WordPress page builders (Elementor, Divi, Bricks)

Overview

WordPress page builders are visual drag-and-drop editors that sit on top of (or in place of) WordPress's native block editor (Gutenberg). The dominant commercial builders in 2026 are Elementor, Divi (Elegant Themes), WPBakery, Beaver Builder, and Bricks. As of 2025-2026 they collectively render the majority of all small-business WordPress sites, but every published metric — market share, page weight, security, lock-in, and pricing — has moved against them since 2023.

This page consolidates the Candid Creative knowledge base's atomic entries on page builders into a single reference. It documents:

• Market share figures (2025 Web Almanac; W3Techs April 2026; WordPress.org install counts).
• Performance cost (Anubiz's 500KB / 2,000-DOM-element measurement; corewebvitals.io's 3.8–5.2s pre-optimization LCP; WPPoland's 40% speed gain on Elementor → Gutenberg migrations; Elementor's own 40%-less-HTML admission for Flexbox Containers).
• Breakage history (Elementor 3.24.1 August 2024; Elementor 3.26 Schemes API removal; FAQ JSON-LD caching bug; open accessibility issue #11779; deactivate-with-content feature request #5667 open since 2018; absence of default schema markup).
• Pricing-power asymmetry (Elementor Pro's November 2023 Essential-tier strip; Bricks's January 2024 retirement of its $199 lifetime deal; Divi 5's February 26, 2026 one-way migration).
• Bricks Builder's strengths (cleanest output among visual builders in 2026) and its February 2024 CVE-2024-25600 unauthenticated RCE (CVSS 10.0), exploited in the wild within ~24 hours of patch.
• Migration economics ($1,500–$8,000+ to rebuild a typical Elementor site in Gutenberg; GeneratePress's official position that Elementor code cannot be converted to block-editor code).
• Candid Creative's internal rule and four-stage transition roadmap for moving the agency's default new-build stack off page builders and onto Gutenberg + a block theme.

The voice is encyclopedic and neutral. Confidence labels from the underlying entries are preserved verbatim. Wikilinks are used for related KB entries.

Related research briefs: Research brief: The Case Against Page Builders (piece 10 of 15) and Research brief: WordPress + Page Builders vs Modern Custom Stacks — sourced performance comparison (piece 18) contain the longer argumentative form; this page is the reference layer.

Market share (2025–2026)

2025 Web Almanac, CMS chapter, Fig. 12.6

The 2025 Web Almanac (CMS chapter, Figure 12.6) gives the following 2025 share of WordPress sites on mobile, with 2024 comparison:

Builder	2025 share of WP sites (mobile)	2024 share	Direction
Elementor	43%	56%	losing share fast
WordPress Block Editor (Gutenberg)	18%	~12%	growing fast
WPBakery	13%	21%	declining
Divi	10%	14%	declining
Beaver Builder	~2%	~2%	flat
Bricks	<2% (not in top 5)	–	growing, no public number

Approximately 60% of WordPress sites use some form of page builder according to the 2025 Almanac. Headline movement 2024 → 2025: Elementor share fell from 56% to 43% (a 13-percentage-point drop), while Gutenberg grew from roughly 12% to 18%. WPBakery and Divi both declined.

Live-site counts:

• Elementor: 10+ million active installs (wordpress.org/plugins/elementor/).
• Divi: ~2.16 M live sites (BuiltWith via Colorlib).
• WPBakery: ~2.32 M live sites (WebTechSurvey).
• Bricks: not publicly disclosed (commercial-only, no .org listing). Pricing: $99/site or $249 lifetime historically; see Bricks pricing section below.

Confidence: Verified for the Almanac shares and Elementor official install count; high-confidence for Divi/WPBakery via BuiltWith/WebTechSurvey.

W3Techs (April 2026)

W3Techs's Elementor detail page, fetched April 19, 2026, reports:

"Elementor is used by 18.6% of all the websites whose content management system we know. This is 13.2% of all websites."

Source: https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-elementor. Confidence: Verified.

