The question comes up at the start of almost every project: assemble the site with a builder, or write a theme to the design. The answer depends not on the developer's taste but on what will happen to the site afterwards.
What a builder gives you
Elementor, WPBakery, Divi and similar tools let you assemble a page with a mouse, without code.
Strengths:
- a fast start: the first version is ready in days rather than weeks;
- the client can edit text and rearrange blocks themselves;
- cheaper to launch.
What you pay for it:
- Page weight. The builder loads its own CSS and JS on every page regardless of how much is used. On mobile it shows immediately.
- Markup made of nested containers. Where code would have one block, the builder produces six wrappers.
- Lock-in. Switching the builder off later means rebuilding every page: without it, the content is replaced by shortcodes.
- Anything outside the template quickly costs more than writing it in code would have.
What a custom theme gives you
Strengths:
- the page weighs what it should, with no foreign code;
- clean semantic markup, better for both search and accessibility;
- non-standard behaviour is built directly rather than worked around;
- plugin updates do not break the layout, because the layout does not depend on them.
What you pay for it:
- a longer start;
- higher cost at launch;
- letting the client build new pages requires designing the editable fields deliberately.
How to choose
A builder fits when you need to test an idea quickly, when the site is small and rarely changes, when the budget is tight and speed is not critical.
A custom theme fits when the site is a working tool of the business: a store, a multi-page service site, a site with search traffic. Anywhere speed turns into money and the site will live for years under constant edits.
The middle option, which is often the best one: a custom theme plus editable blocks. The developer writes a clean theme and the client assembles new pages from ready-made blocks. The speed of hand-written code with the independence of a builder.
On comparing speed
A builder does not automatically make a site slow. It adds a fixed amount of weight that can afterwards only be partly offset with settings and caching.
A custom theme does not automatically make a site fast either: heavy images and a dozen unnecessary plugins will ruin any theme. The difference is that the ceiling is higher, so with equal effort the result is better.
In short
A builder is cheaper to launch and more expensive to maintain. A custom theme is the other way round. If the site earns money and lives for years, the difference pays for itself; if it is a temporary landing page, it does not.
Discuss your project
Tell me what needs doing and I will come back with a timeline and a price.