Why Visual Composer is for Advanced Website Builders [2021 Review]

Website builders have become the hottest website creation tools today. With a wide selection of website builders in the market, Visual Composer stands unique from other website design and creation services, and you'll discover why later.

When it comes to visual website builders, it’s a battle of rich features and ease of use. There are a lot of page builders in the market already, ones that I’m sure you’ve already heard of some for their popularity with designers, developers, or marketers. In this post, we’ll highlight the features and other aspects of Visual Composer that you might want to know if you’re considering this website builder.

What is Visual Composer?

Visual Composer is another drag-and-drop website builder comparable to the likes of Divi, Elementor, and Beaver Builder, which aids all types of web creators build their own website without coding knowledge. 

Moreover, Visual Composer promises to deliver a comprehensive website building experience tailored to your purpose and needs—easy, fast, and affordable. What more can you ask for?

Best of Visual Composer: What I Like

Visual Composer is jam-packed with numerous features that facilitate functionality, convenience, and design for both ends of the website creator and visitor. Here are the top features and capabilities that piqued my interest:

Templates usually come with a predetermined layout composed of the header, footer, and sidebar, but what if you require more customizability? The Blank Page Wizard is a godsent feature for maximum personalization without starting from scratch.

With this feature, you can convert predesigned templates into a blank page and start your layout from there. The Blank Page Wizard is useful whenever you want to make a post, page, or custom layout with a blank canvas.

Once you've accessed the Blank Page Wizard, you can play with the page title layout and control your permalinks to make meaningful links and enhance your website's ranking.

Popups are nothing new in the website world. Even well-designed ones have an average conversion rate of 9.28%. With the help of Visual Composer's Popup Builder feature, you can produce unlimited popups that have the potential to engage and take visitors further down your marketing funnel.

Take note that the Popup Builder add-on is only available for Premium users. After the activation plugin, you can easily download this feature from the Visual Composer Hub.

Visual Composer acknowledges that you're in charge of your own website. Therefore, they support element customization through the Visual Composer API. This capability is perfect for developers working with advanced web design projects with specific requirements, allowing them to customize their own design elements.

Crafting your own elements doesn't mean that you can't utilize their predefined ones, as the Visual Composer API extends your list of readily usable design elements, which can come in handy whenever you need them.

With Visual Composer, what you see is what you instantly get! After accomplishing any drag-and-drop action on your canvas, its front-end editing and live design let you visualize your webpage and play with design elements until you find the perfect configuration. 

On the other hand, the Tree View is a more interactive approach to viewing your webpage content. As Visual Composer says, Tree View is an editor inside of an editor. To access tree view, simply hover around the Frontend Editor navigation bar to find it. 

Tree View displays a well-defined structure or layout of your content, starting from columns to icons. The elements are arranged like branches of a tree that shows which components are under which, and you can move them around however you'd like.

While you won't have to get your hands dirty with codes, some website builders use WordPress shortcodes responsible for their customization aspect. However, if you decide to uninstall your website builder plugin, it'll only leave you with a bunch of shortcodes without access to content.

Visual Composer is proudly fueled by React.JS, a JavaScript library for powering sleek and innovative user interfaces (UI) primarily useful for web businesses. Since React.JS supports Visual Composer, you can significantly make your website reactive, thanks to seamless SEO integration, notable performance boost, and ease of migration available in React.JS.

What You Can Do With Visual Composer

Visual Composer is designed with easy utilization and navigation in mind. You can start adding webpage pieces to your site in a few minutes and even build the entire website in one sitting. To assist your website building journey, I've compiled several capabilities that you can do with Visual Composer:

Unleash your creativity with the Visual Composer Website Builder.

The Visual Composer Theme Builder is taking a step further to your website building, as it's only accessible with the Premium version. If you're uncertain of paying for Visual Composer's Premium version, I'll briefly touch on what things you can do with it than its unpaid counterpart.

Basically, this Theme Builder lets you manipulate more content areas on your page, including the following:

• Page layouts
• Headers, footers, and sidebars
• Dynamic content
• Theme templates
• Archive pages

Furthermore, you can design a unique webpage when your website is in maintenance mode and directly implement the maintenance page without installing additional plugins.

Download and import stock images from Unsplash.

Images, when effectively used, can bring fruitful results to your website. Your choice of photos for your website will profoundly impact these results. To ensure high-quality images, you can obtain them from websites sharing stock photography like Unsplash, which luckily complements the Visual Composer.

With this partnership, you can effortlessly search photos and images that you need straight from the Visual Composer Hub, but take note that this feature is only available in the Premium version.

Play with GIF animations thanks to GIPHY integration.

Many website builders won't let animated images pass through your website. Suppose you upload an animated image in a graphics interchange format (GIF). In that case, most of them will only convert your image to a Joint Photographics Expert Groups (JPEG), but Visual Composer won't.

Visual Composer recognizes the importance of incorporating GIF images into your website as animation can convey more meaningful messages than static pictures. Like Unsplash, you can directly access GIPHY from the Visual Composer Hub and search for GIF images that will best represent your website.

Download free elements and templates with Visual Composer Hub.

Visual Composer Hub is accessible to free and premium versions. On the free version, you can download free elements and templates from other apps integrated with Visual Composer without leaving WordPress.

On the premium version, you have unlimited downloads of all assets in Visual Composer Hub. That includes icons, gifs, elements, and stock images.

Other Things You Should Know

First-time and returning users of Visual Composer may be confused about this, so I thought it’d be best to clarify it here— the old Visual Composer, which is now WPBakery, is different from today’s Visual Composer website builder. Keep in mind that both are under the same company. 

To clarify, WPBakery only focuses on creating the content aspect of your website, but the Visual Composer website builder facilitates all procedures undertaken to complete an entire website.

Also, Visual Composer website builder, as mentioned earlier, doesn’t use shortcodes unlike WPBakery. Visual Composer website builder is programmed from scratch with the help of React.JS. 

For more information regarding this confusing story, you can explore their official website and check out the differences between WPBakery and Visual Composer website builder.

Pricing

One thing I didn’t mention when it comes to page builders is that pricing is not always congruent to quality. With Visual Composer, the pricing plans don’t differ much to what’s already on offer by other page builders.

However, one thing that I commend about Visual Builder is the wide-ranging pricing from $0 to $349, and the inclusions they have for each pricing plan. While other builders only have 2 or 3 pricing plans, Visual Builder is more inclusive in terms of what users might need. The amount for each pricing plan seems to reflect the features unlocked.

Visual Composer: Recommended or Not?

One thing that makes Visual Composer stand out against competitors is the intuitive product development. With various integrations, the ability to develop your own API, and the use of technologies like React.JS, they seem to be receptive of what users might actually need from the builder.

The focus is not only on just giving the most convenient and easy-to-use product, which from experience is too good to be true in most cases. Visual Composer have made the product relatively easy to use but rich in capabilities that developers need.

Of course that comes at a disadvantage for beginners in building websites, but it’s safe to conclude that this is a page builder might just be more apt for developers.