In Short
- WordPress offers three main content creation methods: the Classic Editor, the Block Editor (Gutenberg), and third-party Page Builders like Divi and Elementor.
- The Classic Editor is beautifully simple, focusing on content creation and honouring the core CMS principle of separating content from design.
- The Block Editor, WordPress's modern default, is powerful but can feel unintuitive and clunky, blurring the lines between content and layout in a way I find counterproductive.
- Page Builders like Divi offer immense visual control but historically fought against WordPress's core structure, leading to performance issues and lock-in.
- My preferred method is a hybrid: using the Divi Theme Builder for powerful, site-wide template design while re-enabling the Classic Editor for a clean, focused writing experience.
Let's get one thing straight. The way you build a page in WordPress isn't just a technical choice; it's a philosophical one. It’s a declaration of intent. Are you a writer, a designer, a tinkerer, or a developer masquerading as a user? For years, this question has been at the heart of a quiet, brutal war fought within the WordPress dashboard, a three-way skirmish between the old guard, the new regime, and the mercenary armies of third-party builders.
I’ve been in these trenches since 2009, and my hands are dirty. I’ve seen it all.
The Old Guard: My Lingering Affection for the Classic Editor
I’m going to say something that might sound heretical in the current year: I love the Classic Editor. There. It’s out. It’s the simple, TinyMCE-powered box that feels like a slightly more capable Microsoft Word document. It’s clean. It’s honest. It does one thing, and it does it with an unadorned elegance that has been completely lost in the modern scramble for features.
Why the affection? Because it understands what a Content Management System (CMS) is supposed to be. The whole point—the foundational, earth-shatteringly brilliant idea of a CMS—is the separation of content from presentation. You write your words, you upload your images, you pour your ideas into the database. The *theme*—the template—then takes that raw data and makes it beautiful. You can change the entire look of your website, a thousand pages at once, by simply switching themes or tweaking a template file, and your content remains pristine, untouched, and portable.
The Classic Editor is the purest expression of this principle. It forces you to focus on the substance. The words. The argument. The story. It doesn’t tempt you with columns and sliders and parallax-scrolling-animated-gradient-backgrounds. It’s a writer’s tool. And for that, it has my undying respect.
The Usurper: Gutenberg, The Block Editor I Never Warmed To
Then came Gutenberg, the Block Editor. WordPress’s great leap forward. A complete reimagining of the editing experience. And I’ve tried. I really have. I’ve forced myself to build pages with it, to understand its logic, to embrace the block-based paradigm. And every single time, I’ve walked away feeling like I’ve just been in a fistfight with an octopus. It’s all arms and no direction.
To me, it feels utterly impenetrable. An interface that somehow manages to be both simplistic and confusing at the same time. Things are hidden in sidebars, inside other sidebars, inside pop-ups that appear when you hover over an icon that doesn’t look like what it does. It’s a mess. I’m sure—I am absolutely certain—that once you invest the dozens of hours required to memorise its esoteric workflows, it’s probably fine. Maybe even powerful. But here’s the thing: why should I have to? Why is the learning curve a vertical cliff face when other, more powerful tools exist?
More fundamentally, the Block Editor commits the cardinal sin: it mashes content and presentation together into a messy, inseparable pulp. Every page becomes a unique, handcrafted layout. That sounds great, until you have 50 of them and you decide you want to change the font size of all your subheadings. Good luck. You’re now on a manual tour of every single page, clicking through blocks, hoping you don’t miss one. It’s a regression. A betrayal of the CMS ethos.
The Mercenaries: Page Builders and My Long Dance with Divi
Long before Gutenberg was a twinkle in Matt Mullenweg’s eye, third-party page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder, and my long-term companion, Divi, filled the void. They offered true What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editing. Drag-and-drop columns, visual styling, instant feedback. It was intoxicating.
I landed on Divi years ago, primarily because I secured a lifetime, unlimited-site licence back when they were practically giving them away. It was a pragmatic business decision. And for a long time, it was the best tool for the job. It allowed me to build complex, visually rich layouts for clients without writing a single line of custom CSS. It was, and still is, incredibly powerful.
