You’ve found the perfect site if you’ve been searching the internet high and low for a trustworthy Divi theme review written by someone who has considerable first-hand experience using the theme in real-world settings.
Divi, a product of Elegant Themes, has been one of THE brands in the industry for a number of years now, establishing the benchmark for what is achievable with contemporary WordPress themes. In this review, I’ll be taking a detailed look behind the hood of one of the most popular premium themes, showing you what it’s capable of doing and the compromises you’ll have to make in order to use it. I’ll also discuss the benefits that come along with it.
Divi Review -- Overview
Divi is Elegant Themes‘ flagship theme and one of the most popular independent WordPress theme marketplaces out there.
In the past, we referred to themes of this sort as mega themes, with the understanding that they are fundamentally quite comparable to a conventional WordPress theme… but better and bigger – a lot bigger.
The word “mega” may be applied to it primarily due to the fact that it can serve a wide variety of purposes and offers an extremely extensive menu of alternate configurations and personalization choices. In a nutshell, Divi makes the claim that it is capable of handling the job of building any kind of website (and any design, for that matter) that you wish to develop.
In addition to that, Divi was developed with the idea that it will be used by novices. To put it another way, even if this is your first time constructing a website using the do-it-yourself method, Divi guarantees that you will be able to successfully complete the task.
To summarize everything:
- Divi is a powerful WordPress theme that is ready to function right out of the box without any additional configuration.
It is not necessary for you to have any specific coding abilities or previous expertise in the construction of websites.
- You are able to make whatever adjustment you want using an intuitive user interface, and the entire process takes place on the front end of the website, so you are effectively viewing your site through the perspective of your visitors.
It enables you to construct nearly any form of design or layout possible, all while maintaining the same theme throughout the process.
As we get started on this Divi review, let’s concentrate for a moment on the final point that was mentioned. The primary advantage of utilizing these so-called mega themes is the freedom it provides to construct any kind of design. To put it another way, Divi does not come pre-packaged with a single pre-defined design; rather, it gives you access to a wide variety of “starter designs,” which we will discuss in more detail in just a moment, and enables you to modify those designs to achieve the exact appearance that you desire for your finished website.
It is also important to discuss the place of Divi in relation to the other page builder options now available on the market, notably Elementor and Beaver Builder.
Although the individual capabilities of generating pages are comparable across all three options, the method utilized by Divi appears to be far more comprehensive than those of Elementor and Beaver Builder. This is only due to the fact that Divi encapsulates its functionality within the framework of a theme rather than a plugin that must be activated on top of the theme that you are currently utilizing. In this view, Divi is a convenient option that is more out-of-the-box, and it has the potential to be easier to understand for WordPress novices and casual users.
Divi Review -- Design & Starter Sites
More than 1,900 different types of pre-made page designs are included with the Divi theme. These operate in a manner that is equivalent to plugging and playing, and they cover the sorts of pages that the vast majority of website proprietors will wish to have:
Homepages, about pages, blog listing pages, careers/jobs pages, contact pages, landing pages, portfolios, services/product pages, and more.
You also receive more than 260 complete website design bundles in addition to the aforementioned benefits. In contrast to the more than 1,900 single-page designs, these are comprehensive website designs featuring a group of pages that all adhere to the same style. This is what sets them different from the other designs. Take, for instance, a gander at this beginner website, which is referred to as Digital Product:
You can receive a homepage, a about page, a blog listing page, a documentation page, a landing page, and a price page as part of it; the thumbnails for these pages are located up above. If you are in the business of selling digital items and are in need of a website, all you have to do is import this basic design, change the existing content with your own, add your product descriptions, and you might be through with the project in less than two hours.
You may view the whole collection of Divi’s beginning designs by going to this page. It would be an understatement to simply remark that it is stunning. In general, you may create some websites that are extremely stunning by utilizing these themes.
Divi Review -- How To Use Tutorial
There are two aspects of these Divi designs that immediately stand out as being outstanding. To begin, there are a great many of them; this point has already been explored. But second, they can be customized to an almost unimaginable degree. Because of this, you may select a layout that comes the closest to meeting your requirements without running the risk of finding out later that it cannot be completed successfully.
To personalize anything about Divi, its looks, or its features, you actually don’t need any knowledge or experience with coding at all.
In terms of design customization, the following is what you will receive:
To begin, Divi provides a genuine visual editing option. When you modify your sites in this way, you should always view them through the perspective of your visitors. This is in contrast to the traditional method of customizing WordPress sites, in which the majority of the work was performed in the dashboard of WordPress, and then the changes had to be previewed on the front end in a separate step. This method was cumbersome.
