3+ Powerful Integrations
Top Developer-Friendly Features
3 Web Design Tools
Unlimited Websites
Oxygen Builder is a visual page and theme builder that gives a flexible designing experience without having to write a single code.
Yeah, I think we’ve all heard that before. It’s true, but I could also say that about Elementor, Divi, Thrive Themes, and many other page builders out there. That’s not the only strong point of Oxygen, and that’s also the reason why it’s worth looking into alongside other more popular alternatives.
I would say, if you’re in the market for a good website builder, you should consider Oxygen Builder in your options. Keep reading and I’ll tell you why.
What is Oxygen Builder?
Oxygen Builder is a page and theme builder with its own drag and drop interface that also retains the native WordPress editing experience. It’s an extremely powerful plugin because it offers one of the most flexible designing tools and capabilities in as little bloat as possible. In fact, Oxygen Builder users attribute its lean and light features as to why they choose it over other page builders.
To some, they would describe Oxygen Builder as the “most powerful visual builder for WooCommerce” because of its powerful integration with the WooCommerce plugin. Upon installation, when you choose to adopt the pre-built template from Oxygen’s design library, the default layout is made for an e-commerce store. Although, it’s also easily adaptable for any person that makes websites, whether for personal use or even if you do websites for clients.
How to Set Up Oxygen
As with some other page builders, you will install Oxygen Builder by adding a new plugin in your WordPress Dashboard. Upon installation, it will give you these 2 options: load a pre-made website with templates from their design library or start designing from scratch.
Because Oxygen Builder is made as light as possible, it’s very easy to navigate the builder and build your website from scratch entirely on the visual builder without touching code, but it’s also available if developers want to design their sites both on the front-end and back-end.
Whichever you choose, you can always access the design library from the visual builder.
Best of Oxygen: What I Like
Oxygen Builder has some small, singular qualities that’s unique to them, and I came to like. Here’s a list…
It’s built for developers.
If you’re working heavily online and with WordPress, I think having some coding knowledge is a huge asset. Yes, there are page builders like Oxygen that make it easy to design WordPress websites without having to code, but from personal experience, there are still some problems that come up that can only be resolved by having this information in your brain or at least readily available to you.
Oxygen Builder already has a very responsive editing interface, but I especially think that you can use raw code (CSS, HTML, JS) and apply them to specific elements, pages, and templates. That’s not something you can just do with other page builders.They use proper terminology in the programming world.
Oxygen Builder is really made for developers, and you’ll see it throughout the interface and the entire plugin. Aside from the ability to write custom HTML, CSS, and JS, the visual builder also uses a lot of CSS terminology.
This might be a con for some people, especially non-coders who are not familiar with those terms, but I personally think it’s a huge advantage to using Oxygen. We already have these terms like float, div, text-transform, etc. You’ll encounter them while using Oxygen but you can easily learn those things as you use the builder, just as you would have to learn the ‘modules’ and ‘rows’ in other page builders.
Another advantage of learning the proper terminology is you’ll be able to work easily with developers as you build your own website or more websites for clients.
The plugin is lean and light.
Oxygen Builder makes really clean code for your website. It implements a What You See Is What You Get system wherein the code output is exactly what you set in the front-end visual builder.
If you create your website with this, its size will be significantly smaller than if you use other page builders and search engines love that. With other builders, you have the plugin on top of another full-feature theme, and that’s just a lot of bloat for one website.
Remove bloat.
WordPress loads unnecessary scripts which end up bloating up your website. You can purposely remove this in one action with Oxygen.
Oxygen also works with any CDN because it caches CSS and also avoids query strings. If you wish to reduce bloat on your website, you can also limit the font files with the Google Font Weight Chooser. It forces your site to use only a limited set of font weights, which further reduces the size taken up by your site.
There’s an active community inside the Facebook group.
The Facebook group of over 17,000 members is really active and insightful if you encounter any specific problem in the builder or with the plugin. It’s highly recommended because first hand experiences and insights are rich in this group, and you might expand your knowledge of building WordPress websites just by joining this group.
