Divi Review: A Perfect Theme for Agencies and Professionals

Expensive. That’s probably your first impression on Divi. No wonder because Divi is priced more expensive than popular themes on ThemeForest like Avada and Newspaper X. Divi is available at $89. Getting more expensive as it is not a one-time purchase option. Instead, it is an annual subscription fee. Elegant Themes, the developer of Divi, adopts a subscription-based business model. You can download Divi by becoming its member that costs $89 per year. There is also a lifetime membership plan, but you need to pay threefold.

Of course, the Elegant Themes team has its own reasons in making the pricing plan for Divi. But still, there is a big enough question, is $89 a worth price?

Understanding the Divi Pricing Plan

Before answering the question above, let’s understand why Divi is available at that high price.

Divi is developed by Elegant Themes and Elegant Themes adopts a membership-based business model. You need to be an Elegant Themes member to be able to download Divi. Elegant Themes offers two membership plans:

• Yearly membership: 89/year
• Lifetime membership: $249

A crucial thing you need to know. Divi is not the only product developed by Elegant Themes. Instead, it also develops the following products and sevices.

• Extra (A WordPress theme)
• Divi Builder (A page builder plugin)
• Monarch (A social media sharing plugin)
• Bloom (An email marketing plugin)
• Divi Cloud

After becoming an Elegant Themes member, you will have access to all of the products and services above, along with Divi theme, for sure.

You can use your membership account to download the Elegant Themes products as many times as you want and install them on as many websites as you like. Be it your own websites or your clients’ websites. With this concept, Divi is a perfect theme if you are an agency as you only need to spend $89 per year (outside hosting) to build as many sites as you want.

Divi is also a great theme for professionals as you don’t need to buy additional plugins for email marketing and social media marketing. Both Monarch and Bloom come with built-in analytics feature to track the performance of your marketing progress and campaigns.

Divi Theme Features:

After you have understood why Divi is available at that high price, let’s find out what features you will get.

More Options on Theme Customizer

WordPress — as you know — has a theme customizer feature to customize your theme. You can access it by going to Appearance -> Customize. The customization options available on the theme customizer are vary depending on the theme you use. Hello theme, for instance, only has 6 option blocks where you can set your site logo, color, menu, and widget. There are even no options to customize the header.

Divi comes with more option blocks. There are 11 option blocks in total with each block contains other option blocks.

Some key optimization options you can set are:

• Website layout which covers content width, sidebar width, and accent color.
  
• Typography which covers body text size, header text size, header font, header font style, body font, body link color.
  
• Header. You can set menu height, header background color, dropdown menu background color, dropdown menu animation, disable/enable the fixed navigation, show/hide header elements (social media icons and search icon).
  
• Footer. You can set the footer layout, set the background color, add widgets, show/hide social media icons.
  
• Mobile. You can customize your website header on mobile devices such as setting the hamburger icon color, setting the header text size, and setting the body text size.

There is also an option to export the customization you made. This feature is pretty useful if you have multiple sites. You can apply the same customization from one site to another one.

Settings Panel

While the theme customizer allows you to customize the appearance of your Divi theme, settings panel allows you to enable/disable the features offered by the Divi theme (outside the theme customizer). You can, for instance, exclude certain categories from the navigation bar, integrate your Divi theme with Google Analytics, and so on. Settings panel itself is a common feature found on paid themes. Avada and Newspaper X also have one.

You can access the Divi settings panel by going to Divi -> Theme Options. From this panel, you can do such things as enable/disable the sticky header (fixed header), add your social media accounts, set the sidebar location, integrate your website with Google Analytics, and so on.

Here are some key Divi features you can access via this panel:

• Ads Manager

If you rely on ads — banner ads in particular –to generate money from your website, the built-in ads manager offered by Divi is useful enough. You can display your ads on several locations such as header and single post. Unfortunately, Divi only supports ads banner with a dimension of 468×60.

• SEO

SEO is a crucial aspect of a website. With proper optimization, you can generate tons of free visitors from search engines. Divi comes with a built-in SEO feature which you can access via the settings panel. Unfortunately, the optimization options offered by Divi’s built-in SEO feature are very basic. You can only set the custom title of the homepage, custom description of the homepage, custom meta, and enable the canonical. There are no options like breadcrumbs and sitemap.

We still recommend you install a dedicated SEO plugin like Yoast to optimize every single article and page on your website. If you just need to optimize the homepage then Divi’s built-in SEO feature is enough.

• Integration

There is an Integration tab on the Divi settings panel. You can open this tab to integrate Divi with some services or tools you use. One of which is Google Analytics. You can simply paste your Google Analytics tracking code to the available field to integrate it with your Divi theme. You can also use this feature to display ads banner (via JavaScript script) on either the top of the single post or bottom of the single post.

Page Builder

Page builder is a crucial plugin to create a website with WordPress. Especially if you have no skills in CSS and HTML. You need it to create a professional-looking page. As mentioned earlier, the Elegant Themes membership allows you to download all WordPress products developed Elegant Themes, including Divi and Divi Builder (Divi Builder is available in two versions: an integral part of the Divi theme and as a standalone plugin).

If you install Divi theme, you don’t need to install Divi Builder anymore as Divi Builder has been integrated with Divi theme and Extra theme. If you have installed and activated the Divi Builder plugin before installing the Divi theme, the Divi Builder plugin will automatically be disabled. Divi Builder itself is one of the most popular WordPress page builder plugins, other than Elementor. It comes with a visual editor where you can create a beautiful page without dealing with CSS or HTML.

