We recently discussed in this article how you must have to do everything from absolute scratch if you choose WordPress over other platforms for your corporate website. WP Bakery actually solves that problem. Seeing that it has more than 4 million satisfied users, they’ve got to be doing something right. WordPress isn’t a blank canvas after all. It does have some basic themes, even if you choose not to go for a theme provider, and while using WP Bakery, you can customize them as per your liking. It’s beautiful! But then, this better thing comes into the market, and people flock to it. This is about why you shouldn’t rush… just not yet. We’ve broken down all the reasons here, after talking to Anwar A.R, one of the developers on the Computan team-
Know the difference between the two names- and their functions.
Let me formally introduce you to WP Bakery Page Builder:
Visual Composer Website Builder, formerly known as Visual Composer Page Builder:
Decide if you even need the whole nine yards, or you’re doing perfectly well with a page builder. You build content for your site using WP Bakery.
Don’t be demotivated by the demotion of sweet, old WP bakery. You can perform numerous functions with it, including working on any existing theme without messing up, with a lot of content elements, templates and add-ons to choose from.
WordPress does have bare essentials and themes that aren't very fancy or developed. With WP Bakery, there’s support for third party plug-ins, like revolution sliders and web forms. You could go through a template library or control how pages will respond across different devices.
Now, Visual Composer has more layout options. It’s got a free and premium version. It used to be a page builder, too, but went onto becoming a website builder.
The old version of visual composer
It’s got things that might be absent in WP Bakery, like menu elements and staging activation, and being able to actually build headers and footers. It does have more functions you may or may not necessarily need, like mobile editing and keyboard shortcuts. It promises to be simple as easy. All you need to do is drag and drop, without having to know a line of code. While that is true to quite an extent, it’s really just not drag-and-drop.
The new version of Visual Composer
So what are Visual Composer’s Downfalls? Why shouldn’t we go with it?
It doesn’t truly have any, but at this point, you may still face inconveniences, basically because it’s a noob in the industry. If you need any custom add-ons or extensions, you will need a developer, which is fine, but here’s what’s not fine:
- “WordPress developers are accustomed to working with PHP for decades, and not with JavaScript,” says Anwar, a developer on the Computan team, “It is true that WordPress is now making its way somehow towards JavaScript by using it in Gutenberg and Calypso, but this change is huge. Mostly, traditional WordPress-centric developers do not tend to use modern JavaScript frameworks, so it’s obvious that people who have been working with JavaScript have not been particularly working with WordPress all these years. It will take everyone time to acclimatize to this change.” Visual Composer has been built using ReactJS Library from scratch. This could be very frustrating for those who aren’t comfortable using it, without the handy shortcodes.
“The goal of the block editors to make adding rich content to WordPress simple and enjoyable.” – From the Gutenberg plugin description on WordPress.org.“
- The customer support has an SLA for getting back to you in 24 hours, which isn’t ideal when you need help as fast as the drag and drop can go!
- “Since it’s a new product, there aren’t many add-ons, extensions or plug-ins available in the market,” Said Anwar, as we’d further discussed the disadvantages. Getting a custom-made plug-in or anything will be time consuming and not economical.
- Every new product has its bugs and glitches, so Visual Composer has its own share of those. The most recent one was with inserting images of the right size.
- For all those developers who have been using shortcodes as easily as they breathe air (excluding the poor souls with breathing problems here) it won’t be as straightforward in Visual Composer, since it doesn’t really support shortcodes. It supports shortcodes, but building blocks/elements in Visual Composer is different. Although they have documentation, the new product is JavaScript-centric and a traditional WordPress developers coming from PHP background need some time getting familiar with the flow.
- It’s true that a non-technical person can actually use WP Bakery and Visual Composer, but they will suffer when they have to move from WP Bakery to Visual Composer, as it’s not a simple process at all. “Extra help would be needed, and that could be time consuming,” he elaborated: Here are some notes regarding migration of pages from WP Bakery Page Builder to Visual Composer . At the moment, migration is not supported.
- WP Bakery Page Builder offers a back-end editor, but Visual Composer lacks this feature. Additionally Grid Builder and Role Manager are functionalities in WP Bakery Page Builder that are not out there in Visual Composer yet.
To wrap it up, we should just hold our horses before jumping into something promising and definitely worthwhile. It’s just not the time yet. Visual Composer hasn’t matured as much as WP Bakery has, and the transition should be smooth. No one wants to go through a hassle in the name of improvisation!
