The first rule of Fight Club states that you don't talk about Fight Club. The good news is that WordPress Builder Fight Club is a different breed. It is easy to join, you can talk about it, and there is no Brad Pitt to hold (kick) you back.

At WP Builders Fight Club, all major page builders and website builders compete in a fair game to show their performance and abilities.

What is WP Builders Fight Club?

WP Builders Fight Club is a community-driven project for page builders and website builders to compete in terms of performance, design, and other capabilities.

The idea is simple, you need to create a WordPress page. But not any kind of page - the page needs to follow the Fight Club guidelines and requirements. The requirements include technical specifications and design accuracy.

All pages created with different builders are then stored in a similar environment. This helps to measure the performance and receive unbiased results. The results include reports from GTMetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights.

The goal of the project is simple - have an honest and transparent comparison of all major WordPress builders in one place.

As of today, there are all major page builders and website builders presented, including Elementor, Builderius, Beaver Builder, and Visual Composer.

WP Builders Fight Club and Visual Composer

We decided to join WP Builder Fight Club with Visual Composer. Visual Composer Website Builder is a complete solution that allows you to build WordPress sites without using the styling of any WordPress themes.

Our goal was to complete the challenge to showcase the capabilities of our visual site builder while not compromising on performance.

Our solution consisted of Visual Composer, Advanced Custom Fields, and SVG Support. We also had Twenty Twenty-Three theme installed (per WordPress guidelines) but did not use it. What makes Visual Composer stand out is that we will not load any theme files if you are using Theme Builder to avoid theme footprints on performance.
The page layout was built using Visual Composer Theme Builder where you can design headers and footers. In the layout, we used Advanced Custom Fields for dynamic content and custom CSS for additional styling.

Since Visual Composer is a low-code solution, web developers and agencies can easily tweak the look and feel of their sites using custom CSS and JavaScript. In the Fight Club challenge, we used custom CSS to introduce pixel-perfect image overlap.

For the content part, we used Visual Composer free and premium elements from the Visual Composer Hub (cloud element library). The library consists of hundreds of content elements and integrations which reduces the need for additional plugins and add-ons.

Results

With Visual Composer, we managed to score 98 performance points in GTMetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights. The score on mobile was a bit lower (88 points) which means there is room for improvement.

We also reached 100 points in the structure and high scores for accessibility and SEO. To be fair, we did not work on the SEO score as a part of the Fight Club challenge. Jumping into Visual Composer Insights and data attributes can easily help you to get 100 points in SEO.

If we compare Visual Composer with other major builders on the market, we see that we have scored higher than some well-known players and are among the top solutions among builders when it comes to performance.

If you’re curious, you can learn more details about how exactly the page was replicated, what challenges we faced, and how we overcame them.

As a web creator, you want to ensure that your client sites stay in shape long after you deliver the project.

Whether there is a plan to add the site to your portfolio or reduce the time your spend on maintenance - you want to avoid unwanted changes.

I've been a web designer for 10 years and can surely relate to that. In fact, client changes have always been one of my strongest fears.

It is much preferable to spend your time working on a new exciting project rather than fixing what should not have been broken.

To avoid issues, web developers tend to restrict access to certain parts of the site. Some are suspicious about WordPress since it gives lots of freedom.

But the cherry on top is page builders.

WordPress page builders give enormous flexibility to manipulate layouts - is it the default Gutenberg editor or a power tool like Visual Composer.

As a web creator, you can design anything - as a client, you can break it.

To deal with the hassle, I want to share three things that satisfy my “freelancer” needs and may help your agency to reduce risks and save time.

User role management

To build a decent website, we choose powerful tools with options tailored for professionals rather than beginners.

WordPress page builders allow web creators to design custom headers, footers, post templates and even incorporate custom CSS.

In fact, based on our research, up to 45% of all Visual Composer users love to use custom CSS in their projects.

These are essential things for every web developer but can be harmful in the hands of your clients.

What I love to do is disable advanced features for my clients which results in benefits for all of us.
From the agency's point of view, you are sure that your clients will not interfere with advanced features like post templates or page options.

As for the client, he/she will receive a simpler interface to manage the content.

We all know that there is a learning curve for every page builder - no matter what ads are telling you.

As a pro, you will get the basics in an hour and become a power user in a week. As a client, you may need days to cover the basics.

Plus, you can always enable features back or use role manager as your onboarding strategy.

