The WordPress world has changed dramatically over the last decade. Ten years ago, the ecosystem relied almost solely upon heavy, custom themes, each built with a different set of configurations and settings. Certain businesses like Woo Themes or Elegant produced consistent theme foundations with different styles and features based on the theme you were buying. 

Then along came the page builder, which was ushered into mass popularity by Visual Composer. Other competitors came and went, but none maintained such a substantial market share 6-7 years ago as Visual Composer. Then Elementor came out and quickly started capturing market share. With more competition came more features, upgrades, and improvements across the page builder spectrum. 

Themes like Divi and Avada came with proprietary page builders as well. If you use one of these, the theme and page builder is all-in-one. 

Opinions and preferences abound about page builders, which will cover our choice in coming blog posts. But what if you want to use Visual Composer, Beaver Builder, or Elementor – do you still need a theme?

Yes, You Still Need a Theme

WordPress doesn’t function without a theme in place. So even if your entire website will run off of a page builder, it will need a theme to start up and function. 

The question becomes which theme to choose. You can use the standard WordPress theme that comes with the package, but it lacks serious options for customization on the base level and brings several styles you are going to fight with. 

Themes also come in handy when you are setting up eCommerce with Woocommerce. Some nice upgrades from default styles in Woocommerce come with your theme choice, even if you can customize the layout with the page builder. 

So which themes should you turn to when you are using a standalone page builder?

The Best Theme for a Page Builder

In our next post we will dive into our choices for the best themes to pair with your new page builder-based WordPress website.