Divi Theme Review 2023: My Experience Using Divi Since Years

DIVI Theme Review (Summary)

As someone who’s used the Divi theme extensively, I can safely say that the DIVI theme by Elegant themes is the most powerful, yet easy-to-customize WordPress theme.

That’s not all, since the Divi theme is powered by The DIVI Builder which makes it one of the most advanced WordPress front-end editors and visual page builders. This latest version is lightening faster & has a better user interface than the already good previous versions.

But like all other visual builders Divi builder too isn’t perfect. Continue reading this unbiased DIVI theme review, to know more.

Features

Divi is extremely filled with features be it content modules or fast loading, instant design changes. Moreover, the split testing feature is something none of the page builders have yet.

Pricing

Divi is extremely affordable. In fact, it is the cheapest of all its close competitors. For $89 you get 69 themes including Divi and all plugins.

It has a life plan that saves you recurring payments, unlike any other visual builder. 

Support

The support is pretty good with pre-sales but after you buy you get a forum and not the live chat. This is very much made up of highly active Divi user communities and FB groups.

When I first purchased a copy of Elegant Themes membership for my Elegant Themes Review, I knew instantly our relationship would grow beyond just the review.

One year later today, I power a good couple of my niche sites with DIVI, one of Elegant theme’s most powerful and best WordPress blog themes around (one travel niche site runs on their Extra theme, though).

It’s just because of their fast, intuitive page builder (helps me add videos, call-to-action buttons, portfolio section, pricing tables, etc with just drag-and-drop modules).

I was doing a bit of competitor research the other day and I was surprised to see most sites ranking for the “DIVI theme review” were just plain superficial reviews of the Divi WordPress theme’s versions from the stone age.

That’s why I decided to come up with this updated review (since I already use the theme, it wasn’t a lot of work either) that showcases the true potential of DIVI (the latest version) that has shown the age of the WordPress page builders a new light.

Please Note:

 This review of Divi theme by Elegant themes isn’t a letter of praise from an Elegant Themes fanboy. Since this is an unbiased review, you’ll also encounter Divi theme cons that won’t usually find a place in other reviews. The aim of sharing this experience is to help you decide (by taking into account the good and the bad) and see if DIVI is the theme for you.

If you want to create a custom WordPress website without needing to be a code genius, the Divi theme from Elegant Themes is one of the options I can almost guarantee you’ve come across (in fact – that’s probably why you’re reading this Divi theme review!).

Instead of needing those code genius skills, the Divi theme lets you build your WordPress website with simple drag and drag and real-time previews. That ease of use, plus a huge third-party support ecosystem and plenty of unique features, are what make the Divi theme so popular.

In my Divi theme review, I’ll tell you what I like (and don’t like) about the Divi theme. Then, I’ll give you a hands-on look at how Divi helps you build a beautiful WordPress site.

DIVI Theme Review 2023: In-depth Review of DIVI

The Divi theme is a multipurpose WordPress theme, which means you can use it to create pretty much any type of website. Watch this mini-video which shows you a brief about what is the Divi theme and all of what Divi (alpha) theme can help you do.

Yes, Divi theme really is that flexible. You can use the DIVI theme to instantly build:

• Personal portfolio websites
• Blogs or sites with the amazon niche model​​​​
• Landing pages/sales pages
• Small businesses or client websites (and anything in between without needing to learn/touch a single line of code)

Divi even supports WooCommerce, though if you’re using WordPress to build an eCommerce store, in case you’re selling craft or other physical products on your site. 

​Divi also integrates with Etsy if you want to create an Etsy-based shop to sell Etsy items on your WordPress blog.

Wondering what actually is the Divi theme and how you get your hands on one?

What is Divi theme? 

Divi theme is a powerful, multipurpose magazine-styled WordPress theme by Elegant Themes. Divi comes bundled with Divi builder the drag-and-drop page builder to customize your site as you wish.

Divi comes powered with the Divi builder within which enables you to create beautifully designed Divi blog layouts, high converting landing pages, new brandable personal portfolio sites or client sites in minutes.

Divi theme is one of the most powerful, yet easy-to-blend with your own needs WordPress theme by Elegant themes.

With Divi, you design your websites on the front-end. Write blog posts, add elements like pricing tables, drag & drop over 40 different content modules, customize the text you type, change colors, layouts everything visually in front of your eyes.

