We've built websites on Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, Shopify, custom React, and a dozen other platforms. After years of testing, we've standardized on WordPress with Divi 5 for the vast majority of our clients — and we have specific, data-driven reasons for that choice.

This isn't a sponsored post. Elegant Themes doesn't pay us. We use this stack because it consistently delivers the best outcomes for our clients: faster build times, lower ongoing costs, better SEO performance, and — critically — sites that clients can actually manage themselves without calling us every time they need to change a phone number.

Why WordPress

WordPress powers 43% of all websites on the internet. That market share exists for good reasons: it's the most flexible, most extensible, and most well-supported CMS ever built. The plugin ecosystem means there's a solution for virtually any functionality requirement. The hosting options range from $5/month shared hosting to enterprise-grade managed WordPress infrastructure.

For local businesses and media companies specifically, WordPress's SEO capabilities — particularly with Yoast or RankMath — are unmatched by any other platform at a comparable price point. The ability to fully control every SEO element, from schema markup to canonical tags to XML sitemaps, is critical for the local SEO work we do for our clients.

Why Divi 5 Specifically

Divi 5 is a complete rebuild of the Divi page builder on a React foundation. It's faster, more flexible, and more capable than its predecessor — and it's significantly better than competing page builders like Elementor or Beaver Builder for our specific use cases.

The key advantages for our workflow:

  • Visual editing — clients can make content changes without touching code
  • Theme builder — full control over headers, footers, and global elements
  • Performance — Divi 5's output is significantly cleaner than Divi 4
  • Template library — a starting point for every project that we customize rather than build from scratch
  • One license, unlimited sites — the economics work for an agency building multiple client sites

When We Don't Use This Stack

WordPress + Divi isn't right for every project. E-commerce businesses with complex inventory management are better served by Shopify. Applications that require real-time data, user accounts, or complex business logic need a custom development approach. And for very simple brochure sites with no ongoing content needs, a static site generator can be more appropriate.

But for the local service businesses, media companies, and radio stations that make up the majority of our client base, WordPress + Divi 5 is the right tool for the job — and we're confident enough in that assessment to standardize our entire workflow around it.