The drag and drop editor is somewhat of a new trend, but as many designers, wordpress developers and newbie webmasters are finding out, many of them are not as great as the marketing tells us they are.
In theory, the drag and drop website builder and editor is a godsend. It cuts out most of the coding needed to build a site and generates a beautiful realtime interface for dropping anything from sliders to columns into a page. As stated in various places online, the drag and drop editor is designed to help a beginner, with no coding knowledge, get a website up and running within an hour.
And that’s how it should be. You shouldn’t have to call tech support dozens of times, and you shouldn’t have to slam your head on the desk when you can’t figure out how to use the interface. Luckily, a few drag and drop website builders lead the way in the market, allowing for you to pump out quick designs for your clients and focus on improving your design skills with that time saved.
If you’re looking for a list of some of the top WYSIWYG and drag and drop solutions, this article is a great place to start. However, if you’re mind is primarily focused on that drag and drop interface, stick around and keep reading to learn about your ideal options.
Aqua Page Builder
The Aqua Page Builder is a fairly simple, and lightweight, WordPress plugin, so you wouldn’t be moving away from the WordPress platform, if that’s what you work with for your website design. It offers a powerful user interface that fits right in with the way WordPress normally looks.
You can create an unlimited amount of template variations, which is great for those designers out there who want to make something and then use that same design for other clients. It’s also compatible with the WordPress Import/Export feature in case you need to move around your designs, and the plugin even has a simple button in the page and post editor for implementing one of your templates.
Velocity Page
The Velocity Page drag and drop website builder also runs on WordPress, and it uses real-time drag and drop editing to see exactly what you changed as you make those changes. No coding is required at all, which is wonderful for beginners and handy for designers who want to start saving time with their business.
You can make landing pages that are compatible with AWeber and MailChimp, build high converting sales pages, and even generate product launch pages with contact information for your company.
The Divi Builder
The Divi Builder is a favorite in the market right now, because of its intuitive interface and plethora of “Divi Modules” for making anything from an image gallery to a pricing table. The builder comes with over 18-premade templates, allowing you to make a site that stands out from competitors. In addition, the responsive design ensures that anyone who goes to these sites can view them on mobile devices, such as tablets or phones.
CSS Hero
The CSS Hero customizer works as a plugin for WordPress, and it lets you play around with tons of fonts and colors without having to dive deep into the CSS of the website. The special effects provide things like shadows and transitions, and the “no lock-in” system means that you can export your CSS for use on other websites.
Along with a beautiful history area where you can flip back to a previous point if you mess something up, the Aqua Page Builder is a nice solution for any web designer.
Visual Composer
Visual Composer is one of the most popular drag and drop plugins, since it lets you take full control over the frontend and backend editors of your website. You can work with any WordPress theme, which is nice knowing that you don’t have to make theme decisions based on what plugin you install, and the over 40 content elements are ready to go out of the box.
The skin builder is handy for choosing a solid color scheme, and the responsive design is already implemented on all of your designs, meaning that everyone can view the sites on just about any device. Along with several extensions and quality customer support, the Visual composer plugin is an ideal choice.
Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder is all about helping you make stunning, responsive websites without the need to touch a single line of code. Control the layout of your pages without any problems and use the dozens of gorgeous templates so you never have to start the process from scratch.
Shortcode and widget support is included with the Beaver Builder, and you can implement the WooCommerce plugin and use it side by side with your new drag and drop editor. Feel free to use the program with your multi-site network, or export your designs to move them over to other client sites.
The Themify Builder
Our last recommendation is the Themify builder, but that certainly doesn’t mean we think it’s the worst of the bunch. It’s quite the opposite really, since Themify offers live previews, a drag and drop editor and frontend/backend editing for you to decide which one works best for you.
Fast prototyping is the standout feature from Themify, since you can grab a template, drop in reusable content and even import or export designs you have worked on in the past.
Over to You…
As you can see, the drag and drop page builders we talk about in this article have something special compared to the other options on the market. Not only do most of them provide various modules for you to place on your website designs, but some of them even offer full website hosting and building platforms to cut out the need for any additional web design tools.
If you have any other suggestions for awesome drag and drop website builders, feel free to drop a line about it in the comments section below. Share your thoughts on using one of these editors for your own design business and if you think that you could make it work for generating a large amount of sites.