But it came at a cost. Divi, like its contemporaries, felt like a layer fighting *against* WordPress. It worked its magic with a mountain of proprietary shortcodes—ugly little tags that wrapped your content. If you ever dared to disable the Divi builder on a page, you were left with a horrifying, unreadable mess of code gibberish. You were locked in. Your content was a hostage to the builder. Furthermore, it was always in a constant, grinding war with CSS. You’d set a style, and it would be overridden by some other style from some other module, forcing you to dig into specificity wars or just slap an `!important` tag on it and pray. It felt… brittle.
A Glimpse of the Future: Divi 5 vs. Full Site Editing (FSE)
The WordPress core team saw the popularity of these builders and decided they wanted a piece of the action. That’s the real genesis of the Block Editor and its ultimate evolution: Full Site Editing (FSE). FSE is the grand vision—a WordPress where every single element of your site, from the header and footer to the 404 page, is just a collection of blocks, editable in that same (in my opinion, infuriating) interface. It’s an attempt to unify the entire site-building experience, eliminating the need for separate theme files or page builders.
This is the existential threat that builders like Divi now face. Their response is fascinating. The upcoming Divi 5 is a complete, ground-up rewrite. They’re ditching the legacy shortcode system and rebuilding the entire architecture on a modern flexbox layout engine. This is huge. It promises better performance, cleaner code, and an end to many of those infuriating CSS battles. It’s also being built for deeper compatibility with the Block Editor, acknowledging that it can’t just ignore WordPress’s new direction.
But here’s the critical distinction: Divi 5 is not *adopting* FSE. It’s responding to it. It’s keeping its own visual builder, its own workflow, its own ecosystem. It’s a strategic decision to modernise and improve interoperability while providing continuity for its massive user base. It’s a bet that its user experience is still superior to the native WordPress offering. This makes it a modern, powerful tool, but one that still asks you to choose a side, creating a partial lock-in that you need to be aware of.
The Synthesis: Divi's Secret Weapon and My Perfect Workflow
So, after all this, where have I landed? In a place that might surprise you. I use Divi. But not in the way you might think.
Divi has a killer feature, a piece of understated genius that solves this entire philosophical conflict for me: the Theme Builder. And, crucially, it includes a simple toggle switch in its settings: “Enable Classic Editor”. No plugin required.
This combination is my holy grail. It’s the best of all worlds.
Here’s the workflow: I use the Divi Theme Builder to do what themes are supposed to do. I build the header, the footer, the blog post template, the archive page layouts. I can use all of Divi’s powerful modules—its grids, its sliders, its forms—to create dynamic, data-driven templates. I can pull in the post title, the featured image, the author bio, and arrange them with pixel-perfect, drag-and-drop control. This is the stuff that, a decade ago, would have required a skilled PHP developer hours of custom coding. Now, I can do it in an afternoon.
Then, once that beautiful, intelligent container is built, I flip the switch. I turn the Classic Editor back on.
And when it’s time to write a new blog post? I’m not greeted by a confusing mess of blocks or a heavy, slow-loading visual builder. I get a clean, white screen. A blinking cursor. The beautiful, simple, honest Classic Editor. I can focus entirely on the content—the words, the images, the message. I write. I hit publish. And Divi’s Theme Builder template takes my pure, unadulterated content and pours it perfectly into the stunning layout I designed.
The separation is restored. Content and presentation are once again distinct. It’s a perfect synthesis of power and simplicity. I have developer-level control over my site’s structure and a writer-centric tool for my content creation. You can even, if you’re feeling particularly adventurous, build a page with the Divi builder and have it display inside a Theme Builder template—a layout within a layout. It’s turtles all the way down.
So, Where Should a New User Start?
If you’re new to WordPress, this landscape is a minefield. The common advice is to just learn the default Block Editor. I disagree. I think that’s a path to frustration and poorly structured sites.
My advice is to be deliberate. Understand the principle of separating content from design. If your needs are simple—a blog, a basic brochure site—a well-coded classic theme and the Classic Editor (via the official plugin) is a fantastic, stable, and future-proof way to start. You’ll learn the fundamentals properly.
But if you know you need more design control, if you want to build something visually unique without hiring a developer, then I wholeheartedly recommend the hybrid approach. Invest in a premium tool like Divi. Learn its Theme Builder inside and out. Use it to craft your site’s shell. Then, turn on the Classic Editor for your day-to-day posts and pages. You’ll get the creative power you crave without sacrificing the sanity and structural integrity that a proper CMS provides. It’s the professional’s workflow, and it’s the most powerful, flexible, and, dare I say, enjoyable way to use WordPress today.