The 18.6%-of-known-CMS figure refines an earlier W3Techs snapshot of 13.1% recorded in the original [[elementor-share-2026]] brief. The newer number reflects continued growth in Elementor's absolute footprint even as Elementor's share of the page-builder market declines (Colorlib reports Elementor at 40-50% of page-builder market, down from 56% peak in the 2024 Almanac). The two trends are compatible: total WordPress installs continue to grow; Elementor's slice within WordPress is shrinking; its absolute install count is still rising. Elementor remains the de-facto default for small-business WordPress in 2026.

Comparison datum: Beaver Builder Lite shows 100,000+ active installations on WordPress.org — roughly two orders of magnitude smaller than Elementor.

Performance cost

Pre-optimization median mobile LCP: 3.8–5.2 seconds

corewebvitals.io's 2026 WordPress guide reports that Elementor sites typically show a median mobile LCP of 3.8–5.2 seconds before optimization — well above Google's 2.5-second "good" threshold. Post-optimization typically lands at 2.0–2.8 seconds, but the same source notes that this requires "ongoing maintenance as plugin and builder updates frequently reintroduce bloat."

Source: https://www.corewebvitals.io/core-web-vitals/wordpress-guide (2026). Confidence: Industry-consensus.

The implication is architectural rather than tactical. The Elementor performance penalty is not a one-time fix; it is a maintenance posture. Every plugin update, every theme update, and every new widget can regress LCP back over the 2.5s threshold. For sites that require stable Core Web Vitals — typically those competing on transactional intent in markets where SERP performance still matters — the recurring optimization spend is structurally embedded in the architecture choice.

Anubiz Host: 500KB+ CSS/JS per page, 2,000+ DOM elements

Anubiz Host's Elementor → Gutenberg migration analysis documents two specific measurements:

• "Elementor adds 500KB+ of CSS/JS to every page"
• "A simple page can have 2,000+ DOM elements"

A companion finding from Seismic Pixels notes that page builders nest "five, six, or seven layers deep" of <div> tags around a single paragraph.

Sources: https://anubizhost.com/seo/migrate-elementor-to-gutenberg ; https://seismicpixels.com/gutenberg-blocks-vs-page-builders-seo/ . Confidence: Single-source (vendor blog) for the specific numbers; industry-consensus for the pattern.

These numbers translate directly to failing the Reference: 2026 performance budget — SMB marketing site (Candid default targets) CSS budget (≤50 KB) and JS initial bundle budget (≤150 KB) before the site loads its own content. Per-page weight is regularly 2× what a disciplined performance budget targets. The Anubiz number compounds with [[gtm-18-tags-20x-tbt-chrome-aurora]]: page builders are the foundation cost; tag managers are the additive cost.

Elementor's own 40%-less-HTML admission (Flexbox Containers)

Elementor's own engineering blog (2023–2024) states:

"Containers produce 40% less HTML output than sections and columns for the same layout."

Confidence: Verified (vendor admission).

The significance is structural. Pre-Container Elementor — sections/columns, the default for most builds before 2022 — emits 40%+ more HTML than the new Flexbox-Containers system. Sites built before 2022 are still on the old section/column system unless they have been migrated. The vendor has acknowledged the cost; the customer has paid it.

Even with Flexbox Containers, page builders still emit deeply nested <div> structures (five-to-seven layers around a single paragraph is typical per Seismic Pixels and Anubiz). Container adoption reduces the cost but does not eliminate the structural pattern.

WPPoland: 40% mobile speed gain on Elementor → Gutenberg rebuilds

WPPoland, an agency citing dozens of client migrations, reports that Elementor → Gutenberg rebuilds yield "a 40% increase in mobile site speed" on average.

Source: https://wppoland.com . Confidence: Single-source (vendor portfolio aggregation).

The vendor publishes this number to sell rebuild engagements, so it should be treated as directional. The direction-of-effect is consistent with Anubiz's structural-overhead measurements and Elementor's own 40%-less-HTML admission. The "40%" figure recurs across independent sources — Elementor's own engineering data, Anubiz's third-party measurement, and WPPoland's portfolio aggregation. The convergence suggests the number is approximately real.

Breakage history

The maintenance cost of page builders is dominated by post-update incidents. Each release of Elementor or Divi is a potential outage for sites that have not staged the update on a non-production environment. The following are the canonical 2024–2026 incidents.

Elementor 3.24.1 (August 2024): widespread site breakage

Elementor 3.24.1 (August 2024) shipped with breaking changes. The WordPress.org support thread titled "Elementor update broke my site and its entire design" documents widespread reports of full design loss.