In Divi, all of the design modification is accomplished through the use of a variety of pop-out windows that appear just when you want them. The procedure is fundamentally the same for each individual section of material that appears on your sites, as follows: Simply move your cursor over an element, and when you’re ready, select a button from the available alternatives. Simply clicking on the gear icon will take you to the element’s personalization settings, as seen here:
When it comes to the degree to which you may customize the specifics of your design, one of the most striking aspects of Divi is the level of granularity to which it gives you access. And it’s not only about the website’s general layout and look/feel; it’s also about the ability to alter each page element on an individual basis.
Take, for instance, the common picture block as a point of reference. The following are the various choices for personalizing the design:
- Alignment — left, right, center, plus you can set different details for desktop, tablet and mobile views.
- Sizing — width, height, full-width forcing.
- Spacing — really detailed settings for margins and padding.
Borders — borders seem like a simple thing in principle, but it turns out you can really do a lot to customize them. Plus Divi’s UI is really intuitive to use.
Filters — give your images some of that Instagram feel by adjusting various aspects of them.
Transformations — I don’t recall seeing this feature in any other theme, or at least done this well. Basically, Divi lets you transform your images when it comes to size, position relative to other elements, rotation, skew and more. The interface makes using these features really straightforward too.
Animations — I left the best for last… animations really are Divi’s cherry on top. To say it simply, you can choose how you want your page elements to appear in view, and, as is usual at this point with Divi, the interface makes using them quite easy. The best part with these animations, of course, is you don’t need any CSS/HTML/JavaScript skills to use them.
Divi Review -- Divi vs WordPress Approach
When you first begin to work with Divi, there is one item that may not be immediately obvious to you, and I believe it is important that I discuss it here. The manner in which it provides all of those ready-made designs and the manner in which it allows you alter them is, in essence, highly proficient and user-friendly.
Nevertheless, this methodology is not totally congruent with the general course that WordPress as a platform has been traveling in recent years.
You may be familiar with a tool referred to as the block editor, and you may even be familiar with another tool referred to as complete site editing. Here’s the thing:
To make a long tale short, and without getting into the technicalities of what those things truly imply, this is WordPress’s attempt to transform your preferred content management system (CMS) into a fully featured website builder, similar to Wix or Squarespace. It is a multi-stage process with the end goal of making the native WordPress post and page editing interfaces more comparable to the experience users get from these other builders.
One of these milestones was the implementation of the block editor on the editing screens for both posts and pages. The following is how it appears when it is not changed:
This new editor is something that WordPress really wants both casual users and theme and plugin developers to take advantage of. This implies that developers should construct their works in a manner that integrates with the builder and offers the builder’s capabilities while staying within the parameters of the builder. The creation of additional blocks and the incorporation of those blocks into the main WordPress interface has been something that a lot of developers have been working on recently.
Divi has not done so.
Instead, it stubbornly adheres to the interface that it developed in-house in order to create and customize pages. Don’t get me wrong—this interface works just fine and isn’t difficult to learn, but it has the distinct impression of being a separate application that has been grafted onto WordPress rather than something that was designed to work in tandem with it in a seamless manner.
For instance, when you access the page editing screen for a page that was developed using Divi, the only thing that you will see is the following:
If there is anything on this page that you would like to modify in any way, the one and only thing you can do is click the button labeled Edit With The Divi Builder. You are basically prevented from working on your Divi page in any other way other than by using the Divi builder, since Divi disables the functionality that is built into WordPress that allows you to “switch to code editor.” Divi does this by preventing users from switching to the code editor.
Is it difficult to utilize in day-to-day life? Certainly not in every case. However, it does not follow the most current changes that have been made by WordPress itself and instead follows its own path.
Divi Review -- Divi Cloud
The most recent product to join the Elegant Themes ecosystem is called Divi Cloud.
The offering is straightforward; it functions exactly like Dropbox, except for your WordPress site that has been developed with Divi. In other words, you are able to store the designs and layouts of your pages to Divi Cloud, where they may subsequently be reapplied to websites that are entirely distinct from one another.
Someone who is using Divi to develop websites for customers and would like to speed up the process by not having to import their preferred layouts by hand each time might benefit greatly from this new feature, which seems like it could be a potentially wonderful addition.
