In the Engage Web office, I have gained a reputation for being a little obsessed with a relatively new kid on the block in the world of WordPress. It’s about time I tell the rest of you about it!
If you’ve had a go at building websites with WordPress and don’t fancy writing your own code, you’ve probably come across an array of page builders. WP Bakery, Elementor & Beaver Builder (to name just a few) are widely used by makers of websites across the world. As a Technical Team Leader at Engage Web, I spent a significant chunk of my time wearing my web developer hat (not an actual hat, but maybe I should buy one). I’ve had the chance to try many of those page builders over the years. One word I will use to describe them though – awful. If you are about to start your WordPress journey in 2025 or at least still figuring out which path to take, let me help you save time in researching this confusing world of plugins. Our chosen software for building websites is LiveCanvas. You may not have heard of it but in my opinion, it is the most powerful, efficient, and future-ready page builder available for WordPress right now.
LiveCanvas isn’t brand new. It’s actually been around for a few years. In 2025 though, it’s finally come into its own as a top-tier option for professionals and beginners alike who want clean code, fast websites, and full design control. It’s built around Bootstrap. Yes, I am getting a bit technical here but if you’re interested, look it up. Bootstrap is the world’s most popular front-end framework (think of it as a ‘shell’ / time-saving tool that gives you the bare-bones of a website with all features to make it look good and function well in one package. Bootstrap was originally developed by Twitter to use in-house, but they realised it was useful for everyone. LiveCanvas is a what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor for Bootstrap code, used by developers globally to build responsive (works on all devices) websites.
If you’re feeling a bit nerdy and fancy having a go at writing your own HTML code, this is a big advantage of my chosen page editor. On one hand, it gives you visual control via pointing and clicking with a mouse. However, sometimes as a developer, I just want to edit clean and efficient, bog-standard Bootstrap HTML code. I can’t do that with Elementor. I can’t do it with WP Bakery. One click in the page editor and that is possible, with a live preview within LiveCanvas. It means I can write code until the cows come home and see the results of my work in the preview window instantly.
Looking at a few of the alternatives, WP Bakery is still widely used. It’s infamous among developers for generating bloated, slow-loading pages filled with cryptic shortcodes. That’s our experience with it anyway, every time we take on a website that was built with it. We have found that WP Bakery websites often become harder to manage over time, especially if the builder is ever removed or breaks after an update. Licencing is sometimes an issue too because certain themes you can buy in places like Theme Forrest come with it, but the included licence is only valid for a year. After that, you end up with a website that has an out-of-date page builder plugin. This is not good for functionality or security.
Elementor is another hugely popular option. It offers slick visual editing and has a gentle learning curve. We have used it in the past and it worked well. There are ways to make the code that Elementor produces less bloated, but it lacks the direct access to code that we like so much in LiveCanvas. If you don’t know what you are doing with it, Elementor can add a significant performance overhead, particularly if you’re building a large site. If you care about page speed scores (and you should in 2025, with Google’s Core Web Vitals now fully entrenched as ranking factors), your site needs to be loading fast.
Don’t be put off by LiveCanvas having the ability to write raw code. Out of the box, you can build feature-rich, modern and clean web pages in a few minutes using the library of pre-built sections, blocks and, if you’re feeling really lazy, entire page layouts! Yes, we go a bit further than using those included bits as we want all the websites we create to look bespoke and unique to the business they are representing. If you’re just starting out, though, and want an easy life, the option is there to use those built in features.
Why did I decide to write about LiveCanvas now? Well, over the past year, there’s been a noticeable shift toward lean, fast WordPress builds, to stay ahead of Google’s ever-evolving algorithm. Nobody knows exactly what Google are looking for on a daily basis, but we can tell you now – page speed matters. LiveCanvas has evolved a lot during 2024 and 2025 in particular – adding ways to bring news articles into a page for instance via a few clicks.
At Engage Web, we only made the decision to use LiveCanvas on web builds a few years ago, but the results have been fantastic. Sites are loading faster, clients love the bespoke designs we are creating live, and we as developers are thrilled to be working with semantic, maintainable code again (nerd alert).
You can see more about LiveCanvas on their website, and if you are interested in having a vibrant, responsive website of your own, give our team a shout.
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