like about Beaver Builder is how simple it is to control your layouts.
In the case of many other page builders, you must first set up your row/column layouts before you can begin adding content elements. However, with Beaver Builder, you can just drag a module next to another to create a new column:
Additionally, you can use drag-and-drop to change column widths, so you don’t have to open the whole settings to do so:
All Beaver Builder designs are responsive by default. This means they will change automatically depending on whether a user is browsing on a desktop, tablet, or mobile device.
However, if you want more control, Beaver Builder offers a responsive editing mode that allows you to make changes for specific devices.
While making these changes, you’ll be able to see how your design looks on various devices:
You can also change the responsive breakpoints for mobile and tablet devices.
Beaver Builder also allows you to apply various conditional rules to control whether to display specific rows or modules.
You can show and hide content based on a user’s logged-in status. This also allows you to create a simple membership site without the need for a membership plugin like MemberPress.
Beaver Builder has some pre-built templates for landing pages and content pages if you don’t want to build your designs from scratch.
However, Beaver Builder’s template library is far smaller than other page builders like Elementor and Divi. Beaver Builder’s templates are not its strongest point.
You can also save your own templates to the library to reuse them later.
You can also add custom CSS or JavaScript to your designs via a dedicated editor that includes basic validation and suggestions:
Plus, you can also add CSS classes to specific rows or modules to apply your CSS.
The Beaver Builder plugin’s main component is a page builder, so you can use it to create unique posts and pages.
With the Beaver Themer Addon, you can design your theme’s templates like the Header, Footer, Single, and Archives using the same visual builder interface.
When you build a template, you may use rules to determine where that template is applied. These rules are really flexible, which we think is something Beaver Themer does well. You can apply templates conditionally based on post details, user details (such as logged-in status or user role), author, and more.
Another feature we enjoy about Beaver Themer is the ability to create template elements and inject them into various WordPress hook places. For example, you may inject some content after the content of a blog post. This can be very handy for ads, CTAs, email opt-ins, and other purposes.
However, one disadvantage of Beaver Builder theme-building implementation is that the header and footer templates only work with limited themes. You can create single or archive templates for any theme. However, header and footer templates are only available for certain themes. In comparison, Elementor Pro’s theme builder works with any theme.
The main Beaver Builder plugin is expandable, which means there is a vast marketplace of third-party Beaver Builder extensions that add additional modules, templates, features, and so on.
When you require a specific feature, these can be handy. For instance, if you ever feel like Beaver Builder’s module selection is too small, you can buy PowerPack or Ultimate Addons and have access to dozens of new modules, plus many other helpful features.
A fast-loading website is essential for success, as today’s users won’t wait around for slow pages.
Unfortunately, every page builder tends to add a bit of extra weight compared to the native WordPress block editor.
The good news is that you can still create fast-loading WordPress sites using any page builder by choosing quality hosting and implementing other performance optimization techniques. Some builders do, however, have an edge in terms of performance.
To test Beaver Builder against its competitors, we built an identical test page with each option—using the same modules—and ran them all through WebPageTest.
Here are the results:
The results show that Beaver Builder generally stands out as the most lightweight, performance-friendly choice.
Elementor and Beaver Builder are quite comparable in terms of results. The differences are too small to be noticeable.
You may notice that Divi Builder registers fewer HTTP requests, but that’s mainly due to its built-in file combination features. If you want something similar to Elementor, there are tons of plugins to help you do that.
While Beaver Builder is a bit faster overall, you can still get excellent performance with Elementor and Divi Builder if you follow WordPress performance best practices.
The Beaver Builder core version is available for free on WordPress.org. However, we don’t call it a free builder because it is more limited than the free versions offered by Elementor or Brizy.
Beaver Builder pro offers three pricing options based on a number of website usage and features.
There is no option for a lifetime subscription. All plans are billed on an annual basis and include a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Beaver Builder provides dedicated support to all customers that have an active license.
There is also a comprehensive knowledge base for self-help, where you can find the solutions to several queries.
If you still require support, you may submit a ticket. Beaver Builder tries to respond to all queries within one business day.
Now that you understand what Beaver Builder does and how it works, let’s review some of its pros and cons.
If you’re thinking about using Beaver Builder, you should also explore some of the other popular page builder plugins. Let’s see how it compares to two prominent Beaver Builder alternatives: Elementor and Divi.
Here are the pros and cons of Beaver Builder vs Elementor.
Here are the pros and cons of Beaver Builder vs Divi.
Overall, we think that Beaver Builder is a superb page builder plugin created by a reputable, high-quality team. However, we believe that Beaver Builder is not the best page builder plugin for every WordPress user.
In general, we think Beaver Builder is popular among users who appreciate Beaver Builder’s lightweight approach and stability. You may not get all the bells and whistles of other site builders, but Beaver Builder delivers all of the core page-creating features.
However, some page builders, like Elementor or Divi, just provide more. More means:
If you are the type of user who prefers having “more” in your tool, we believe Elementor Pro is the better choice. Elementor Pro offers more design options, features, templates, and content elements. You can learn further in our Elementor review.
However, it’s important to clarify that we don’t believe “more” always means “better.” It is better for many people, but it all depends on how you want to use the builder.
So, it totally depends on what you’re looking for and how you plan to use the tool. If Beaver Builder’s feature set and approach fulfill your goals, we believe it’s a high-quality tool and have no problem in recommending it – we don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
For more, check out these other helpful resources:
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Beaver Builder is available for free on WordPress.org. However, it is very limited, so we do not recommend it. Elementor is a far better option if you want a free page builder.
Beaver Builder has no direct impact on your site’s SEO. You can achieve good results on Beaver Builder sites as long as you follow basic WordPress SEO best practices.
Yes! By default, all of your Beaver Builder designs are mobile-friendly and responsive. You also have a responsive editing mode that allows you to edit the mobile and tablet designs as needed.
The Beaver Builder Theme is good, but we do not recommend it because there are several great multipurpose themes available that are even better. Rather than paying more for the Beaver Builder Theme, I’d suggest choosing GeneratePress, Astra, or another lightweight theme.