The only drawback to using Divi Cloud is that its unlimited version is not included in the Elegant Themes subscription plan that you have. The cloud storage space available to normal users is limited to a maximum of 50 items. If you require more than that, the fee is $8 each month.
Divi Review: Features and Interfaces
As I’ve already stated, the most appealing aspect of Divi is that it provides an all-in-one solution for developing the specific website design that you want. In addition to this, it provides a wonderful collection of features to go along with this main selling point.
I have previously gone over some of these aspects, particularly when it comes to design, but I want to offer you a more full list so that you can get a better idea of just how many features Divi actually packs:
- – It enables you to design and construct your website in real time. Everything you do is being streamed live. There’s no need to go through an approximation of your website and hope the end result looks the way you want it to. Divi eliminates all of that.
- – Everything on the page can be changed.
- – Text editing is done by clicking and typing – it works exactly like an MS Word document.
- – All of the layouts are mobile-friendly.
- – You have the option of using numerous rows, columns, and content items.
- – Divi has over 1,900 pre-made layouts out of the box.
- – You may export/import your layouts to use on other sites.
- – You can save your own global components, which is useful if you have anything you want to reuse throughout the site.
- – Almost everything works by dragging and dropping.
Last but not least, the array of accessible content pieces is quite impressive:
In light of this, I feel the need to underline yet again that the Divi theme does not combine with the newly introduced block interface and page builder in WordPress. Instead, it employs its own unique interface in order to provide a content editing experience based on drag-and-drop operations.
I don’t want to pass judgment here and say that the user interface that comes with Divi is better or worse than the one that comes with WordPress. Both of these things allow you to accomplish more or less the same thing in the end, but they do it in very different ways.
Since the interface for constructing sites with Divi has been under development for a far longer period of time than the block interface for WordPress, one could argue that it is a more mature option.
In the end, Divi is more than capable of allowing you to design pretty much any kind of website, and it will come down to your own choice as to whether or not it will feel better than the native interface in WordPress.
I have discussed the fundamental capabilities and features of the Divi platform, but more sophisticated users will find that it also has a lot to offer. To begin, there is the module for doing split tests:
For example, if you are unsure about which precise block of text you should use on your homepage, you may try using both of them and analyzing the results to determine which one is more successful.
Additionally, Divi is available in 32 different languages, including both right-to-left and left-to-right writing systems.
Divi Review -- Pricing
Although Divi is a paid theme, its price structure is unique among premium themes available for WordPress. You do not pay for the theme itself; rather, you pay for access to the whole collection of themes and plugins that Elegant Themes offers.
To our relief, the cost of this doesn’t end up being that high. At the moment, there are two different types of membership available:
Not only do you receive access to Elegant Themes’s Divi for that fee, but you also get access to all of their other themes and plugins that they have created.
The primary distinction between these two price plans is that one of them requires an annual membership while the other merely requires a one-time payment.
Both of these licenses allow you to use Divi on an infinite number of websites; therefore, even if you decide to establish another site in the future, you won’t be required to pay any more fees to continue using Divi.
In terms of selecting a plan, I would begin by going with the yearly option because it is less expensive. However, if after a year or two you find that you still love using the theme, moving to the model that requires a one-time payment is going to be a better deal for you in the long run.
Divi Review -- Ease of Use
You won’t be able to locate Divi in the theme directory that is provided by WordPress.org because it is a paid premium theme. Instead, as I mentioned before, you will need to go to Elegant Themes, sign up for their membership, and download the ZIP file containing Divi on your own.
When you have the ZIP file in hand, you can upload it to WordPress by navigating to the Appearance > Themes > Add New > Upload Theme menu option within the WordPress dashboard.
After you have the theme installed and activated, you may go to Divi’s primary configuration options. It has a menu of its own in the main sidebar, where you can find a link to the configuration panel:
There is probably a good deal of tinkering that can be done at that location, but if you don’t feel like going through all of that, you don’t actually have to. Or, at the very least, making adjustments to each of these settings individually does not have to be the first thing that you do when using Divi.
Creating a new homepage for your website is the most effective approach to become familiar with Divi and its capabilities. In my review, I will focus only on that aspect of the book.
Everything operates just like one would anticipate it to. You will need to begin by generating a new page that is blank and designating that page as the front page in the Settings Reading menu option. After that, you are free to move on to editing the page.
The page builder component of Divi functions in a manner that is fairly comparable to that of other commercially available builder solutions, such as Beaver Builder (for more information on Beaver Builder, check out our review of Beaver Builder here) and Elementor.
