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I hope this is not a breach of etiquette, and if it is I apologize to the great people at StudioPress.
I've been a loyal Genesis user for several years now and while I'm very comfortable with this platform, it seems like a lot of my smaller competitors are starting to use Divi. I'm assuming that's because most of them are a little more technically-challenged than I am.
Although I am by no means a WordPress, PHP, CSS, or HTML expert, I have come a long way—thanks to the help of many people on this forum. That said, I don't want to fall behind in terms of current website development technology.
What are your thoughts on Divi? What are its pros and cons? Are you still using Genesis for most of your websites or have you begun to use Divi? Again, I love the Genesis platform. And, although I'm getting better at coding, I do struggle with it from time to time.
I would never use Divi. Divi is a super-bloated page builder that is proven to significantly slow down website performance. In addition it damages user content by inserting its formatting shortcodes throughout content wherever it is used. Cleaning up content so it displays correctly after Divi is removed is a nightmare. Visual Composer is another one, that like Divi, destroys user content with shortcodes.
Regards,
Victor
https://victorfont.com/
Call us toll free: 844-VIC-FONT (842-3668)
Have you requested your free website audit yet?Things are going well. Thanks for asking!
Regards,
Victor
https://victorfont.com/
Call us toll free: 844-VIC-FONT (842-3668)
Have you requested your free website audit yet?Hold on here Divi is not so bad as all that in fact I have seen many professional sites using divi and they load fine.. now Victor is correct in that yes there is a lot of software in there and it can be difficult to wrangle it but all in all to be fair if you know what to do Divi is fine..
I personally do not use Divi.. I am just reporting what I have seen and I have been logged into Divi thru a friend that uses it..I suggest you watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmIrqJ9Wd0U&feature=youtu.be
Regards,
Victor
https://victorfont.com/
Call us toll free: 844-VIC-FONT (842-3668)
Have you requested your free website audit yet?I have used Genesis for many years, but have used Divi from time to time too. It is really good if you want to make pages with more complicated layouts. But I've always found it rather troublesome - glitchy, sometimes slow, just in general more prone to problems. I find Genesis more solid and I much prefer to use it. Now that we have Atomic Blocks, I think I'll be using that a lot more.
Thanks for your post.
I have never heard of the Atomic Blocks theme. Is it Genesis compatible? Why do you like that theme so much? Thanks!
OMG! I just checked out the Atomic Blocks plugin. I can't believe I missed this little gem. Thanks for cluing me in. 🙂
Hi Everyone,
My agency has created several dozen sites with Genesis as well as Divi. My point is, we use Divi just as much as Genesis. While I won't argue that Divi has certainly become bloated over the past year, something we are not too happy about, it can still perform extremely well.
I saw this on the Divi Facebook Group where an individual benchmarked his Divi sites. If I recall correctly, it was as a direct response to those Oxygen performance videos. As an aside, we bought Oxygen over a year ago and have yet to make a client single with with it.
Needless to say, the results are very impressive. If I can dig up the original post, I'll reference it here.
@paradime, Thanks for your response.
Quite frankly, the last thing I need is to learn yet another website development platform, but I find it interesting that your agency chooses to use both. Out of curiosity, why would you choose Divi over Genesis or vice versa?
Divi is more than just a theme. It's also a page builder with nearly 50 modules. As such, we're able to build much more graphically rich and dynamic sites. You can easily add special effects, shape dividers, animations, and transitions...all with a drag and drop interface.
With Genesis, you might need to add a number of separate plugins to get similar features and functionality. However, each of these plugins won't have a consistent UI and will have their own learning curve. At least with Divi, there's a unified UI/UX across everything including the modules.
It's also why saying that Divi is bloated isn't quite a fair statement. Again, it's much more that just a theme.
That said, Divi is not for everyone's tastes. There's certainly issues with it, some already stated. Genesis, on the other hand, is rock solid.
Anyway, as an agency, we certainly don't want to be limited to just one theme and expect it to be the best at everything. We're always experimenting with other themes and page builders to find optimum workflows.
Speaking of workflows, along with Genesis, we also purchased the Dynamik Website Builder (DWB) and Genesis Extender (GE), both from Cobalt Apps. The difference is that DWB functions as a child theme where as GE is a plugin so you can use your own Genesis child theme. Definitely take a look at their site. Their tools have saved us so much time and effort:
I hope this helps!
@paradime, thanks for your post.
I've been using Genesis Extender for some time and I definitely agree. It's a huge time saver. I hear you when it comes to a consistent interface. That's one of the reasons I use the Adobe suite of applications. I may need to give Divi a try, but I think I'll play around with Atomic Blocks first.
Thanks again for your insight. 🙂
My pleasure...always interested in reading about what other devs use, etc. and sharing our experiences.
I have to say, my big issue with Gutenberg is that most of the collections seem very incomplete. Yes, we're still in the early days of Gutenberg Blocks so I'm sure things will change significantly in year or two...at least that's the hope.
The Atomic Blocks Collection, for example, only has 14 blocks. Some of the other collections have as many as 25 blocks. You're probably going to have to install several collections to get the blocks you need. This is a far cry from Divi's 46 modules.
This happened with a client that was our very first (and last) Gutenberg site. We installed 2 blocks collections for a total of 6 plugins required to get what we needed. In the end, we ripped it all out and installed Elementor, which has 30 widgets (as they call it). So, yes, we replaced 6 plugins with 1. The client was very happy about the switch. They didn't quite like Gutenberg.
I use Genesis and the Divi builder plugin on my homepage and a few other pages. I can't notice any issue with the speed honestly but I spent a lot of time optimizing my website.
Here's my report:
https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.fabionodariphoto.com/1f30S2gQI would like to switch to Gutenberg but right now its functionality are very limited.
Wow! You've done a great job optimizing your website!
I see that you've kept your plugins to a minimum. I suspect that's because all of your website's functionality is built into Divi. Is that the case?
Also, most of the time, slow websites are the result of poorly optimized images. I didn't see any image optimizer plugins. How are you optimizing your images? Thanks!
Divi's okay. I wouldn’t recommend it, especially in light of the better options that exist. Two much better options, IMO, are Elementor and Beaver Builder.
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Thanks. Yes I'm a bit obsessed with the speed. I actually use DIVI plugin only for the home page and a few other pages. And as you have noticed I use few other plugins, not because DIVI offer the functionalities I need but because I try to keep stuff as simple as possible. Most of the plugin I use are related to actually optimizing the speed: caching, async javascript, critical css and so on.
About the images I optimize them myself with Photoshop. So I don't need any plugin for that.
So, you chose to use a Studio Press template with the Divi plugin. May I ask why you didn't use the Divi theme as well?
Great job! It just goes to show that you can perfectly optimize almost anything. 😉
We've also built a couple of sites where we used Genesis and the Divi Builder plugin but this was a few years back. I'm not sure we'd take the same approach today. It just depends on the design.
Also, to circle back to your original post...I think Divi is ideal if you're primarily a graphic artist, and not a developer, and use Divi as the design creation tool, instead of using Photoshop or a wireframing prototyping tool. There's also hundreds of layouts packs, as they call it, available through the builder that you can drop in and edit...including royalty free pictures.
Again, Divi is just another tool in our belt in addition to Genesis, and other themes that we've purchased, and certainly not a replacement.
@gulisanolaw
Saying there are better options is quite subjective. Tell us why you think so.
I generally find that the criticisms of Divi are largely "fanboy" comments and hearsay and not based on fact or current experience.
Regarding Beaver Builder, we've never used it on any client site. We have used Elementor (free edition) on a number of our non-Divi sites.
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