This is how easy building a homepage/landing page or blog post with Divi is!

You don’t need to preview after you’ve completed because everything you did was right in front of your eyes, on the front end of your website!

Essentially, there are two parts to the Divi theme:

• The Base Theme: You use the WordPress customizer and theme options to style core elements of your site like header, sidebar, and generic aesthetic.
• The DIVI Builder: You use this powerful page builder to design high converting sales pages, add various elements like portfolio section, testimonials, custom buttons, pricing tables etc. all with the Drag-and-drop modules (no code touching!).

Thanks to this two-pronged approach, you basically have the power to build your entire website with custom branding without needing to know a single line of code.

And that unique selling proposition is what’s made the Divi theme so dang successful.

Divi Theme Examples: A list of few of the Best Divi websites

Elegant Themes website claims that Divi powers over 437,821 WordPress websites and this shows how a good theme and powerful features can help you build such a large community of happy users.

If you’re looking for Divi theme examples or sites build with Divi, here are the top cream of the crop websites that are build with Divi theme. I am sure they will give your creative brains a knack for what you can do with Divi theme and page templates.

http://eatthairestaurant.com/ a divi food and restaurant blog example

https://www.abbartjc.com/ This site is a perfect Divi woocommerce example where you can sell your won products.

It is literally impossible to list down all the divi theme examples leave alone my personal favorites which range in 100s in numbers.

Besides, Elegant themes blog also releases their top sites list based on website niches from time to time like these list of web design sites built with Divi and Divi websites examples for artists & artisans.

Divi Review: A Hands-on Look at The Divi Theme

Ok, now that I’ve given you some general thoughts on the Divi theme, let’s dig in and see how things actually work.

I’ll give you a tour of the Divi theme in the order that you’re likely to build your website. That is, I’ll first show you how to style the base theme. Then, I’ll give you a look at the Divi Builder.

Using the WordPress Customizer to Style Divi Theme

As I mentioned, the Divi theme uses the native WordPress Customizer to make style changes.

This approach is superior to other themes that rely more on custom theme options panels because it lets you preview all of your changes in real-time.

For example, here’s what a freshly activated copy of Divi looks like on a brand new WordPress install:

To customize the header of your theme, you can jump right in and change the Header Style:

All you need to do is select a new style from the drop-down and you can instantly see the changes reflected on the live preview of your site.

If you want to go even further, you can change up colors for your fixed navigation header using a similarly beginner-friendly interface:

I think you get the idea! Basic theme changes are easy to make with Divi and the WordPress Customizer.

Beyond changing up your header, the WordPress Customizer also lets you:

• Change the basic layout for your site (e.g. enable a boxed layout or change website width)
• Choose a new color scheme
• Change fonts and colors
• Configure how buttons look
• Customize your footer
• Create specific mobile styles for responsive design (this is an awesome feature that not many themes offer)

How to customize Divi theme with Theme Options

While you can customize many of the front-facing style elements via the WordPress Customizer, Divi does also include a custom theme options panel with even more options.

I think some of these options that deal with front-end appearances could’ve also been included in the more user-friendly WordPress Customizer.

Still, that’s not a huge deal because many of the settings here aren’t visual.

Across its many tabs, this area lets configure things like:

• Sidebar layouts
• Which post metadata to display
• Smooth scrolling
• Fixed navigation
• Built-in advertising spots
• Lots more

Using the Divi Builder to Create Complex Layouts

Once you use the WordPress Customizer and Theme Options settings to configure how your base theme looks, you can build the rest of your website using the Divi Builder.

Essentially, you’ll use the Divi Builder to create all of the content that fits inside the “header – footer – sidebar” framework that you choose.

You can launch the Divi Builder by clicking the big purple Use The Divi Builder button inside any post or page.

Then, you can choose to build your page’s design via a backend or visual builder:

• Backend – you build your design using abstract blocks that represent elements (pictured below)
• Visual – you build your design in the exact same view as your end users will see your design

Most people prefer using visual builders, so that’s what I’ll show you below. But it is nice that Divi gives you the option to use either. Many page builders only offer one or the other.

In the Visual Builder, you see a live preview of your site that you can add different sections and “modules” to by clicking the various Plus buttons.

