Hello guys,
If you want to get the most out of your WordPress theme, you have to make sure you understand the differences between themes and page builders more importantly, how they work together. In this post, I’m going to go over the three major ways in which themes are incredibly important still, why I think you should use one.
I want to get started by explaining some of the core functions of a theme. These are (one template, many pages), automatic interlinking, and dynamic content.
Let’s talk about (one template, many pages) and I want to fully break that down. This is a really important thing to understand because when you’re building your website and understanding what a theme does at its core is, it allows you to make a change once and that change is applied everywhere instantly. So one easy example is, if you wanted to make a change to the header, you don’t have to go into a hundred instances on your site and change the header. You just do it one time and that change is applied everywhere. To give you a few more examples of the (one template, many pages) concept, just think about the rest of your blog archive pages or your blog post templates, it could even be the sidebars you use on different categories and even the category pages themselves. You’re not going to uniquely design every single one of these pages every time, you’re going to design it once and that change is going to be applied to every single instance.
This brings us nicely to our second point and that is Automatic interlinking. So, let’s think about it when you publish a blog post and you hit publish in the backend of your WordPress site, all kinds of stuff magically happens. It appears on the proper category page, the blog role page, and it goes up to the top of the archive. This all happens without you doing anything.
Now, let’s flip the table on this. If you were doing this individually using a page builder and building one-off instances of your page, you would have to manually link everything together. That’s quite a tedious process and is not the best way to do it.
The third core function of a theme would be Dynamic content. Let me explain the dynamic content in the simplest way that I can. When you have a blog post title, it’s going to have the same look, the same font size, color, hover actions, or anything like that. But, for every single blog post, it is a different word, the words always change, they are dynamically populated. So your blog post titles would be the best example of dynamic content. Another example would be the featured image of all of your blog posts. The image is going to always look the same, may have a border core, round or square image but the image is gonna change dynamically depending on the post. Another example I want to give is the author box. It’s always going to look and be designed exactly the same but the image, the author name, and the author’s bio are always going to be dynamically populated depending on who wrote the post.
Page builders on the other hand allow you to create your own custom theme instead of using redetermined layouts from a theme. You have full control over your design, you can customize every page of your website. Your header, your footer, your blog layouts, even e-commerce pages.
Another reason we decided to use page builders to build our websites is, WordPress is really changing over the years they’ve made so many
different changes to the platform including the Gutenberg editor and the
block editor system.
So, I hope this post cleared up any confusion, now you might have some idea about the difference between WordPress themes versus page builders. If you need any more information about WordPress themes or page builders, just fill-up the form below and feel free to message.
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