Source: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/elementor-update-broke-my-site-and-its-entire-design/ . Confidence: Verified.

Internally at Candid Creative, page-builder update incidents are the largest single source of "site broke after update" tickets in the maintenance retainer time budget. Each incident consumes 4–20 hours of remediation across a client portfolio (see Cost catalogue, item 1, below).

Elementor 3.26 (late 2024): Schemes API removal + Element Caching default

Elementor 3.26 (late 2024) removed the legacy Schemes API and enabled Element Caching by default. Elementor's own release warning reads:

"This change is considered very risky, especially for websites that use Elementor add-ons not hosted in the official plugin repository."

Source: https://sitecare.com/elementor-326-errors/ . Confidence: Verified (Elementor team's own statement).

This is a "very risky" admission from the vendor itself. When a platform vendor characterizes its own release as "very risky" for sites running third-party add-ons, every Elementor maintenance contract is exposed to that risk. Schema markup bugs cascaded from this release (see FAQ schema bug, next subsection).

Elementor FAQ Accordion + Element Caching: FAQPage JSON-LD "Missing field text"

Pronto Marketing documented a downstream consequence of the 3.26 Element Caching default: Elementor's FAQ Accordion widget breaks the FAQPage JSON-LD output. Google Search Console reports the structured-data error "Missing field 'text'."

Source: https://www.prontomarketing.com/blog/fix-elementor-faq-schema-bug/ . Confidence: Verified.

Two compounding costs follow:

1. Lost AI Overview citations. FAQPage schema is one of the primary signals AI extraction systems (Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, ChatGPT extension fetches) use to pull verbatim answers. Broken FAQ schema means lost mentions.
2. Google Search Console errors. The property is flagged as having broken structured data, which surfaces as a recurring nag in the SEO maintenance loop.

This bug is a direct downstream consequence of the [[elementor-3-26-schemes-api-removal]] change documented above.

Elementor accessibility: open Issue #11779

Elementor GitHub Issue #11779 is open. The issue text from the Elementor team itself reads:

"Unfortunately, Elementor is not fully compliant out of the box and breaks many of the rules for accessibility."

Source: https://github.com/elementor/elementor/issues/11779 . Confidence: Verified (the issue is open on Elementor's own repo; the language is acknowledgement, not allegation).

The structural problem is twofold. First, the default Elementor output is not WCAG-compliant. Second, Elementor's Pro accessibility tools (the "Ally" widget) sit behind the paid Pro plan — accessibility is positioned as a paid upsell rather than a default. The EU European Accessibility Act has been enforceable since June 28, 2025 ([[eu-accessibility-act-enforcement-june-2025]]). Default-accessible output not being the default — with remediation gated behind upsell — compounds with [[ftc-accessibe-1m-settlement-jan-2025]] (FTC vs accessiBe). The broader pattern: accessibility overlay widgets are not accessibility solutions. See [[rule-accessibility-is-architecture-not-overlay]].

Elementor #5667: no "deactivate with content" since 2018

Elementor has no built-in mechanism to deactivate and retain content as standard HTML/WordPress markup. This is tracked as a still-open feature request on GitHub: elementor/elementor issue #5667.

Sources: GitHub elementor/elementor issue #5667; Nelio Software analysis; WordPress Help Blog migration guides. Confidence: Industry-consensus.

The implication is that Elementor lock-in is structural rather than malicious. The builder's data model is fundamentally different from WordPress's native post_content. Practical exit requires one of:

1. A content rebuild (typical $1,500–$8,000+ per [[generatepress-cannot-convert-elementor-code]]).
2. Commercial migration tools (Nelio, etc.).
3. Staying on Elementor.

Related lock-in entries: Divi 4 stored content as proprietary et_pb_* shortcodes — orphan text on theme deactivation (Divi 5 fixes this) (Divi 4 shortcode lock-in via et_pb shortcodes) and [[acf-data-broken-in-xml-export]] (ACF field data lost in standard WordPress XML export).

Elementor: no schema markup by default

Schema Pilot:

"[Elementor] does not generate schema markup. None of the layouts, widgets, or templates you build in Elementor add structured data."

