Divi 5 Review: Now with 50% less rage-quitting

We have a chat with Justin, our Lead Web and UI Designer, who shares his first impressions of the strengths and 'could-do-better’s of Divi 5 compared to Divi 4 and its competitors. 

Could you start by telling us a little about your experience with WordPress, Divi and page builders in general?

Well, I have around 20 years’ experience of using WordPress, and probably 10 years of using Divi. We’ve also used Elementor (page builder) in collaboration with our press partners, Allegory.

I think Divi was chosen originally because it was single price with lifetime access, and it seemed easier. Experience of it was very limiting in areas, but it's come a long way since I first started using it.
 

What kinds of projects have you used it for?

We used it recently to build the Evolve Pilates Studio website. Over the years, it’s the platform we’ve tended to use for the smaller business website builds. 

But it is possible to build big sites with it. The Paynetics website was built using it for example, and I’m pretty sure the Ergo website used it at one point too.

Now that Divi 5 is out, what are your first impressions compared to earlier versions?

It’s a lot faster! Which was the main selling point of Divi 5, because Divi 4 was horrible at times. It didn't run particularly well on lower powered servers.

My general impressions are that the UI has followed other builders now, rather than being separate, which is not a bad thing because it makes it more intuitive and familiar for users of other page builders. You know, like if you compare Elementor and Divi 5, other than stuff being on different sites, they're still similar. So, moving from one to the other is not as difficult.

Right. So, there's more similarities across the platforms?

Yeah, and it even follows the logic of some of the animation platforms like Rive and stuff like that as well. So, it's simplified for everyday use in that you don't have to spend ages moving your mouse around and then finding that you're in the wrong f****** place. Sorry, I swore!

But generally, even front end, it's faster and back end, it’s considerably faster so, you know, it's turned out quite well.

In your opinion, what are Divi 5’s biggest strengths?

I would have said its simplicity, and I would have said Divi 4 was definitely aimed at your small business that wants to manage their own site. However, some of the releases that they’re putting into Divi 5, for instance flexbox, is making it better but more difficult to use - because you have to know flexbox to be able to understand what you're doing.

What's flexbox?

Normally websites are very linear horizontally. So for example if you've got 18 cards on a page, previously you would have to tell the card to be 33%, 40%, or 25% wide depending on the device it was being viewed on.

Whereas with flexbox, you tell the outer container what to do, and then it tells the inner bits what to do.

Does it offer any new design or development flexibility that stands out to you?

It's got an attribute section. If you notice on the Ergo website, the headers shrink smoothly rather than reducing down in almost like chunks once a device reaches a certain size. That's clamp. So, you tell it, big size, small size, and then it decides where it is in between those sizes compared to screen size. In Divi 5, I can set attributes up for that. I can also set attributes up for colour. I can set attributes up for text then use them throughout the whole site.

So if I've done my job right, and a client says to us 'oh, we've changed our blue to a green now’, for instance, and I can go in and change the attribute and that it will change the whole site to green. You could do it before with global colours, but they were a bit s***.

Whereas this is in one place now and you can see all of your attributes together. And say I want a bigger font for example, I can go and change my clamp calculation and it will change the whole site that uses that particular clamp setting. That is a very strong point for it.

Are there any other strong points?

Yeah, there's one. I haven't really used any of the new stuff because I think that they're still releasing it and it's difficult to keep up with it. But I was having a mess around with a new thing they’ve got to go with the loop builder, which is a carousel or slider that you can use as a loop builder. They've never had that before. So you can build your own blog carousel section, projects carousel, slide-y stuff like that with the loop builder.

It was a little temperamental, but I think because it was new, it was just getting your brain around it. That stands out, but as for the rest of it, I don't think I've seen anything new other than flex, which makes things a lot easier to do actually.

How do you feel about the user experience for non-developers who want to build their own sites?

Splitting it into developers and non-developers, from a developer’s perspective, you've got so much more to hand that you can use, that it will make life easier. You can just think about layouts in Divi 5 rather than having to write code to achieve it.

But from a non-developer perspective, if they start messing about with design stuff, I can see a lot of people coming back to us after we’ve built it and saying I've broken this, how do I put it back?

From an editing content perspective, that's also a 50/50. So generally, customers don't want to build their own sections, they just want to go in and change content. Using Divi 4, when you clicked edit, it opened a window and it would feel like you had a bigger area for editing. Whereas now, on the right-hand side you've got a tiny little edit box.

So if a customer wanted to paste content in it makes it difficult to sanitise the content, because they will often send it without the right headers, or the formatting will be wrong. The old WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) was easier to use, and even though they've put the same WYSIWYG in the side panel, because it’s smaller, it makes it a bit more difficult to use.
 

How intuitive is the drag-and-drop experience, especially for complex layouts?

So the drag and drop experience itself is good. You click the plus button to add whatever modules you want, where you want them. Is it intuitive? At times, no. The old one was better. There's a few foibles, let's say.

If you've put a small element in, you can't get back to the edit button - it's hidden. It has very small tabs, so if the element itself is small, the tabs you need like edit, delete, duplicate then sit underneath one of the other tabs. It has these colour-coded tabs from outside to in, and they'll sit under a row tab. And you then have to put it into wireframe mode to be able to find it. And it's a faff. That's one of its massive failings at the moment. It's only on small elements, but it’s still inconvenient.

What limitations have you noticed so far in Divi 5?

Currently background YouTube videos don't work. I think it's when you try and put a background in a section - if the background video is from YouTube it will not work. But that’s a YouTube limitation and not a Divi 5 issue. For Evolve it was really annoying because I wanted to build a custom header but couldn't get their video in the background. So I was stuck then with using the header module where the video would work. But again, if you’re working with YouTube videos there’s no way around that unless YouTube changes how you can use their videos.