The following is a brief summary of the page organizing system offered by Divi:
The information that makes up the content of your page is organized into sections, each of which may include one or more rows, each of which may contain one or more columns, and each of which may finally contain individual content blocks.
Once you get started with Divi, you’ll realize that despite the fact that it could sound difficult to use, it’s actually rather simple. The following is an illustration of how a page may be structured (you can see all of the necessary components, including sections, rows, and content blocks contained within columns):
This will begin the process of launching the primary graphic builder for Divi. At this early stage, there isn’t much there, but stay tuned because that’s about to change in an instant.
You may choose something from the various layouts that come with Divi, which will make getting started with Divi much simpler. You may load them by clicking on the icons that look like three dots and a plus sign at the bottom of the screen:
In the design portion of our Divi review, we discussed the fact that you have access to more than 1,900 distinct page layouts to select from when working with Divi. You may locate them by either searching for them or navigating via the categories that are located on the side of the page.
The one drawback is that you are unable to get a good idea of how a certain layout will look on your website until after you have loaded it. However, this is not a major problem because selecting a template layout is something that you will generally only do at the initial phases of working on a certain page. Because of this, you won’t risk losing any actual content if you make this decision early on in the process.
I have to say that the procedure of importing the plan functions in a really cinch-free manner. Simply select the layout you wish to use by clicking on it, and it will be imported into your project in a matter of moments.
The device preview toolbar is another another awesome feature that can be found at the bottom of the page and is waiting for you there.
You can also use the same toolbar to switch to the wireframe view if you want to. This view focuses more on the order in which the content blocks on your website are shown and the settings for those blocks than it does on the individual appearances of the content blocks themselves. When working on a larger page, this feature may come in handy.
You may freely realign the individual rows and sections by grabbing one of them and dragging it into the desired position. This applies to both the rows and the sections.
But of course, altering an existing layout and molding it to your preferences is not the only thing you can do with Divi; there is a lot more that is waiting for you.
Now that everything has been covered, the last question that remains is: How steep is Divi’s learning curve? And is it easy enough for everyone to use, even those with less experience?
To put it simply, the answer is yes.
However, beginning from scratch and working with a blank canvas might be scary when using Divi because it has such a large number of features. Because of this, it’s best to import one of the ready-made layouts and work on customizing that one before attempting anything else.
Then, if you get the feel of how things operate, you ought to be able to utilize Divi rather efficiently not too much longer after that.
Having said that, Divi is not simply “any old WordPress theme;” rather, it is an enormous software product in its own right. And because of this, there are a great many things to learn before you can confidently refer to yourself as a genuine Divi pro.
In conclusion, I would say that the learning curve is manageable if your only goal is to create a site that has a great appearance, but it becomes significantly more difficult if you want to make use of all of the potential that Divi has to offer.
#Divi Review -- Pros & Cons and Final Verdict
It’s safe to say that Divi is an outstanding piece of software that can meet the needs of both novice and experienced users. Additionally, as a result of the Divi Cloud service, it has developed into an excellent option for professionals that employ Divi to construct websites for their customers.
- The fact that Divi is extremely adaptable and may be used for any purpose that can be conceived of is one of the most significant advantages it possesses.
- Because of this, you’ll be able to continue utilizing the same theme even if you decide to shift the focus of your website at some point in the future. Because of this, purchasing Divi is a smart financial move.
- In addition, Divi makes it possible for you to construct your website on your own, from the ground up, without the need to have any prior knowledge of programming or to seek the assistance of a designer.
If I had to name some key drawbacks to Divi, I’d say the following are among them:
When it comes to constructing those great page layouts, Divi is very dependent on shortcodes. This means that you will lose them if you ever decide to switch to another theme on your website. But on the other hand, if you change your theme, it’s to be anticipated that you’ll lose your existing design, so it’s difficult to hold that against Divi.
- If you have an active membership, then and only then will you be eligible to receive updates. There are a lot of different premium themes available, and many of them come with free updates, despite the fact that the upgrades frequently include security fixes and other important components.
- If you want to take advantage of the new block content ecosystem that WordPress has to offer, then Divi is probably not the solution that you should get. It employs a builder interface that was custom-made for it and is not compatible with block-based construction.
To wrap up my evaluation, I think it’s safe to state that Divi is an excellent option for those who are building their own websites. It really is an outstanding theme that comes with a ton of features and presents them in a format that is simple to understand. The fact that Divi is so user-friendly for novices is probably its strongest selling point.