A Module basically represents a specific block of content. For example, a bit of text is one module, a button is another, and a testimonial is a third:

For each module, you can edit a variety of settings – again, without needing to know any code:

In total, the Divi Builder offers over 41 different modules for you to choose from.

The Divi Builder is a big part of what sets the Divi theme apart from many of its competitors. While I still think other page builders like Elementor and Thrive Architect are slightly better, the Divi Builder is definitely one of the best page builders out there.

Divi Features Review: Other Helpful Features In The Divi Theme

Beyond the core features that I outlined above, another thing that puts Divi above the competition is all the extra goodies you get that most other themes don’t offer.

Divi Layouts Templates: Divi Comes With Inbuilt Layout Templates

In my Divi Builder example above, I showed you how to build a design from scratch. But thanks to the Divi Builder Library, you don’t actually have to do that for all of your pages.

Divi includes a number of pre-made templates that you can insert with the click of a button:

For example, loading the Homepage Portfolio instantly gives you a page that looks like this:

All you need to do is add your own images and text and you’re done!

You can also save your own layouts to the library to easily reuse them across multiple designs.

Is Divi theme Optimized For Conversions? Built-in Split Testing

If you’re interested in improving your site with A/B testing and multivariate testing, Divi’s built-in split testing functionality is an insanely cool feature.

Divi lets you easily A/B test different design layouts without the need for any complicated or expensive third-party tools.

Once you activate split testing, you can create one or more variations of specific elements on your page that Divi will automatically compare against each other to see which one achieves the targeted goal better:

This is one of my absolute favorite Divi features! I haven’t encountered another page builder that makes it so easy to split test your designs.

You can also view stats about your split tests to see which variation is performing the best.

Divi SEO Review: Is Divi Theme SEO Friendly?

Yes, Divi theme is 100% SEO friendly. Divi contains all important SEO features a WordPress theme should have plus some more. A few features that make Divi SEO friendly are the presence of schema markup, better site structure, canonical URL feature, and features to add meta titles and descriptions etc.

In fact, you wouldn’t even need Yoast SEO plugin to add breadcrumbs. In Divi Yoast breadcrumbs can be overridden with the Divi breadcrumbs module which doesn’t need Yoast to pull the breadcrumbs data. With Divi, you can have your own breadcrumbs and customize the look of it. (You can of course, choose to use Yoast SEO default settings if you use that previously).

Here is a screenshot that shows you the exact Divi theme SEO settings.

Is Divi theme SEO Friendly? Answer: yes!

A common question that arises in users’ mind is are multipurpose themes optimized to rank higher?

I don’t know about other themes but I am sure Elegant themes are SEO optimized search-engine friendly. They do have schema markups that let’s search engines understand what your business/blog is about and  rank better.

One thing is sure, Divi uses shortcodes to display your design elements and to style your writing and it does add to the crap of your site’s coding structure. However, it is the case with all page builders may that be thrive architect or beaver builder.

And search engines are smarter than we think they are. This shortcode junk, as much as it is feared, does not affect rankings in anyway. 

A cleaner and light-weight theme is good but remember we aren’t here to advocate importance of fast loading themes, we are here to make our blog content more engaging and optimized for conversions (sales & subscribers).

That’s exactly what visual builder themes like Divi help us with.

Divi Role Editor: A Very Essential Feature To Control User Roles

Another helpful Divi feature that you’re unlikely to find in other themes is the Divi Role Editor.

Why It’s Important?

Having control over which user gets access to what feature is very essential because you wouldn’t like your guest contributors mess up with your posts or someone change something in your already running split testing campaigns.

This is a feature I so dang want Thrive themes guys bring up soon.

In the Role Editor, you have detailed control over what options each user role on your site can access.

This is especially important when it comes to the Divi Builder, where you might not want all user roles to have unfettered access:

Extra Divi Benefits: Divi’s Massive Third-Party Ecosystem

The Divi theme is insanely popular. And this fact leads to another benefit of using the Divi theme:

There’s a huge third-party ecosystem for support and Divi add-ons.

Beyond the Elegant Themes blog, which is an excellent source of Divi information by itself, you can also find tons of third-party Divi tutorial sites.

And beyond those tutorials, you can also find a plethora of third-party Divi plugins and add-ons that tack on even more functionality to an already powerful theme.

Did you know?

