Best WordPress Page Builders in 2026: What 1,138 Top Sites Actually Use

For most new WordPress sites, the best page builder is the block editor that already comes with WordPress, paired with a free block toolkit like GenerateBlocks or Kadence Blocks. Four out of five top WordPress sites we checked don’t use a page builder on their homepage at all. If you want visual drag-and-drop editing, Elementor is the safe default, with by far the most users. Bricks suits developers who want lean pages, Divi suits anyone who wants to pay once, and Beaver Builder has a free version that is easy to walk away from.

Most page builder comparisons are opinion lists, so we measured instead. On October 1, 2026, we checked which page builder 1,138 WordPress homepages from the world’s 20,000 most-visited domains were built with, counted the stylesheets and scripts each one loads, read the code of the free builders to see what they leave behind when you switch them off, and took prices from each vendor’s pricing page.

Which page builder should you use?

Every builder in this comparison can produce a good-looking site. The real differences are how you like to edit, what you pay, and how hard it is to leave later.

Pick	Best if you want	Keep in mind
The block editor with GenerateBlocks or Kadence Blocks	A free setup that stays standard WordPress	Layouts are saved as regular blocks. Both toolkits are free, and GenerateBlocks Pro is $99 a year.
Elementor	The most popular drag-and-drop editor	The core plugin is free, but headers, footers and templates need Pro, from $60 a year. Elementor homepages loaded the most stylesheets in our data.
Bricks	Lean pages and developer control	Bricks is a theme, not a plugin. It costs $79 a year for one site or $599 for a lifetime license.
Divi	One price for unlimited sites	$89 a year or $249 once, theme included. Divi 5 replaced shortcodes with the block format.
Beaver Builder	A free version that is easy to leave	It writes a plain HTML copy of your layouts into each post. Paid plans start at $89 a year.
Breakdance	A free plan with room to grow	Free on unlimited sites with basic features. Pro starts at $99.99 a year.

What 1,138 top WordPress sites actually use

We started from the 1,203 sites among the world’s 20,000 most-visited domains that we verified as WordPress for our WordPress version study, the same set we used to compare WordPress SEO plugins. On October 1, 2026, 1,138 of them served a homepage rendered by WordPress, and we looked for each page builder’s own markup in it.

Page builder	Homepages	Share of all 1,138	Share of the 217 builder sites
Elementor	85	7.5%	39.2%
WPBakery	53	4.7%	24.4%
Divi	18	1.6%	8.3%
Beaver Builder	14	1.2%	6.5%
Avada	12	1.1%	5.5%
SiteOrigin Page Builder	12	1.1%	5.5%
Bricks	8	0.7%	3.7%
Breakdance, Enfold, Colibri	3 each	0.3% each	1.4% each
Visual Composer	2	0.2%	0.9%
Oxygen, Brizy, SeedProd, Cornerstone	1 each	0.1% each	0.5% each
Any page builder	217	19.1%
No page builder	921	80.9%

Four out of five homepages use no page builder at all. Among the ones that do, Elementor accounts for 39%, more than WPBakery and Divi combined. A few details behind the table:

• WPBakery’s count needs a footnote. 40 of those 53 homepages load WPBakery itself, 7 of them through the copy bundled with the Salient theme. The other 13 render WPBakery-style rows through a theme’s own builder, such as tagDiv Composer in the Newspaper theme.
• 24 more sites have Elementor installed without using it on the homepage, so its real reach is a little wider than the table shows.
• Thrive Architect, Themify Builder and Zion Builder did not appear on any homepage.
• Popularity barely changes the picture: 18.0% of homepages in the top 5,000 used a builder, 15.9% from 5,001 to 10,000, and 20.9% from 10,001 to 20,000.

What the other 81% use

Of the 921 homepages without a page builder, 390 show at least five core block elements (columns, groups, buttons and the like), 57 run a block theme, and 40 add a block toolkit. Across all 1,138 homepages, Kadence Blocks appeared on 17, GenerateBlocks on 13, Spectra on 5, Stackable on 4, Otter on 2 and Greenshift on 1. Many of the rest run custom or classic themes, from news publishers’ in-house themes to GeneratePress and Genesis.

To check which builder and theme any site runs, paste its address into our WordPress plugin detector.

Elementor: Pro is standard, the new editor is not

Elementor prints its version number in a generator tag unless you switch it off, so we could see how up to date each install is. Here is what the 85 Elementor homepages, and the 109 sites with Elementor installed, look like:

• 72 of the 85 homepages (84.7%) also load Elementor Pro.
• 51 use an Elementor footer and 47 an Elementor header, so Elementor builds the whole page rather than just the content. 31 load an Elementor popup.
• 80 use the flexbox containers that replaced sections and columns, yet 69 still contain at least one old-style section. Most sites are partway through that switch.
• Only 2 use the new Atomic Editor elements, which Elementor marked stable and turned on by default for new sites in version 4.0 on March 30, 2026.
• Of the 93 sites showing a version, 73.1% run 4.x, and 34 were already on 4.3, released September 22. The other 26.9% are still on 3.x, the oldest being 3.11.2 from February 2023.
• 40 of the 109 sites (36.7%) use the Hello Elementor theme, and 42 (38.5%) load at least one add-on pack, most often Essential Addons (27 sites).