Source: https://www.schemapilot.app/blog/elementor-schema-markup/ . Confidence: Verified.

The absence of native structured data compounds with [[rule-schema-as-hygiene-not-growth-lever]]: schema is the foundation Google's May 2026 guidance recommends, and Elementor produces none of it. Sites built on Elementor without an additional schema plugin (RankMath, Yoast, AIOSEO) are missing the entire foundation layer.

The WooCommerce-specific bug: Elementor GitHub Issue #9529 (open since 2019) documents that WooCommerce product pages built with Elementor are marked up as WebPage items instead of Product — breaking shopping-result rich snippets entirely.

Elementor Pro pricing strip (November 2023)

WP Tavern, November 2023:

"Elementor Pro is removing things like ACF/Pods integration from their lowest tier 'Essential' plan."

Source: https://wptavern.com/elementor-pro-pricing-update-slashes-features-in-the-essential-plan-for-new-customers . Confidence: Verified.

This is the classic SaaS pricing-power pattern. Once a platform has market share, features migrate up the pricing tiers and the entry tier strips down. Existing customers on grandfathered plans are not affected immediately, but new customers face the new economics. Combined with Elementor's recurring-only model (no lifetime license available; auto-renewal required) and the shift toward credit-based Elementor One, the trajectory is consistent: price escalation is the platform's only direction.

The comparison case is Bricks's January 2024 retirement of its $199 unlimited-sites lifetime license — see Bricks pricing section below. The framing connector is Doctorow: "enshittification" — the three-phase decay pattern of platforms (Word of the Year 2023 + 2024).

Divi 4 → Divi 5: a one-way migration

Divi 5 entered beta in November 2022 and removed the beta label on February 26, 2026 — a 3+ year development cycle that disrupted customer projects. Elegant Themes documents that Divi 4 stores "all layout data as shortcodes… [Divi 5] replaces shortcode-based layout storage with a new, more stable storage format." Migration between the two versions is a one-way data conversion.

Elegant Themes Help Center:

"Switching from Divi 4 to Divi 5 is a one-way update via the Migrator… the longer you run Divi 5 and edit content, the harder a clean rollback becomes."

Sources: https://elegantthemes.com/blog/divi-resources/how-to-migrate-your-website-to-divi-5 ; https://help.elegantthemes.com/en/articles/12767407-how-to-safely-migrate-from-divi-4-to-divi-5 . Confidence: Verified.

This is the page-builder lock-in pattern made explicit by the vendor itself. Rollback degrades over time: "the longer you run Divi 5 and edit content, the harder a clean rollback becomes." That is the architectural inverse of [[rule-require-database-export-day-one]] — Candid's standing rule that every client engagement should produce a day-one verifiable database export.

The Divi 4 shortcode architecture is documented separately at Divi 4 stored content as proprietary et_pb_* shortcodes — orphan text on theme deactivation (Divi 5 fixes this): every Divi 4 layout writes [et_pb_section]…[et_pb_text]… shortcodes into post_content. Disabling the Divi theme leaves shortcode soup in every post, which is why most Divi exits are full rebuilds.

Bricks Builder

Bricks is the page builder Candid Creative recommends only when a client absolutely cannot work in Gutenberg.

Cleanest output among visual builders (2026)

Among WordPress visual page builders, Bricks produces the cleanest HTML/CSS/JS output — comparable to Gutenberg on simple pages, with 95+ PageSpeed Insights typical (PageBuildLab, PureThemes 2026 testing). Bricks is a theme replacement (it occupies the theme slot rather than installing as a plugin on top of an existing theme). It stores content as JSON in postmeta._bricks_page_content_2.

The lock-in is real but cleaner than the alternatives: Bricks stores content as JSON in postmeta — still locked to the builder, but cleaner than Divi's shortcode-in-post_content (Divi 4 stored content as proprietary et_pb_* shortcodes — orphan text on theme deactivation (Divi 5 fixes this)) or Elementor's JSON blob in postmeta. Migration to markdown / Portable Text / Astro Content Collections is still essentially impossible — plan to rebuild pages on migration.

Confidence: Directional. Bricks does not publish install counts; performance claims are from independent agency testing.

Candid's recommendation hierarchy: Gutenberg > Bricks > Beaver Builder > Elementor > Divi > WPBakery.

