Once upon a time, making websites was limited to people with technical know-how. These days, even those with zero coding knowledge have the power to make beautiful websites… that is, as long as they have the right tools.
But what are the right tools? There are so many different ways to make websites these days, and it’s hard to decide which one is best.
Allow us to introduce you to Divi, a premium WordPress theme that stands apart from the vast sea of WordPress themes out there. This powerful, multipurpose tool is perfect for the aspiring web designer to offer unlimited websites and a lifetime plan.
Table of Contents
What Is Divi?
Divi isn’t just any old website theme; it’s also a website builder, allowing you to design webpages visually without any coding knowledge at all. (And professionals who can code love using Divi, too.)
When you make a WordPress page with Divi, you’re given options: build from scratch, choose a premade layout, or clone an existing page.
If you build from scratch, you’ll get to work on a completely blank page with Divi’s visual builder. You’ll have 46 “modules,” or website building blocks, at your fingertips. There are simple text modules, like blurbs under images and clickable buttons, as well as fancier modules, like contact forms, galleries, and login pages.
Any feature that a fully functional website would ever need is right here…, but if you’re still not satisfied, you can always learn a little coding, then use the Code module to get exactly what you want!
Meanwhile, if you opt for premade layouts, you’ll get to choose from hundreds of Divi templates, mixing and matching as you please. You can customize these layouts as little or as much as you want.
Just want to change the colors? Go ahead! Delete whole sections and add new ones? Just do it! Divi strikes a perfect balance between giving you the freedom and guiding you through the process of building a fantastic WordPress website.
Divi Pros and Cons
Pro 1: No experience necessary
Again, with Divi, you won’t need any coding experience to make a visually pleasing website. The website builder is drag-and-drop, which means the only two skills you need are reading and using a mouse.
However, that doesn’t mean Divi does all the work for you. This takes us to…
Con 1: …Some experience necessary?
If you want the absolute best from Divi, you’re going to want some web designing skills. After all, to build a webpage from scratch, you’ll need a good eye for where things go.
If designing isn’t your strongest suit, you can always use one of Divi’s many premade layouts (but if you shy away from customizing, you’ll lose out on that one-of-a-kind website look).
Pro 2: Offers tons of features
Divi lets you customize everything. There’s a comprehensive Theme Options panel for your convenience. You can change the default color palette that the visual builder uses, decide how you want thumbnails to be generated, format dates to your preference, enable smooth scrolling…
Clearly, Divi’s going above and beyond. Some, though, might call it to overkill.
Con 2: Maybe too many features
What does “smooth scrolling” even mean? With all the choices available, a common concern about Divi is that it can be overwhelming for beginners. Luckily, Divi has about as many tutorials and guides as it does features (more on that later).
Pro 3: Lifetime plan
If you plan on building websites for a long time yet, you’ll probably want to get Divi through a lifetime membership. For a one-time fee (cheaper than three years’ worth of the annual plan!), you can get lifetime access, which is quite a good deal.
But what if you’re not so sure whether you’ll want to use Divi forever?
Con 3: You might be stuck with Divi for life
Divi uses messy shortcodes. Basically, this means if you decide to stop using the Divi theme, it’ll be a bit of a pain to transfer your website to a different theme or builder. If you don’t know how to clean up code, you might find yourself resigned to using Divi forever.
But we wouldn’t say resigned, because Divi’s great, and it offers…
Pro 4: Unlimited websites
With Divi, you’re licensed to build as many websites as you want, even for commercial use. So whether you’re running multiple websites for personal reasons or designing sites for hundreds of clients, Divi gives you a good bang for your buck.
Pro 5: Suitable for any need
Whether you’re a newbie or a pro at website-building, whether you’re running a business or a blog, Divi will work for you. Need to open up a shop? That’s one of Divi’s modules. Want a place for viewers to leave comments? Also, a module.
Divi’s versatility makes it great for anyone to use.
Is Divi safe and legit?
Divi belongs to Elegant Themes, a company that makes—you guessed it—WordPress themes. Founded in 2008, Elegant Themes has become an industry leader, with 701,000 customers and counting.