What You Can Do With Oxygen Builder
Oxygen Builder didn’t start out as strong in the 1.0 era, but it significantly bulked up on features and capabilities, and kept up with other theme builders since then with the 2.0, 3.0, 3.4 versions, and now the 3.6. Here’s what you can do with it in its latest update.
Put Elements Side by Side Without Columns
Columns are the only way elements can be edited horizontally in other page builders like Elementor or Thrive Themes. In Oxygen Builder, you can just drag and drop an element to the side of another without creating columns.
The Flexbox Layout Engine is largely responsible for this. With it, you can also adjust spacing just by dragging from the edges of an element, and change the alignment of all elements in a single container at the same time.
Create Sitewide & Page-Specific Headers
Unlike other page builders, Oxygen Builder has a dedicated Header Builder. It has more capability because…
1) Oxygen Builder in general is very flexible with positioning elements like text, buttons, etc; and
2) The Header Builder has specific design features that give you all the editing power to make your header your own with little to no limitations.
There’s a native header overlay and a sticky header. The native header overlay is the one that appears on your site when a visitor arrives. With this you have the option to put multi-row headers.
The sticky header is the one that remains on the top portion of the page as the visitor scrolls through the content. You can make this more minimal, so you can put people’s attention to your content more.
Change Layouts for Specific Templates Once and Apply It to Every Page That Uses the Template
Some of your pages may have sidebars, some have a full-width layout. You can easily change this with custom post types. Some headings in posts have specific colors, while in other pages, you want different colors. You can set all these configurations as templated layouts, so you can just switch templates, and the content will follow all the format settings you set previously. These are global styles, which is available on Oxygen itself.
There’s also an Advanced Custom Fields integration, custom post types, and dynamic data that can really differentiate your website from others and make templating 10x easier.
Advanced Custom Fields is another powerful plugin often used with Oxygen. It’s mainly for creating custom properties and fields. These custom fields can be filled out easily in WordPress’ native editor and the content can be inserted to the page and designed with the builder.
Let Clients Edit Content Without Touching Oxygen Builder
If you’re creating websites for clients, then you know the struggle when clients make some edits that somehow throw off the layout or change some major parts of the website. Oxygen Builder has a powerful Gutenberg editor integration. You just have to make sure that you install and activate the Oxygen Gutenberg plugin. With this, the client can have access to the native WordPress Gutenberg editor without changing anything on Oxygen.
If 2 or more websites you run are affiliated with each other, you can even create and share Gutenberg blocks with all those websites.
An advantage of this is you can create the website and hand it off to the client, and charge higher for it because the website will be done and they can just edit content easily with the Gutenberg editor.
Other Things You Should Know Before Getting Oxygen
There are the features and then there’s the other perks that come with choosing Oxygen. I thought you might want to know these other factors in considering if Oxygen is for you...
Unlimited Websites
Once you’ve downloaded Oxygen, you can install and use it in as many websites as you want, no additional charge.
60 Day Money Back Guarantee
Try it for 60 days. If you don’t like it, Oxygen gives you your money back. Though there’s a high probability that you won’t not like it.
Lifetime License
You only have to purchase Oxygen once. After that, you’ll get the latest updates and support for life.
Pricing
As of this writing, this is the one-time pricing of Oxygen. This reflects the limited promo they currently have for the release of the latest 3.6 update.
Recommended or Not?
Oxygen is by far the first page builder that I’ve been impressed by the first time, before I’ve even explored the more advanced functionalities it can perform like the advanced custom fields and custom post types.
The builder is extremely straightforward and easy to get familiar with, whether you have experience designing and templating websites before or not. Oxygen goes beyond being a user-friendly page builder. It includes powerful integrations and internal features that enables the most flexibility when designing websites.
Ultimately, Oxygen Builder is a complete website builder of developers’ dreams. It’s made for coders and non-coders alike. And it can also be a stepping stone for beginners to learn more about the back-end of making websites without bloating it up with unnecessary code and scripts.