The role manager has proven to be a very effective instrument for me and I highly recommend it to all web creators.

WordPress admin panel

Same as for the page builder, your WordPress admin panel could require a facelift.

And by facelift, I mean, it is worth reducing the number of sections available to users other than the Administrator.

To me, the WordPress admin panel has always been bloated when it comes to an average user. You, as a web creator, are in charge of setting the correct permalink structure, managing plugins, working with the Appearance, and so on.

All these options can be hidden from other users to lower the barrier.

While there is no specific favorite on my list, plugins like User Role Editor will do the job.

Last, but not least, sometimes it is worth considering removing the admin bar as well. Just to make things cleaner.

While there is surely a plugin for that, I would go with a simple code snippet to avoid bloating my clients' sites with micro plugins. All you have to do is add this small code snippet:

add_filter( 'show_admin_bar', '__return_false' );

Element and layout locking

Any page you make consists of the layout and content. The content management process is a process when a person interacts with the content to modify it to their liking.

But what if you can modify the layout as well? The border between layout and content disappears and your clients may try to interfere with your layout.

To avoid such a scenario, I use the element lock feature that allows literally locking any element, row, or section of your page to make it accessible only by the admin.

Though, I leave only essential elements that require constant updates open. Things like paragraphs and images are still accessible to the client while styled rows are out of the content management scope.

Just like with the role manager, clients simply don't have access to certain parts of the page. The number of controls is reduced and navigation becomes easier.

To get the most out of it, I lock all elements on the page and then unlock the ones I want clients to edit. Usually, there are more elements to lock than to leave unlocked.

It will require some time, but this is how you can get 100% safe when it comes to handling the project over to your client.

Outro

Does setting up user permissions and locking down elements sound like a lot of work to do?

Yes.

Most likely, you will have to spend several hours configuring settings and locking layouts.
Nevertheless, a web creator spends up to 10 hours weekly fixing bugs (roughly 25% of all your time). And we know - fixing bugs means stealing time from development.

While the user role manager and element lock may not solve all the problems, they can help to reduce the time you spend on unwanted maintenance.

The time that is critical for your agency's growth and success.

As with everything, you will start slower and have to wait for results to come. But, I can promise you one thing - your life get easier.

There is always someone talking about WordPress page builders and performance.

It's a hot topic that receives tons of attention. Conference speeches, blog posts, and even Facebook comments - everyone has a story to share.

No wonder, page builders are prioritizing performance as one of the focus areas. Some even share their success in a form you're all familiar with.

“Our page builder just became faster.”

But what does it really mean? Does it apply to everything that the page builder does?

I'm not in the position to talk about all page builders, but I can say a thing or two (probably more) about Visual Composer.

Today, I want to explore how performance “operates” in Visual Composer. What critical factors affect it and share some of the improvements we've implemented recently.

But before we begin…

This topic was born as the result of our internal educational session which means you have a chance to really look under the hood of Visual Composer.

Let's go.

Performance and resources

When talking about performance, it is important to understand where does it come from.

There are three main components (resources) that are “working” with performance.

It is Network, CPU, and RAM.

In addition, it can refer to either client or server sides.

What does it mean?

Whenever you work with the page builder, either your computer or server resources are consumed. The availability of those resources and optimizations on the page builder side will determine how fast (or slow) your experience is.

In the next chapter, I will present (and explain) the performance schema of Visual Composer. I will mark every block with the resources that are used within the process as followed:

• sNET - server-side network
• sCPU - server-side CPU
• sRAM - server-side RAM
• cNET - client-side network
• cCPU - client-side CPU
• cRAM - client-side RAM

Understanding the resources in use makes it easier for web creators to analyze whether the server requires optimization and how to boost the performance.

Visual Composer performance schema

There are three main blocks of performance we can distinguish:

• Requests
• User interface
• Server-side processing

As you can see from the schema, server-side processing mainly relies on server resources. Requests are a mix of both, while the user interface is highly impacted by the client-side.

We will look into the details of every block to get a more clear understanding.

Requests

All requests refer to the editor's saving and loading operations. The performance of the operations depends on both - the client and server.

The client needs a good network to perform the operation and the server should be able to process as fast as possible. Here, the main pressure lies on the server CPU.

In other words, shared hosting with a virtual CPU (serving many sites) may get you into trouble.