CVE-2024-25600: unauthenticated RCE, exploited in 24 hours

Bricks Builder ≤ 1.9.6 contained an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2024-25600), CVSS 10.0. Patchstack disclosure:

"[Allows] any unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary PHP code on the WordPress site."

Patch 1.9.6.1 shipped February 13, 2024. Active exploitation in the wild was detected from February 14, 2024 — approximately one day after patch availability.

Source: https://patchstack.com/articles/critical-rce-patched-in-bricks-builder-theme/ . Confidence: Verified.

This is the "page builders are the highest-value attack surface" thesis in a single CVE. Bricks runs on tens of thousands of sites; an unauthenticated RCE means anyone on the internet could execute PHP as the web user. Attackers had patch-diff exploits live within 24 hours of disclosure. Page builders are, by code volume, one of the largest plugins on a typical site — their attack surface scales accordingly.

Ecosystem context (Patchstack 2026, Feb 25, 2026): 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WP ecosystem in 2025 (+42% YoY); 91% in plugins; weighted median time to first exploit: 5 hours; 46% had no patch at disclosure.

Bricks retired $199 unlimited-sites lifetime license, January 2024

Bricks Builder retired its $199 unlimited-sites lifetime license in January 2024. Current pricing (2026): $79–$249/year subscription, or $599 one-time (Ultimate, unlimited sites).

Source: https://bricksbuilder.io/pricing/ . Confidence: Verified.

This is textbook inflection-point pricing. Bricks built its reputation on the $199 lifetime deal; once enough sites had committed to it, the deal went away. Customers who bought before January 2024 keep their lifetime entitlement; new customers pay 3–4× as much for the same feature set. The pattern is the same as Shopify checkout.liquid sunset (Aug 2024 → Aug 2025 → June 30 2026) — unmigrated customizations will be DELETED (Shopify forced migration) and [[elementor-pro-pricing-strip-essential-nov-2023]] (Elementor stripped the Essential tier): once a platform has switching cost on its side, the pricing power activates.

Cost catalogue: 10 categories, ranked by long-term cost

The full ranking of page-builder costs to a small-business site, highest first:

1. Compounding maintenance debt. Every plugin update is a potential break. Documented incidents: Elementor 3.24.1 August 2024 breakage, Elementor 3.26 Schemes API removal, Bricks CVE-2024-25600, Divi 4 → 5 one-way migration February 2026. 4–20 hours of remediation per incident across a client portfolio.
2. Lock-in / migration cost. $1,500–$8,000 to rebuild a typical SMB site in Gutenberg — see [[generatepress-cannot-convert-elementor-code]]. The cost of admission that no vendor discloses at sale.
3. Performance penalty. Sub-40% mobile CWV pass rate is the WordPress norm; page-builder sites trend lower. See [[platform-cwv-pass-rates-june-2025]] and the Anubiz 500KB / 2,000-DOM-element measurement above.
4. AI citation invisibility. ChatGPT/Perplexity/Claude do not render JS (AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot) generally do not execute JavaScript — client-side React/Vue without SSR is invisible). Page-builder JS-dependent rendering reduces extractable content. This cost compounds through 2026–2027 as AI search share grows.
5. Accessibility legal exposure. EU EAA enforceable since June 28, 2025 ([[eu-accessibility-act-enforcement-june-2025]]); ADA Title II extended to 2027–2028 ([[ada-title-ii-extended-dates-2027-2028]]). Page-builder defaults fail WCAG 2.1 AA without paid remediation (Elementor Issue #11779).
6. Schema markup gaps. No native structured data (Elementor schema markup section above); FAQ accordion bugs (Pronto Marketing); WooCommerce product schema broken since 2019 (Issue #9529).
7. Pricing-power asymmetry. Once built on a builder, the vendor restructures pricing (Elementor Pro November 2023), retires deals (Bricks January 2024), or forces migrations (Divi 4 → 5 February 2026). The site owner has no exit that isn't a rebuild.
8. Security attack surface. Page builders are among the largest plugins on a site. CVE-2024-25600 is one CVE; Patchstack 2026 reports 91% of WP vulns in plugins, median time to first exploit 5 hours.
9. Developer/agency dependency. The "client can edit it" myth means the agency holds the keys regardless; retainer revenue is structurally subsidized by the architecture choice.
10. Architectural inflexibility. Custom components, headless preview, multi-channel content reuse — all more expensive when content is trapped in proprietary builder blobs.

