Building a WordPress website? The WordPress community provides you with plenty of options. You can either make an easy one using WordPress themes or a custom one using website builders. A website builder is the most convenient way to make a personalised website. WordPress community provides you with a ton of free and paid builders as per your needs and levels of expertise. Once you make up your mind on what you plan to do with your website, then you can chalk-out the structure and the elements that you’re going to need for the website to function. After locking in your requirements, you can choose your website builder. We recommend using two of our recent favorites. ACF Visual Composer ACF Image Source: advancedcustomfields.com The interface of the Advanced Custom Fields is simple. It lets you create dynamic fields for individual elements of your website. Installation and activation of ACF adds Custom Fields to your WordPress dashboard. From the Custom Fields menu you can take full control of your edit screen & custom field data. The minimalistic interface of ACF can be mistaken for an under equipped website builder. You can make some of the most complex and powerful websites with ACF. The best thing about ACF’s interface is that it doesn’t try to overwhelm you. It only shows the functions that you need. ACF gives you the full control of your website right from header to footer. You can build individual elements of your website with custom fields. There are 25+ different field types to choose from, vis-a-vis. text, image, gallery and WYSIWYG editor. These fields are dynamic. You can use them to give your client an easy way to update their website according to their liking. Visual Composer Image Source: visualcomposer.io It has a clean and modern interface which allows you to make basic layouts with ease. The interface lets you work on different elements of the website, right then and there. Visual Composer has a floating window which pops up every time you’re trying to add or edit an element. The window is movable and resizable, you can place it anywhere if it’s obstructing your view. Visual Composer gives you the best of both worlds with its backend and frontend editor. While building, you can easily choose from the ready-made layouts of landing page, call to action page, feature list, description page, service list or a product page. Adding elements in the website is also easy with the element window. The drag and drop visuals come at a cost of short codes. Migrating to another website builder or uninstalling Visual Composer leaves short codes in the content, rendering it unreadable. Fixing these short codes is an another chore on its own. Which one do we prefer over another, you ask? Well it’s a tough choice but…ACF! ACF and Visual Composer are serving two different audiences. ACF is focused on developers. Visual Composer on the other hand targets the people with little to no knowledge of website development. In case of both the builders. the audiences don’t need to have an extensive coding knowledge. Visual Composer focuses on making the website building experience as easy as it can be. Visual Composer is not made for complex websites it will only provide you with enough elements to get your website up and running. Why ACF? ACF does a commendable job with its active development and incredible support. The developers are constantly working to keep the plugin current. The heavily themed interface of Visual Composer is slow. The floating window takes time to load the elements, and the builder shows glitches when you switch from frontend to backend. Visual Composer is affordable for personal license but expensive for client work. ‘Advanced Custom Fields’ is more affordable and provides value for money. Another thing that doesn’t work in Visual Composer’s favor is that the pre-sales service and overall support for Visual Composer is terrible. It comes as no surprise that ACF has 900,000+ active installations compared to Visual Composer’s 500,000+. You can save your time and money with theme-based websites but you might not get the exact thing you’re looking for. Themes are designed keeping a universal requirement in mind. Your unique requirement might not fit in those templates everytime. But, if you have unique requirements and want the best for your website, then website builder is the right bid. Making custom websites is a hectic process. We can make that process easier. Our expert development team knows website builders like the back of their hands. Hit us up here if you’re looking for WordPress development partners.