There’s a large community of Divi developers doing wonderful things to make the Divi user experience even better. One such plugin is ​the Divi Booster which makes your Divi theme even more faster by minifying the code, more customizable by giving 100s of new configurations and is easier to use. 

If you have an extra $19 to shell, you should definitely check it out.​​

What I Liked About Divi Theme? (Pros of using Divi Theme)

There’s a lot to like about the Divi theme. I’ll dig into these points in more detail in the hands-on section, but here’s a quick overview of the benefits of using Divi:

• The Divi Builder integrates perfectly into the Divi theme. Divi Builder is one of the best visual page builders out there, so this is a huge benefit.
• Secured theme coding that is certified by Sucuri.
• You can create any type of website because Divi is legitimately multipurpose.
• Because Divi uses the WordPress customizer, you can make changes to how your site looks and see a real-time preview. No annoying page reloads!
• There are tons of cool extra features like built-in A/B testing, the Divi Role Editor, and more.
• Multilingual with RTL support
• Vertical & Dot navigation styling
• Lots of third party child themes, plugins, free tutorials, and best of all a huge happy community which is there whenever you need so yes you are not alone.

Things That I Think Divi Could Improve On (Divi 3.o theme cons)

Since this Divi WordPress theme review is unbiased, here are the Divi cons that I wish they improve upon. My main criticism of Divi is something that you may well be familiar with if you’ve already spent some time Googling “Divi theme review”:

Shortcode lock-in.

The Divi Builder uses WordPress shortcodes to create its designs. That means if you ever want to stop using the Divi Builder, you’re going to have trouble with your old content.

Thankfully, this is less of a problem since Elegant Themes introduced a standalone Divi Builder plugin. With the standalone plugin, you can continue using the Divi Builder even if you change themes, and therefore preserve the design of your old content.

And, in my personal opinion, this is a lot safer than both:

1. having a bare HTML site that pushes the readers away, and
2. ​getting a site designed by a designer for maybe $5000 or $10,000 and then getting locked in that design unless you could afford another designer. Makes sense?

Divi Theme Price Review: How Much Is The Divi Theme?

Divi theme costs you $89 only for an annual subscription of the theme, divi builder, 86 other pre-built themes and 6 plugins. For unlimited access, Divi theme is $249 paid once which gives you lifetime access to the theme, support and all future updates.

In terms of pure value for the money, it’s hard to find anything better than Divi and the Elegant Themes membership.

When you join the Elegant Themes membership for $89, you not only get access to unlimited usage of the Divi Theme, but also all of Elegant Themes other plugins and themes including:

• Bloom email opt-ins
• Monarch social sharing
• Divi Builder (plugin version)
• Extra theme
• and Lots more

$89 for all of that value is crazy cheap.

While we’re big fans of Thrive Themes products here (you may notice that’s what we use), the cheapest that you can get a Thrive Themes membership for is $228. Compared to that, Divi and Elegant Themes is less than half the price.

And the icing on the cake?

You get access to tons of Divi theme tutorials (one published each day on their blog), free Divi goodies and Divi templates that you can download and use for free.

PRO TIP:

If you have a bit of higher budget I recommend (and use) purchasing the Elegant themes lifetime membership.

WHY?

Because with the lifetime membership, you get unlimited access to all their future updates and themes for just $249 paid once. If you buy the developer license or single Divi theme you pay $89 every year if you want regular updated.

So why not pay once and use forever and that too on unlimited sites?

​MAKES SENSE?

Icing on the cake is, you get an exclusive 10 % discount to further reduce the pricing to $224.

Divi Theme Review 2023: My Thoughts About Divi

Wish this, let’s wrap the Divi WordPress theme review.

Here are my closing thoughts on Divi:

The Divi Theme is a powerful multipurpose theme that makes it easy to create a detailed website without needing to know any code.

Excellent use of the WordPress Customizer makes it painless to style your base theme, and the Divi Builder helps you create complicated page designs without needing to know how to code.

There are some downsides – like shortcode lock-in. But, most users won’t ever experience problems with that, and the introduction of the Divi Builder plugin has done a good deal to mitigate the issue with lock-in.

When you consider the excellent overall value offered by the Elegant Themes Membership, I definitely recommend the Divi theme to anyone who wants to build a detailed WordPress site without needing to know how to code.

I hope you enjoyed my Divi theme review, and please leave a comment with any questions!

Divi Theme FAQs: All Your Questions Divi Answered