Migration by use case

GeneratePress's official forum position, the definitive statement of the structural lock-in problem:

"You cannot convert Elementor's code to the code required by the Block Editor. So if you disable Elementor you will be left with just the unstyled content."

Source: GeneratePress official forum. Confidence: Verified.

The lock-in is structural, not contractual. Disabling Elementor leaves unstyled content in the post (the text survives — Elementor does not use shortcodes); the design is unrecoverable. Disabling WPBakery leaves shortcode soup. Beaver Builder is the cleanest exit of the four major builders.

Practical migration cost (per Scalebloom migration agency): $1,500–$8,000+ for a typical Elementor → Gutenberg rebuild. Crocoblock notes that Elementor is at least cleaner than WPBakery, Bold Builder, and UX Builder, which use shortcodes pervasively.

For per-use-case stack recommendations (existing-portfolio inheritance vs. greenfield brochure vs. content-led SEO build vs. WooCommerce), see Reference: alternative-stack recommendations by use case and budget (Candid 6-tier framework).

Candid Creative page-builder roadmap (4 stages)

The concrete migration plan for the Candid agency stack.

Stage 1 (now, low-risk). Stop quoting Elementor or Divi as the default for new builds. Update internal scoping docs and pricing menus to lead with WordPress + Gutenberg + a block theme (Kadence or Blocksy) for sub-$10k brochure work. Zero migration of existing clients required.

Stage 2 (next 90 days). Pick one block-theme stack and standardize. Document a starter kit: theme + 1–2 block plugins + ACF Blocks for custom modules. Run two new builds on it. Measure build hours vs the last two Elementor builds — the honest result might be that Gutenberg builds take longer at first (counter-argument 4.5 in Research brief: The Case Against Page Builders (piece 10 of 15)). Document the gap so it informs Stage 3 pricing.

Stage 3 (next 6 months). Offer existing Elementor/Divi clients a migration audit as a service ($500–$1,500) that scopes a rebuild quote and projects CWV / SEO impact. Converts the architecture problem into a billable engagement instead of an awkward conversation.

Stage 4 (next 12 months). For one suitable client (content-heavy, SEO-sensitive, willing to invest), pilot a headless Astro + WordPress build. Use as a case study and reference for the "premium" tier pricing.

Benchmarks that would change these recommendations:

• If WordPress core stewardship destabilizes further (a Mullenweg/WP Engine-style event in 2026–2027 that affects Gutenberg's roadmap — see [[wp-engine-automattic-dispute-timeline-2024-2026]]), reconsider Bricks as a managed-risk choice — its output is cleaner than Elementor's and the team is small but focused.
• If a Gutenberg-killer regression ships (a 6.x release that significantly degrades block-editor UX), the case for Beaver Builder as a stability play strengthens (cleanest exit of the four major builders).
• If AI search referral traffic does not become a meaningful channel by mid-2027, the AI-extractability argument weakens proportionally. Re-weight accordingly.

Internal rule

For all new Candid Creative client builds, stop leading scoping conversations with page builders (Elementor, Divi, WPBakery). The default starting point is WordPress + Gutenberg + a block theme (Kadence or Blocksy). Page builders may still be appropriate for specific clients (Use Case F from Reference: alternative-stack recommendations by use case and budget (Candid 6-tier framework) — existing portfolio inheritance), but they are not the new-build default.

The rule is supported by:

• Performance: [[platform-cwv-pass-rates-june-2025]] (WP 43.44% vs Duda 83.63%); Anubiz 500KB / 2,000-DOM measurement; WPPoland 40% mobile speed gain on Elementor → Gutenberg.
• Lock-in: GeneratePress official position (migration is rebuild, $1.5k–$8k).
• Pricing power: Elementor Pro November 2023 Essential strip; Bricks January 2024 $199 LTD retirement.
• Security: Bricks CVE-2024-25600 (24-hour exploit window).
• Accessibility: Elementor Issue #11779 (accessibility-as-paywalled-upsell).
• Schema gaps: Schema Pilot (no native schema); Pronto Marketing (FAQ accordion JSON-LD bug).
• AI extractability: AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot) generally do not execute JavaScript — client-side React/Vue without SSR is invisible (JS-heavy rendering invisible to AI crawlers).

