For years, page builders like Elementor earned their place in agency workflows by letting clients manage their own sites without touching code. That argument is weakening as AI coding tools change the speed equation — and a thread on r/WordPress this week captures the shift in real terms.
One agency owner described reaching a tipping point after using Claude Code, an AI-powered coding assistant, to generate blocks and layout patterns far faster than a drag-and-drop builder allowed. The gains were enough to offset losing Elementor’s visual flexibility — particularly for clients who rarely used the editing tools anyway.
The thread quickly drew responses from developers who had made similar moves, with most pointing toward Full Site Editing (FSE) — WordPress’s native block-based approach to building entire sites, including headers, footers, and templates — as the natural destination. The most common questions centred on which starting point makes FSE practical for mixed teams where some users are non-developers.
Losing some of the freedom to edit quickly or build without code is much less of a loss compared to the time and efficiency gained from having Claude Code do the majority of the driving when it comes to creating blocks and patterns.
r/WordPress
On the theme side, community responses pointed to two main options: WordPress’s own Twenty Twenty-Five, which ships with broad FSE support out of the box, and Kadence, a third-party theme that pairs FSE compatibility with a more structured starting point that some developers find easier to hand off to clients. Several respondents noted that Kadence in particular offers a middle ground — non-developers can add blocks and edit content without guessing at front-end results, even if they cannot restyle the site freely.
The broader concern raised in the thread is about where page builders fit in a landscape where AI can generate custom block patterns and PHP templates on demand. According to the thread’s original poster, Elementor’s built-in AI features have not kept pace with standalone tools, making the builder feel like a slower path rather than a faster one. The thread attracted enough agreement to suggest the conversation is happening in more than one studio.
For agencies heavily invested in WordPress, a full CMS switch to a headless alternative remains a hard sell — the ecosystem lock-in is real. FSE with an AI coding assistant offers a path that keeps WordPress at the centre while removing the dependency on a page builder license and its associated performance overhead — the render-blocking scripts, inline CSS bloat, and additional HTTP requests that page builders typically add.
The practical challenge is rebuilding client handoff workflows around the block editor, which has historically drawn criticism for feeling less intuitive than visual builders. Getting that transition right is where most of the community discussion currently sits.
