Weekly Links Roundup – Page Builders, Headline Formulas, Better WordPress Search

This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

As a developer who hand-codes I’m not a fan of page builder themes and plugins. Though I agree that they accomplish their goal very well – enabling users to make nice-looking complex layouts without knowing any code – the majority of them have some big issues. The ones that a few of my clients use (or used to use) are very, very popular – and they leave a huge nasty mess of shortcodes all over your website if you ever decide to stop using them.

Here’s a post about one of the most popular theme-based page builders, Divi, and how if you decide to use it, you need to marry it, because you shouldn’t plan on leaving it. Ever. If you do, the mess can be excruciating to clean up, especially on a larger site.

That said, I must give props to another page builder called Beaver Builder. I’ve heard developers gush over how lean and mean this full-featured plugin is. If you decide to stop using it, are you left with a pile of junk where your content used to be? Nope. Beaver Builder’s code degrades to clean HTML, not shortcodes. You won’t have to manually strip out crap-tons of shortcodes to clean up your content. Try Beaver Builder.

Having trouble coming up with a good headline for your new blog post? Here’s a guide to common headline formulas along with examples and an explanation of why they work so well. We need all the help we can get, right?

Finally… you may have noticed: the default WordPress search tool is not always that great. But there’s hope – here’s a roundup of 8 search plugin alternatives that can greatly improve the search process by including things like custom fields in the results.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.