How to apply:

• Internal scoping docs and pricing menu lead with Gutenberg + block theme.
• The page-builder option is presented in the proposal as a downgrade ("budget tier") or carried forward only for existing-portfolio audits.
• Use Reference: alternative-stack recommendations by use case and budget (Candid 6-tier framework) to match client to stack per use case.
• Stage rollout per the four-stage roadmap above.
• Existing Elementor/Divi clients are NOT subject to this rule — they get migration audits at next redesign, not reflexive rebuilds.

Sources and confidence

Claim / datum	Source	Confidence
Elementor 43% of WP sites (2025); Gutenberg 18%; WPBakery 13%; Divi 10%	2025 Web Almanac, CMS chapter, Fig. 12.6	Verified
Elementor 10M+ active installs; Beaver Builder Lite 100,000+	WordPress.org plugin directory	Verified
Divi ~2.16 M live sites; WPBakery ~2.32 M	BuiltWith via Colorlib; WebTechSurvey	High
Elementor 18.6% of known-CMS sites, 13.2% of all websites	W3Techs, fetched April 19, 2026	Verified
Median mobile LCP 3.8–5.2s pre-optimization; 2.0–2.8s post	corewebvitals.io WordPress guide (2026)	Industry-consensus
Elementor adds 500KB+ CSS/JS; 2,000+ DOM elements/page	Anubiz Host migration analysis	Single-source (vendor blog) for the specific numbers; industry-consensus for the pattern
Five-to-seven nested <div> layers around one paragraph	Seismic Pixels	Industry-consensus
Flexbox Containers ship 40% less HTML than sections/columns	Elementor engineering blog (2023–2024)	Verified (vendor admission)
40% mobile speed gain on Elementor → Gutenberg rebuilds	WPPoland portfolio aggregation	Single-source (vendor)
Elementor 3.24.1 broke sites and designs (Aug 2024)	wordpress.org/support thread	Verified
Elementor 3.26 removed Schemes API + Element Caching default ("very risky")	sitecare.com/elementor-326-errors/	Verified (vendor statement)
FAQ Accordion JSON-LD "Missing field text" bug	Pronto Marketing	Verified
"Elementor is not fully compliant out of the box"	GitHub elementor/elementor issue #11779 (open)	Verified
No "deactivate with content" since 2018	GitHub elementor/elementor issue #5667 (open); Nelio Software; WordPress Help Blog	Industry-consensus
Elementor generates no schema markup; WooCommerce → WebPage not Product (Issue #9529)	Schema Pilot; GitHub issue #9529	Verified
Elementor Pro Essential tier stripped (ACF/Pods removed) Nov 2023	WP Tavern	Verified
Divi 5 released Feb 26, 2026; one-way migration; rollback degrades	Elegant Themes blog + Help Center	Verified
Bricks cleanest output among visual builders; 95+ PSI typical	PageBuildLab, PureThemes 2026 testing	Directional
CVE-2024-25600 unauth RCE CVSS 10; patch Feb 13 2024; exploited Feb 14 2024	Patchstack	Verified
2025: 11,334 new WP vulns (+42% YoY); 91% in plugins; median TTFE 5 hrs; 46% unpatched at disclosure	Patchstack 2026 (Feb 25, 2026)	Verified
Bricks $199 unlimited-sites lifetime retired Jan 2024; current $79–$249/yr or $599 one-time	bricksbuilder.io/pricing/	Verified
"You cannot convert Elementor's code to Block Editor code"	GeneratePress official forum	Verified
$1,500–$8,000+ for typical Elementor → Gutenberg rebuild	Scalebloom; Crocoblock	Industry-consensus

Linked KB entries (kept standalone, not absorbed): Research brief: The Case Against Page Builders (piece 10 of 15), Research brief: WordPress + Page Builders vs Modern Custom Stacks — sourced performance comparison (piece 18), Divi 4 stored content as proprietary et_pb_* shortcodes — orphan text on theme deactivation (Divi 5 fixes this), Reference: alternative-stack recommendations by use case and budget (Candid 6-tier framework).