Last Updated on July 18, 2024
Divi is a WordPress theme, but it’s much more than that. Whether you are a complete beginner or a seasoned pro, Divi can help you design any website, landing page, e-commerce store, or whatever type of content you or your clients need.
First released in 2013, the team at Elegant Themes has been working hard to refine, tweak, and update Divi to maintain its position as a leading all-in-one solution for website creators. It seamlessly integrates with other popular plugins like WooCommerce and comes with 100s of pre-defined templates to get you up and running fast.
Divi comes with a ton of features and there’s a lot to get your head around. Despite the extensive feature set and complexity, Divi is adept at holding newcomers’ hands so they can create their first web page or site relatively quickly. It’s not perfect, but there’s a lot to like in Divi, and in this review, we will show you why we think you will love it as much as we do.
Divi Builder Vs. Divi Theme: How are They Different?
When Divi was first released, it had none of the WYSIWYG features web designers enjoy today. Instead, installing the Divi theme gave you access to the “Advanced Page Builder,” which wasn’t accessible with any other theme and only worked as a backend editor. Pages were arranged in blocks containing your content, such as images, paragraphs, or custom code. You added content to each box and tracked each with an identifying label.
You viewed and edited content by expanding the relevant box. Boxes could be easily rearranged by dragging and dropping, but it was far removed from today’s sophisticated “drag-and-drop” builders. The only way to see how your page was shaping up was to open it in a new tab and refresh the page each time you made an update in the builder.
Today’s Divi Builder is a full-drag-and-drop editor that will work with almost any theme, while the Divi theme is an all-in-one product that includes the Divi Builder, but is not required.
Divi Features Overview
Divi delivers a powerful drag-and-drop builder that makes creating stunning layouts easy for newcomers but with enough options to satisfy even the most demanding power users.
You can add, rearrange, and modify every element with a few mouse clicks and effortlessly switch between modes. Get a bird ‘s-eye view of your design through wireframe mode, test how it will appear on mobile devices, and mix and match modules to create unique designs.
Premade layouts make web design even more straightforward. Each layout includes royalty-free images, but we recommend swapping these out to ensure your design is truly unique.
Creating a site with SEO in mind is critical to building traffic. While Divi has some basic SEO features, such as custom titles and meta descriptions, you will need other tools to cover all your SEO bases. We recommend SEOPress, which works well with all WordPress themes and builders.
Despite some easily overcome limitations, Divi is a complete design studio that allows you to design and publish eye-catching sites with minimal effort.
Using Divi to Build Your Website
One of the best features of Divi is that you can use the builder to create some or all of your website. Another advantage to this system is that your creation will look the same should you transfer your website to a new host, even without Divi installed.
One of the ways we prefer to think about Divi is that it’s like Wix or Squarespace but for WordPress. While those website builders limit you to a single hosting provider and provide a limited upgrade path, Divi gives you the same drag-and-drop features in a website you can take to any host, saving you a lot in monthly fees and giving you plenty of options.
Starting Divi for the first time will trigger the new user tutorial. Click through the screens to get a quick overview of all the features of Divi or skip to head directly to the start screen, where you will have one of three options.
Here, you can select “Start Building,” “Choose a Premade Layout,” or “Clone Existing Page.” Whatever option you choose as a starting point, you can save your modifications to the Divi library using the JSON format, which means they can be imported back the next time you need them. ‘
Premade layouts have received a lot of attention over the years, and the library now contains more than 2,000 templates to serve as your foundation. Dividing them into categories like art and design, events, food and drink, and business helps narrow down your choices. However, with so many beautiful designs for a WordPress site, this could be your first big design challenge.
Building a Website From Scratch
Starting your design from scratch is reasonably intuitive, especially when nutting out the basic design. While Divi has been created to be easy to use, it’s extremely powerful. The more time you spend exploring the user interface, the quicker you will get accustomed to creating unique designs and adding more advanced features without breaking a sweat. Fortunately, the basics are pretty easy to get your head around.
Divi pages are organized into sections (signified by a blue outline). After creating a section, you click the “+” icon to add rows, bringing up the column layout selection. Rows are easily recognized by a green outline when hovering the mouse cursor.
Select a column layout to suit your purposes. Each column will have a “+” icon, and clicking on it brings up an extensive list of modules to add to that column.
There are modules for images, maps, posts, videos, sliders, calls to action, accordions, and more, so you will likely find the right one for your needs. However, if you don’t, you can browse even more modules in the Divi Marketplace (there’s a link at the bottom of the modules panel). These modules are created by third-party developers, so they come at an additional cost.
Customizing Your Design
You’ll quickly get accustomed to using the Divi builder to create the basic page layout. The real fun can begin once you have all your elements in place. Every module can be edited through its settings menu, accessed by clicking the gear icon. Margins, borders, fonts, colors, visibility, CSS, and more are all modifiable.
The module menu is contextual, meaning image options will differ from those shown for a circle counter. There’s a lot of information here that can overwhelm newcomers, but mistakes are easily erased through the undo button.
Divi Performance
Divi has had its fair share of performance issues, but the team has made great strides in improving the backend and front-end performance.
I’ve been with Divi since the beginning, and I can attest to the frustrating delays while waiting for what should have been a quick margin change. Other grumblings from users include slow page loading speeds, which is not great for SEO.
The latest iterations of Divi have eliminated most, if not all, of these hiccups, with all the processes being speedy and getting good results with Google’s Page Speed Insights tool.