Divi Builder works on both posts and pages (you can set Divi Builder to work on posts or pages only via the settings panel). Divi Builder comes with quite a lot of design elements (called modules) you can add to the page you create. There are about 39 native modules offered by Divi Builder:

Accordion	Email Option	Pricing Tables
Audio	Filter Portfolio	Search
Bar Counters	Gallery	Shop
Blog	Image	Sidebar
Blurb	Login	Slider
Button	Map	Social Media Follow
Call To Action	Menu	Tabs
Circle Counter	Number Counter	Testimonial
Code	Person	Text
Comments	Portfolio	Toggle
Contact Form	Post Navigation	Video
Countdown Timer	Post Slider	Video Slider
Divider	Post Title	Icon

Here are some key features offered by Divi Builder:

• Dynamic Content

Since version 4.0 — which was released in the late of 2019 — Divi comes with a theme builder that allows you to create custom templates for theme parts such as header, footer, single post, category pages, 404 page, and so on. When creating a custom template using Divi Builder, you can use dynamic content for components like post title, author name, featured post, site title, and so on. There are about 13 dynamic content types supported by Divi Builder:

• Layout Library

When creating a page with Divi Builder, you have two options to start from. First, you can create the page from scratch. Second, you can create the page from a template (Elegant Themes uses the term “layout” instead of “template”).

There are over 1000 page layouts offered by Divi Builder in total. They are grouped into layout packs. A layout pack it a set of layouts designed for a specific website type. They have a consistent design concept. A layout pack allows you to create a website (a complete website) more quickly. If the materials to create the website are ready, you can complete your website in a day. Or less.

In addition to the layouts on the layout library, Divi also offers weekly layout pack.

• Form Builder

With Divi Builder, you don’t need to install any additional form builder plugin like Contact Form 7 or Ninja Forms. Divi Builder comes with two modules that you can use to create a form: Contact Form and Email Optin. You can use the Contact Form module to create a contact form. There are 6 field types you can use: Input, Email, Textarea, Checkbox, Radio button, and Dropdown.

While for the Email Optin module, you can use it to create an email opt-in form. You can connect your email opt-in form with an email marketing tool like MailChimp, MailPoet, MailerLite, AWeber, and so on. Ther are about 20 services you can connect your form with, including CRM tools like HubSpot and Salesforce.

• Custom CSS

If you are a professional web designer/developer and want to add custom CSS for your project, Divi Builder allows you to do so. To add a custom CSS to a module, you can go to the Advanced tab on the module settings panel.

Theme Builder

As mentioned, since version 4.0, Divi comes with a theme builder feature. This feature gives you full control to customize your theme since you can create custom templates for all of the theme parts. Theme builder works by replacing a default theme part with the custom template you created. For instance, if you have created a custom header template, this template will replace the default header of your theme (Divi in this case).

The Divi Builder theme builder feature allows you to create custom templates for the following theme parts:

• Header
• Footer
• Single post
• Single page
• Category
• Tag
• 404 page
• Search results page
• And so on.

If you use WooCommerce, you can also create a custom single product page, custom chart page, and other parts of WooCommerce. You can access the theme builder by going to Divi -> Theme Builder.

When creating a custom template for a certain theme part, you can assign it to the entire website or specific page(s) or post(s). Thanks to this (the capability to assign a custom template part for specific posts and pages), you can have multiple headers, footers, or single post templates on one website, which is great to run certain campaigns.

ONE THING. Since a custom template you created will replace the default part of your theme, header, for instance, the customization you made via theme customizer will also be overridden.

Support Center with a Remote Access Option

While most themes like Avada and Newspaper X uses forum-based customer support, Elegant Themes offers live chat support. This is great since you can solve a technical issue you are facing more quickly. If necessary, you can even grant remote access to Elegant Themes technical support staff to allow them to remote-access your website.

To have a live chat with the technical support staff, you can go to Divi -> Support Center. From here, you can also grant remote access to the technical support staff.

You can have a live chat with the technical support staff anytime you want. They open 24 hours for 7 days. There is also a forum you can access to share your issue with the fellow Divi users.

The Verdict: Divi Theme Pros and Cons

At a glance, Divi indeed looks expensive. But, think about features like page builder, theme builder, form builder, and email opt-in. Not to mention plugins like Bloom and Monarch which you can download for free. The fact that you can install Divi on unlimited websites is another reason why $89 per year is not too expensive. For professional use, Divi is not expensive at all. Conversely, if you just need a theme for casual blogging (not for business purpose), $89 is not worth to spend. There are a bunch of themes on the WordPress theme directory you can use for free.

To give you an overview, let’s compare the plan offered by Elegant Themes with the most popular page builder plugin that also come with theme builder feature: Elementor.

	Elegant Themes	Elementor Expert
Price	$89/year	$399/year
Number of sites	Unlimited	1,000

You can read our previous post to compare the features offered by Divi Builder’s theme builder and Elementor’s theme builder.

What about the cons?

Despite allowing you to create a beautiful page without coding, Divi Builder is the biggest downside of Divi theme. Compared to other page builder plugins, say Elementor, Divi Builder is way more complex to use, especially for those who haven’t used a page builder plugin before. The elements (modules) it offers are also limited enough. Also, Divi Builder tends to heavy.

Pros:

• Limitless customization options thanks to the theme builder feature.
• Great pricing for agencies and professionals.
• No need to install basic plugins like form builder and email marking.
• Page builder to create beautiful pages without coding.

Cons:

• Not friendly enough for new WordPress users.
• Lack of elements on page builder.