In the world of WordPress, customization rules the roost. Indeed, with millions upon millions of the CMS-based sites operating in the virtual realm, making your pages stand apart from the masses can mean the difference between successful exposure and wallowing in obscurity. Unfortunately, for many WordPress newbies customizing can be tricky. Beyond content creation there’s editing, imagery, layout, themes and dozens of more ways to add some pop to your page and give yourself a unique look and brand.
Fortunately, there’s also some tried-and-true technology that greatly aids in customizing your site: it’s the drag-and-drop process, and anyone who has even touched a computer in their life is probably aware of how it works: click on an icon or image, hold down the button and move it to wherever one wishes. It’s fast, it’s easy and you don’t need to know how to write a bit of HTML or CSS code.
WordPress plugin developers have thankfully embraced the ease of drag and drop, and have built some wonderful programs that utilize it for page customizing. Here are four great ones worth checking out and incorporating into your design and editing strategy.
- A premium (paid) drag-and-drop page customization plugin, Beaver Builder is extremely fast and offers a beautiful tutorial for beginners that gets them up to speed on how to use the program. One reason the plugin is so great is that it works in real time: as you make changes to your page, those changes appear immediately without having to exit the plugin and do a hard preview. And with it you can add sliders, backgrounds, blocks of specific content, loads of unique buttons and much more to really give your site a stand-alone look.
- The Elementor plugin is first and foremost built for speed, a nice feature for those who want to edit as quickly as their minds work and creative ideas take hold. It’s also a live page builder and works with widgets that you drag and drop from the left panel of each section you’re working with. Add accordions, testimonial designs, social media tabs, customized icons and loads of other elements including ready-made templates that you can instantly insert onto a page and then edit and replace with your own content.
- One of the most popular drag and drop content editors on the market, Page Builder is a completely free, out-of-the-box functional plugin. Easy to learn and use, it melds nicely with most existing WordPress themes, comes with a series of its own widgets and you can download others that are compatible whenever you want. The plugin also includes a “history” tool which lets you cycle back and forth to undo and redo changes, a comforting addition for those who like knowing they can revert to a previous version if they make a mistake or simply change their mind about the current design.
- Lastly, Divi is for both editing a WordPress theme as well as building a customized page. Also easy to use, it comes preloaded with nearly two dozen templates that cover a wide variety of site-specific themes, and users can create and save multiple designs as well as export a layout from one Divi installation into another. This is particularly useful for site owners who make frequent wholesale changes to their site on a regular basis, as they can move seamlessly from one design to another with just a few clicks.