Because this is Alpha, you expect some bugs and stuff, but I can't think of anything else. It has some weird little niggly things. Like the alignment of social icons. The social icons would never centre up, they were just like 'nah, I’m sticking to the left’. Just little things like that.

Are there any situations where you’d advise against using Divi 5?

If it's a small website you’re building, building it in Divi 5 is fine and you can get around some of its issues. And due to it being a small website, customers wouldn't be updating it as much, so they wouldn't come across some of the bugs, let's say.

I wouldn't use it for a big website until it's in full release. Using the Agritech Centre website we built as a comparison, the way that you can build loops in Elementor is bloody brilliant. 

What is a loop?

So a loop is like, you know when you get all your blog cards on a page? You can build a loop to output blog cards, but you can also design the card in Elementor, as long as you have the theme builder, so you've never been limited to just a blog module. With Divi 4 you were stuck with the blog card consisting of header, featured image, description, whether you had a 'read more’ button, and the order that it said it was in.

Whereas Elementor has had the loop builder for a long time, so I can literally go in and design my card, and drag a header and tell it that it's the header, featured image, etc. You know, if I wanted to put anything custom in there, I can just build these cards the way I want to. So Divi 5 has adopted that. But again, it's in early release, so it's a little bit buggy, because they've only just released it. But things like that make management of a bigger site much easier.

How does it compare to competitors you’ve used (eg. Elementor) in terms of scalability?

I feel that Divi 5 is catching up with Elementor to be usable as an agency tool rather than a single user tool. Things like the loop builder is worth its weight in gold to be fair. So, scalability is getting there.

I think they won't have just looked at Elementor, let's say, and copied them. They would have asked, 'What are the best bits?’ And then, 'what can we add for Divi 5 to make it even better?’ And I don't think many of those things are out yet. I think they're still working on the core of it, but I can see a lot of potential in it.

And how does it compare in terms of maintainability?

I think that comes back to the attributes thing. It’s like everything isn’t it - if you set it up right in the first place, it will make maintaining it easier. So sometimes it's a little difficult to start off in the right place.

But again I think maintaining the site, it's two-fold, isn't it? It's one; the actual content and design and colours and stuff like that, and two; the actual core of the site. But that goes with maintaining it from a WordPress perspective, not a Divi perspective.

How does Divi 5 handle responsiveness and mobile optimisation compared to Divi 4?

Divi 4 had three set breakpoints, which were desktop, tablet and mobile. I've not messed about with it too much at this stage, but Divi 5 has got 7 breakpoints as standard, so now it's got phone wide, desktop wide, tablet wide then widescreen and ultra-wide.

You also can add new breakpoints or change the existing ones now, whereas before they were static, so you had to do a lot coding to overwrite it. Now you can just change the break point and it will follow where it breaks, for example where it goes down from three columns to one column. I think it handles it well.

Wrapped up with that is the editing in mobile and tablet. That is not as intuitive currently, but it is a damn sight better. I can see a lot of people potentially getting tripped up by how to do it, because you have a little drop down at the top, which is quite difficult to see, and you might not realise it's there.

On Divi 4, on every element you had an option to change the styling in responsive mode, so like colour, border, border radius, background colour, basically any style option - there was a lot - you had to click a button for each one of the options to change that specific one to allow breakpoint editing. On Divi 5, you now click one button and every style option is instantly editable for that particular breakpoint (mobile or tablet, the standard is desktop).
 

Have you run into any compatibility issues with themes, plugins, or custom code?

Yes. A lot of the plugins that I would have used that are specific to Divi no longer work with it because they need a rewrite. Basically the way Divi 5 works compared to 4 is very, very different, so it's not like just outputting code onto the page. The structure of the way that they output the code is very different, so it's broken all the plugins. There is a compatibility mode, but I've not managed to get any of the paid-for plugins working yet.

Where do you see Divi heading in the next couple of years?

They've definitely invested a lot of time and effort into Divi 5. So their future is, I would have thought, to be the go-to builder - but that would mean releasing more standard modules so that there would be less reliance on the user having to go off and find third party vendors creating plug-ins that add the functionality they need.

What advice would you give to someone considering using Divi 5 for their website project?

With Evolve, we gave Sian the option of having Divi 5 and I currently would still recommend clients go for Divi 5 over Divi 4 - even though 4 is tried-and-tested and 5 is still a bit temperamental - purely because when you reach the crossover point from Divi 4 into 5, there’s a good chance something will break.

I know they'll try their hardest to make it so nothing breaks, but it probably will - and it'll make our life a bit easier if we don't have a broken site on our hands or our clients don’t have a broken site. So I would suggest using Divi 5, but only on small sites at the moment. It's not a large site builder currently.

In one sentence, how would you summarise Divi 5 to someone deciding whether to use it?

My advice would be, bear in mind it’s in Alpha. You can’t moan about it while it’s still in development! You will come across issues.

I've got three perspectives in my head at the moment. One of them's the developer, one of them's the client, and one of them is someone using it to build their own personal website like they would in Wix or something like that. 

I think that from a developer’s perspective, it would work because they would get around the foibles. From the client’s perspective, it's fine because they're only doing text and easy edits like that. For someone that's new to it and building their own website, it's intuitive, it works, but you'll need to put a lot of time into learning it. Don't expect it to make a 'world out of the box’ like Wix would.

Finally, if you had to give Divi 5 a rating out of 10 for professional web development use, what would it be and why?

This number's going to go up, because currently I would give it a 7, but I think it’s heading toward a 9.

There you have it!

Get in touch if you’d like J to be the one swearing at the screen for you instead! (He loves it really).