A quiet thing happened in WordPress over the past eighteen months. Block themes plus the Site Editor became good enough that a meaningful percentage of new sites we build do not need a page builder at all. Here is what changed, what that means for agency workflows, and what is still worth keeping the page builder for.
What block themes finally got right
- Reusable patterns. The pattern library replaced 70 percent of what we used Elementor templates for. Clients edit them in the same UI they edit posts.
- Global styles via
theme.json. Colours, typography, spacing, button styles. Changes feel atomic, do not require touching a builder’s settings panel. - Template parts. Header, footer, query loop, 404 — editable in the Site Editor by anyone with the right capability.
- Performance. Block-theme sites ship measurably less CSS and JS than typical page-builder sites. The default Lighthouse score is higher with no extra work.
What this means for agencies
Three shifts we have made over the past year:
- New brochure sites default to a block theme. No Elementor unless the client specifically asks. Build time is the same; maintenance burden is lower.
- Existing page-builder sites stay on the page builder. Migration cost is not worth the marginal benefit. We do not refactor working sites.
- Page-builder skills still matter, just for different sites. Stores, landing pages, anything with heavy custom layout per page — the builder still wins. The “every site needs a page builder” assumption is what changed.
Where page builders still win
- Landing pages with bespoke layout per page. The Site Editor is designed for templated content; landing pages are by definition not templated.
- WooCommerce product page customisation at the per-product level. Builders handle this well; block themes still feel awkward.
- Clients who want to drag. Some non-technical editors genuinely prefer the visual builder UX. That is a valid reason on its own.
Where neither wins and you should hand-code
Sites with a strong design system that the client will not edit. A small custom theme is faster to build, ships less code, and is easier to debug than fighting either the block editor or a page builder. This is a smaller portion of work now than it was, but it has not gone away.
The honest take
Page builders are not dying. They are becoming optional for a class of sites where they used to be the default. That is a real shift, and the agencies that adapted their tooling around it are shipping faster sites with less code. The agencies that did not are paying license fees for builders they no longer needed.
Audit your default build stack at the start of every year. If it has not changed in three years, the ecosystem changed and you missed it.