If you build on Hello Elementor, our child theme generator creates a child theme for it, so your custom code survives theme updates.

How much each builder adds to a page

We also measured each homepage: the size of its HTML, how many stylesheet and script tags it loads, and how many HTML elements it contains. These are medians across very different sites, so read them as patterns rather than a lab test. A busy homepage is heavy whatever builds it.

Homepage built with	Sites	HTML size	Stylesheets	Scripts	HTML elements
Elementor	85	322 KB	26	25	1,364
WPBakery	53	220 KB	14	24	1,201
Divi	18	296 KB	14	34	1,102
Beaver Builder	14	221 KB	10	18	1,148
Avada	12	276 KB	4	22	1,260
SiteOrigin Page Builder	12	157 KB	14	15	796
Bricks	8	222 KB	8	10	970
Any page builder	217	263 KB	17	24	1,234
Block toolkit, no builder	40	342 KB	10	14	1,259
Block theme, no builder	57	366 KB	7	17	1,264
No page builder	921	197 KB	6	13	1,083

• Builder homepages carried nearly three times as many stylesheets as homepages without one (17 against 6) and almost twice as many scripts (24 against 13).
• Elementor homepages had the most stylesheets (26) and the largest HTML (322 KB) of any builder. Divi loaded the most scripts (34).
• Bricks had the fewest scripts of any builder (10), though that comes from only 8 sites.
• Block themes had the heaviest HTML of all (366 KB) with only 7 stylesheets, because they print much of their CSS inside the page: a median of 83 KB in style tags, against 22 KB on classic-theme homepages without a builder.

Stylesheets and scripts in the page head can delay the first paint. Our guide to render-blocking JavaScript and CSS covers what to defer, and our guide to speeding up WordPress covers the rest.

What happens to your content if you stop using a builder

The biggest cost of a page builder shows up when you leave it. We read the free builders’ code, and the vendors’ own documentation for the paid ones, to see what each leaves behind when it is switched off.

Builder	Where the layout is stored	If you deactivate it
Elementor	Its own data field (_elementor_data)	Your post keeps a stripped-down HTML copy of the text and images, which Elementor rewrites every time you save. The layout and styling disappear.
Beaver Builder	Its own data field (_fl_builder_data)	Publishing writes a plain HTML version of the layout into the post, so the content stays readable.
SiteOrigin Page Builder	Its own data field (panels_data)	SiteOrigin also stores an HTML version of the layout in the post.
WPBakery	Shortcodes in the post	The shortcodes show up as raw text on the page, as WPBakery’s own troubleshooting guide explains.
Divi 4	Shortcodes in the post	Elegant Themes acknowledges that shortcodes are left over in your posts after moving away from Divi 4.
Divi 5	The block format	Layouts are saved in the same serialized block format the block editor uses. Elegant Themes says you start with a blank slate if you switch away, so plan to rebuild the pages.
Block editor and toolkits	Regular blocks in the post	Text, images and structure stay. The toolkit’s styling disappears, and any block it builds on the server, such as a post grid, stops showing.

If you are planning a switch, try it on a staging site first and rebuild the pages that matter before you deactivate anything.

Building with the block editor instead

WordPress’s own editor handles columns, groups and covers without any plugin, plus full-site templates if you use a block theme, and block toolkits add the design controls many people used to buy a page builder for. The trade-off is a more structured, less free-form way of editing.

Size on disk is not the same as page weight, but it shows how much code you take on. Here are the free versions on WordPress.org:

Plugin	Version	Active installs	Download	Unpacked	Files
Elementor	4.3.3	10 million+	23.6 MB	80.3 MB	3,429
Brizy	2.8.23	60,000+	18.9 MB	46.0 MB	8,458
Kadence Blocks	3.7.12	600,000+	11.9 MB	43.0 MB	1,905
Spectra Legacy	2.20.4	1 million+	8.6 MB	24.2 MB	712
Otter Blocks	3.2.7	300,000+	7.9 MB	19.7 MB	1,079
Beaver Builder Lite	2.11.0.6	100,000+	5.3 MB	17.1 MB	1,156
Stackable	3.20.2	100,000+	1.9 MB	6.6 MB	501
GenerateBlocks	2.4.1	200,000+	1.3 MB	4.3 MB	140
SiteOrigin Page Builder	2.36.1	400,000+	0.7 MB	2.4 MB	315

One naming change to know about: the original Spectra plugin is now called Spectra Legacy. It still gets security and compatibility updates but no new features, which go into a separate Spectra Blocks plugin instead.