If those hundreds of thousands of customers aren’t enough to convince you, how about the no-questions-asked, 30-day refund guarantee? Or the 5-star rating they’ve maintained on Trustpilot with over 10,000 reviews?
Yep, Elegant Themes and Divi is safe and legit, even famous, within the niche of WordPress themes.
Is Divi Easy to Use?
Purchasing and downloading the Divi theme is a cinch when Elegant Themes provides such an easy-to-navigate website. After that, all you need to do is install Divi in WordPress and get right to work with the Divi builder.
With all of Divi’s features, you might have a bit of learning to do. But Divi executes their functionality very well, and it won’t be long before you get acclimated to the website builder. Still hesitant? Just try out their demo and see quickly you adjust!
Click HERE to try the demo.
While you’re getting familiar with the interface, you can always refer to Elegant Themes’s plethora of helpful blog posts and YouTube videos. These are clear and straightforward, but if they’re not working for you, don’t worry; Divi is so popular that a lot of people have created their own guides. You can find these with a quick Google search.
The Best Features of Divi
One of Divi’s crowning features is its huge collection of high-quality premade layouts, updated weekly by the Elegant Themes folks.
At the beginning of 2018, Divi boasted 140 layouts. Today, there are 1404 free layouts (organized into 190 packs). What’s more, all the images used in these layouts are royalty-free stock photos so that you can use them for your websites; however, you need them!
We’ve already talked about Divi’s drag-and-drop visual builder, which lets you see the website’s front end; that is, you can see exactly how a web page will look as you edit it.
But Divi also offers a neat little back-end builder. This, similarly, lets you drag and drop modules to play around with a webpage’s layout easily. The difference is that this builder is in block format, so you do not see the actual webpage.
This simpler alternative to the visual builder is quite useful when making a website from scratch and wants to test out different ways of organizing a page.
Divi is also great with responsive web design; you can be sure that your webpages look great on any device. Though this is mostly done automatically, you have the power to specifically change your webpages for different device displays, whether you’re just changing font size or making alternative versions of a module.
Finally, Divi lets you reuse the content you’ve made, which is very useful when you want a custom module like a header to show up on all the pages of your website. This way, if you edit the module on one webpage, the edit will transfer to all the other webpages of the website. Very efficient!
Is Divi good for SEO?
There’s a myth that Divi’s shortcodes are bad for SEO, but we promise it’s really just a myth. Search engines won’t see the entire shortcode. The only problem you might have is with the meta description (the short snippet of each website on the search results page), but a simple SEO plugin can fix this.
Yes, Divi is built to be SEO friendly. Elegant Themes wants your website to be search engine optimized as much as you do. They’ve even made a blog post to help you out!
Divi Support
Elegant Themes provides live chat support to assist all customers quickly. When we messaged them, we received a friendly response in just a couple of minutes. Based on that anecdotal evidence, customer support is 10/10 (and we haven’t heard anything to the contrary).
According to the representative we spoke with, it might take an hour to get a response on a hectic day (and mere seconds when things aren’t busy), but chats are never left unresponded.
If you happen to need instant support on one of those busy days, you can always ask your question on the big Elegant Themes community forums or browse the Elegant Theme websites for their written resources and guides.
Pricing
To get Divi, you’ll have to buy an Elegant Themes membership, which gives you access to all their other products as well.
They offer yearly access at $89 per year and lifetime access at a one-time payment of $249.
Is Divi really worth it?
So $249 is a pretty high price tag.
You might be wondering if it’s worth the investment, especially if you’re planning on just making one or two websites for yourself. (If you’re designing websites for clients, you already know it’s worth it—a set price to customize and sell an unlimited number of websites!)
And you might be considering just using a free WordPress theme instead.
Well, you and everybody else! That’s the thing about free themes; since they’re free, tons of people use them. Also, they don’t have as many features available.
If you want more functionality and a website that stands out, you’ll want to buy a premium or custom theme.
