Best Page Builders for Real Estate IDX Websites Compared
Picking the right page builder for your real estate IDX website is important because it can speed up the time you spend designing your website and it also can impact your website’s speed overall.
Some drag & drop page builders are heavy and slow down your website.
A slower website can cost you business as visitors don’t want to wait around for pages to load slowly.
So when you first start designing a new real estate website, consider page load speed as a factor when choosing the drag & drop editor for your WordPress IDX website.
But also just as important is the ease of use! You want the page builder to be user friendly and easy to navigate or else website design will turn into a stressful headache.
Below, we highlight 3 of the best drag & drop page builder WordPress plugins that you can install for free.
This will make building your real estate IDX website easy as all you do is drag and drop different text boxes, images, etc. into the page or choose from pre-built templates!
Feel free to skip to one or the other:
- Elementor
- Beaver Builder
- Divi
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Top 3 WordPress Page Builders for Real Estate
Elementor
Elementor is a very powerful and fast, drag and drop WordPress page builder. It’s also a FREE plugin, and works well with many different WordPress themes, giving you options to choose from.
Speaking of options, Elementor comes with many pre-built page layout templates so you can quickly import a contact us page layout or an about page layout.
If you need to customize your own page, this page builder makes it simple to do so.
Elementor’s page builder is a “front-end” builder, which simply means you get to see the changes to your page live as you are building them out.
This saves time from having to hit “save” and refresh a separate page to see what the changes look like. This is typical with backend editors, but with Elementor you won’t have to worry about slowing down since it’s a live editor.
Elementor is a beginner friendly page builder and the easiest way to describe how it works is that it has content sections, with columns and elements inside each content section.
For example, the top of your page content section might be a slideshow. Then as someone scrolls down, you could have the next content section split into two columns, with a text box in one column and a photo in the other column.
Elementor offers many different “elements” to choose from such as text boxes, images, videos, quotes, bullet lists, social media, tabs, testimonials, slide shows, etc.
You can also add widget elements created from other WordPress plugins.
As a real estate website you’ll enjoy the code snippet widget which let’s you paste in your IDX code snippet to add a property search bar or property listing feeds to your page.
You can also easily embed videos thanks to the video widget if you want to share your latest property tour video of a new listing you have.
Lastly, Elementor has a pro version which starts at $49 for a single website license. This unlocks even more widgets, templates, and features if you find yourself really enjoying the free version!
Themes that Work Well with Elementor
- Ocean WP
- Astra
- Kava
- Potenza
Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder is another very powerful and fast, drag & drop page builder for WordPress websites.
It’s also free and comes with a built in onboarding tour to help you quickly learn the interface and how to navigate the different page builder settings.
Beaver Builder is also a “front-end” builder plugin that offers a live view of changes you are making to your page as you build it.
As a drag & drop builder, you simply click on an element, like a text box, and drag it onto the page where you want it.
Then click the edit symbol to open up the settings for that element, for example, font style, color, and size if you chose a text box element.
One of my favorite features of Beaver Builder is the large library of templates and pre-built pages you can choose from.
This saves you time and allows you to make tweaks and edits to existing layouts until you have created the perfect page for your real estate website.
Overall, Beaver Builder is very beginner friendly and after playing with it for 30 minutes you should have a good idea of how it works and how to build your own custom pages!
Themes that Work Well with Beaver Builder
- Astra
- Ocean WP
- GeneratePress
Divi Page Builder by Divi Themes
Divi is our third best recommended drag and drop page builder. It that can be installed with the Divi WordPress Theme or as just the WordPress page builder plugin if you want to use your own WordPress theme.
The drag & drop page builder offers 25+ layouts and templates to start with or gives you the freedom to custom build your own pages.
It has over 40+ modules to choose from so you can add lots of design features and elements to your pages. This includes the standard modules you’d find like text boxes, video, image, slideshows, background customization, etc.
The editor is also pretty fast so clicking around, in and out of the different module elements, won’t encounter much lag and slow you down.
We will talk more below about some page builders that operate very slowly and should be avoided!
Divi is a real-time page editor so you can see changes live, which saves time as well. You won’t have to worry about clicking save after every change and then clicking preview, opening up an external tab in your web browser.
Like the other two page builders above, Divi let’s you save your page layouts as your own personal template so you can re-use a custom made template in the future as well.
There are lots of settings you can customize for different module elements giving you endless possibilities and allowing you to be creative with your real estate website design.
Themes that Work Well with Divi
- Divi Theme
- Astra
- The Farm
- Adventure
- Ocean WP
Page Builders to Avoid on Your Real Estate Website
If you’re going to build your real estate website using a drag & drop WordPress page builder, start with the 3 recommended plugins above that are free and easy to install.
The following page builders below are editors we DO NOT recommend using to build your real estate website.
The main reasons these page builders made the No No list are one of or many of the following:
- The editor is HARD to navigate
- The editor is SLOW
- Lack of features / elements
- Backend editor (No live view)
- Costs money or very limited free version
- Content gets locked in
Speed and ease of navigation are two important features to consider when picking out a page builder plugin for your website. You also want it to be compatible with your WordPress theme.
We also want to point out the Content Lock In aspect of these page builders.
Your content gets “locked in” when using certain page builders because these page builders have their own coding that gets inserted into the pages to create the different content sections, columns, and elements.
In other words, the text on your page gets mixed in with all this other code as opposed to remaining separate. Here’s an example from the Fusion Builder plugin.
In the example image above, I clicked on “Default WordPress Editor” to get out of the Fusion editor and instead of converting my text back to normal WordPress editor text, it mixed it in with all this ugly code.
Choosing a page builder that doesn’t lock your content in matters because if you ever change themes or change page builder plugins, you could lose all of your website page’s content and have to restart.
Poorly Designed WordPress Page Builders
- OptimizePress
- Fusion Builder
- Visual Composer
- Themeify
- PageBuilder by SiteOrigin
As a disclaimer, these theme builders are bound to change with time. They may revise the plugin and add better features to the drag & drop builder tool. This could change the overall functionality and compatibility it has with WordPress to make them more user friendly.
Overall, do some self-research into each of the drag & drop page builders discussed to determine which one you feel most comfortable using to build your real estate WordPress website.
As a real estate website, you’ll want to explore key features these page builders need to offer like the ability to:
- Add IDX Integration (MLS)
- Add social media
- Add videos & images
- Add testimonials/reviews
- Add property management portal
- Add credit card fields for eCommerce
Most of these can be done with a code widget and you’ll paste in your own source code from external websites like embedding a YouTube video with the embed code.
You can also install different WordPress plugins that can add these features to your real estate website. We wrote an entire article on the Top 5 IDX WordPress Plugins you can check out.
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