What each builder costs

Builder	Free version	Paid pricing
Elementor	Yes	Pro $60/yr (1 site), $84/yr (1 site with popups and WooCommerce), $108/yr (3 sites), $204/yr (25 sites)
Divi	No	$89/yr or $249 once, unlimited sites
Beaver Builder	Yes (Lite)	$89/yr (1 site) up to $546/yr (unlimited)
Bricks	No	$79/yr (1 site) up to $249/yr (unlimited), or $599 lifetime
Breakdance	Yes	$99.99/yr (1 site) or $199.99/yr (unlimited)
WPBakery	No	€69 once per site, with 1 year of support
Avada	No	$69 through Envato’s ThemeForest
SiteOrigin	Yes	Premium $29/yr (1 site) or $49/yr (5 sites)
GenerateBlocks	Yes	Pro $99/yr
Kadence Blocks	Yes	Pro included in the $99/yr Essentials bundle with the Kadence theme
Spectra	Yes	Pro $69/yr or $319 once

Elementor also sells Elementor One, which bundles Pro with image optimization, accessibility tools and email delivery for $180 the first year and $228 a year after that. Divi Pro ($277 a year) adds AI and cloud services to Divi. Breakdance lists its unlimited plan at $199.99 a year with a note that the price will rise to $399.99.

Notes on each builder

Elementor

The default choice for drag-and-drop, with more than 10 million active installs on WordPress.org and a large add-on ecosystem: Ultimate Addons for Elementor and Essential Addons each have at least 1 million. Plan on paying for Pro: the free version has no Theme Builder, and popups, custom CSS and WooCommerce widgets start at the $84 Advanced Solo plan.

Divi

A theme and builder in one, licensed for unlimited sites. Divi 5 became the official release on February 26, 2026 and moved layouts from shortcodes to the block format, but 15 of the 17 Divi homepages that showed a version were still on Divi 4. Elegant Themes promised Divi 4 support for at least six months after the release, so test the upgrade on staging before you run it.

Beaver Builder

A free Lite version on WordPress.org and paid plans from $89 a year for one site. Because publishing writes plain HTML into your post, it is one of the easiest builders to leave. It built 14 homepages in our scan.

Bricks

Bricks is a theme with a builder inside it, so it replaces your theme rather than sitting on top of one. It built 8 homepages, including cpanel.com, and that group loaded the fewest scripts of any builder.

WPBakery

Still the second most common builder in our data. Some of that comes from themes: Salient ships its own copy on 7 of the sites, and 13 more use theme builders that copy WPBakery’s layout format. Its layouts are shortcodes, so leaving it means rebuilding your pages.

Breakdance and Oxygen

Both come from the same company, Soflyy. Breakdance has a free plan for unlimited sites, and Oxygen is sold on lifetime licenses. They built 3 homepages and 1 homepage in our scan.

Avada

A theme with its own builder, sold through Envato’s ThemeForest for $69, according to avada.com. It built 12 homepages in our scan.

SiteOrigin Page Builder

Free, with more than 400,000 active installs and the smallest download in our table (0.7 MB). SiteOrigin Premium adds 45 add-ons from $29 a year. It built 12 homepages in our scan.

GenerateBlocks, Kadence Blocks and Spectra

These are block toolkits rather than page builders: they add layout and design controls to the block editor instead of replacing it. GenerateBlocks is the smallest download of the three (1.3 MB) and Kadence Blocks has 600,000+ active installs. Spectra’s original plugin has more (1 million+), but its new features now ship in the separate Spectra Blocks plugin.

How we measured

• Sites: the 1,203 WordPress sites we verified among the Tranco list‘s top 20,000 domains. We fetched each homepage on October 1, 2026; 1,154 responded and 1,138 were rendered by WordPress.
• Detection: each builder’s own markup, taken from the source code of the free builders and confirmed on each vendor’s own website for the paid ones. Class names only counted inside HTML class attributes, because some plugins carry other builders’ class names in their scripts and CSS. Real Cookie Banner, for example, ships selectors for Bricks, Oxygen, WPBakery and Divi elements.
• Scope: homepages only. A site can use a builder on other pages, and 24 sites had Elementor installed without using it on the homepage.
• Weight: sizes and tag counts from the homepage HTML, not full network requests. Medians across different sites, not a controlled test.
• Versions: Elementor’s generator tag (93 of 109 sites showed it) and the version number Divi adds to its own file URLs.
• Prices: each vendor’s own site on October 1, 2026.

Frequently asked questions