Premium themes generally cost anywhere from $10 to $200, with an average of $50 to $60. They’re cheaper than Divi, but they’re one-and-done, and you’ll have to navigate a treacherous land of bad coding and slow websites to find a good theme.
Custom themes, meanwhile, range from $1500 to $5000.
When you consider that Divi is an extremely customizable website theme and a website builder, suddenly the price seems very reasonable, doesn’t it?
So, we give a resounding yes: Divi is very much worth it!
Whether you want a unique website for yourself or a tool to make unique websites for others, Divi will provide you with all the customizability and features you’re looking for.
Best Divi Theme Alternatives
If something about Divi’s still not working for you, whether it’s the price or the heavy features, you might want to look at these alternate WordPress themes: GeneratePress and Astra.
In some ways, these two themes are very similar, so we’ll look at them together first. Both have free versions, with the premium/pro versions costing $59 a year or $249 for life, making them cheaper than or equal to Divi.
The main charm to these themes is that they’re very lightweight, with clean coding, making for websites that load extremely fast.
GeneratePress focuses more on the lightweight aspect; it’s very streamlined and easy to use, with less of a learning curve than Divi and excellently crafted code. Astra focuses more on the fast aspect; it’s designed for great website performance while allowing for customizability and elegance.
Both themes’ paid versions offer a healthy smattering of features to customize your website. If you’re interested in something simpler and less hefty than Divi, it’s definitely worth looking into these two themes to see which one best suits your needs.
They don’t quite match Divi’s features, but that’s because Divi is multipurpose: remember, it’s also a website builder.
The good news is, both GeneratePress and Astra work well with WordPress page builders! If you’re interested in either one, you’ll want to find a page builder to pair with it.
Best Divi Builder Alternatives
One page builder that rivals Divi in its reputation with WordPress users is Elementor. Like Divi, Elementor is drag-and-drop and easy to use; some say it’s even easier to use than Divi, which is something to keep in mind.
The best thing about Elementor? It’s free. The free version doesn’t have as many features as Divi, but it still offers a lot. So if you’re new to this whole WordPress website building business and don’t want to invest in anything yet, Elementor is not a bad option.
If you only want one website, Elementor Pro (which offers a few more features than Divi) is cheaper than Divi, at $49 a year. However, Elementor Pro charges $99 a year for 3 websites and $199 a year for 1000 websites. There is no lifetime plan. So if you intend to save money in the long run or create many websites for clients, Divi is the way to go.
Less well known than Divi and Elementor is the Thrive Theme Builder (also an easily used drag-and-drop).
Thrive Themes is geared towards businesses, marketing, and sales. This means the builder has a lot of specialized features for those types of websites, but overall, it has fewer features than Divi and Elementor but still, a significant amount!
You can use the Thrive Theme Builder on one website for $97 or five for $127, so its cost relative to the other builders really depends on how many websites you intend to make. Alternatively, you can become a Thrive Member for $228 a year, which gives you access to all that Thrive Themes offers, including the builder.
Both the Thrive Theme Builder and Elementor are great alternatives to Divi’s builder in their own ways. It all depends on what you’re looking for, but we think Divi is definitely up there for its affordable lifetime plan and unlimited websites.
Conclusion
Straight to the point: Divi is great.
We just talked about how it’s got a lifetime plan that saves you tons of money and lets you make an unlimited amount of websites. Besides that, remember: it’s super customizable to any extent. It has hundreds of templates, with more added every day, and a comprehensive assortment of features.
Because of all those features, it takes a bit of time to get the hang of everything. But you have lots of support, from Elegant Themes’ helpful resources and live chat to the wide community of Divi users out there.
There’s a reason Divi is so popular. If you want a website builder, Divi is one of the best tools out there, no matter how inexperienced you might be. You don’t even need to know how to code. (Those of you who do know how to code might be critical of Divi’s somewhat inelegant shortcodes, but this doesn’t matter if you plan on using Divi for life.)
Although it won’t replace a human eye for design, Divi is invaluable for anyone who’s hoping to craft beautiful websites on their own, whether for themselves or clients.
Visit Divi HERE