RAM is used for the PHP processes to store arrays and objects in memory. This means that large content blocks with multiple options enabled will consume a good portion of RAM and will have a significant impact on saving operations.

RAM size of at least 256 is much preferred.

To improve performance for these operations, optimization of data size is needed.

In Visual Composer, we have introduced a binary data format that allows us to send more data in a smaller size. This means that fewer server-side resources are spent on saving and loading.

Not all servers accept binary data. The problem usually occurs with Apache and some clients were not able to save the content because Apache refused to accept binary data.

For that, we have introduced an option to enable alternative base64 encoded saving. The method is slower but can be used by clients who are not able to use binary data.

User interface

All about the user interface is all about the client-side (mostly).

Element actions like, adding, removing, updating, and sorting (drag and drop) are managed by the client's browser.

Therefore, resources on your side are crucial.

Most of the user interface processes are consuming CPU power.

To optimize it, we rely on React and other modern technologies.

It is important to keep the framework up to date and perform regular component updates. In other words, keeping development debt low.

We found that technologies like React hooks can significantly improve the performance of these processes.

There, Visual Composer benefits from things like React hooks.

At the same time, hundreds and hundreds of elements will make operations like drag and drop costly.

Talking about rendering - a good network and CPU is needed. Since you need to load elements, images, CSS, and other assets - your network will experience a good amount of workload.

Loading components refer to how fast the server provides the information and how fast the client receives it. Both client and server network plays a significant role there.

To optimize the process, we are using package bundles in production.

Optimization of these bundles is crucial for Visual Composer.

One of the improvements we have introduced recently is gZip support. gZip allows reducing the size of the bundle up to 5 times which means that things will work 5 times faster.

Of course, your server should be able to operate with gZip which is not always the case and some legacy solutions are needed for some clients.

Server-side processing

Server-side processing refers to how fast your server operates with the data.

The time that is needed for the server to take data from the database and process it.

As you can guess, CPU and RAM play main roles there.

Talking about problems and risks, low memory limits can affect the speed of these operations. To avoid the issues, your server must be well optimized and has a sufficient amount of resources.

Outro

Performance is a tough topic and requires attention at different levels.

From the page builder perspective, this means following the latest technologies and introducing regular improvements.

On the web creator side, it is needed to ensure that your server is ready to work with the technologies offered by the page builder.

With both parties involved, performance issues go off the table.

We all know that changing fonts is important for branding, but it can be challenging and time-consuming. But not anymore! We are happy to announce that you can now easily change fonts on your site with a few clicks of a button.

Font Manager is an addon for Visual Composer premium users. Make sure to update to the latest version to access this feature! It allows you to choose any Google Font and apply it in seconds WITHOUT touching any CSS code.

You can use Font Manager to change default theme fonts globally (on your whole site at once) and choose from all Google Fonts! This means you can make your posts and pages look like anything you want them to be - clean, modern, elegant... the choices are limitless!

This latest version of Font Manager introduces responsive settings, to apply different font styling for different devices. We would be happy to hear your feedback, to help us improve it and make the next version even better!

What Features Font Manager Has To Offer?

The Font Manager feature list is constantly growing. We keep improving functionalities, features, and usability regularly. Greatly thanks to our dedicated Premium Visual Composer web creators who provide helpful insights by submitting feature requests on what they wish to see in the addon.

• Google Fonts. Select from all Google Fonts.
• Editing options. Get every aspect of your fonts to a T - change the size, style, color, height, spacings, margins, capitalization, and other elements for your typography settings globally.
• Responsive mode. Define font styles and other attributes for different devices.
• Smart preview. See how any changes would appear on the page instantly. The improved preview lets you select, view, and edit specific text parts from the preview for easier editing.
• Dark mode. Just like in TinyMCE editor, toggle between dark and light backgrounds for better accessibility.
• Menu and submenu. Control all typography settings for your 1st and 2nd level menus.
• Headings, paragraphs, and blockquotes. Change all fonts from most important to least important text elements and style each one as you wish.
• Captions. Customize the texts that appear under images.
• Bullets. Select bullet color and style from circles, squares, and lines.
• Buttons. Create a button font design that matches the whole feel of your website.
  Link Styling. In addition, you can control link styling for every single text element - choose the color, underline, and hover options for each one.

A sneak peek into future updates are Responsive controls in Font Manager in 3.0. You will be able to define the font size for specific devices.

How to Use Font Manager

You can get the Font Manager addon either by downloading it from the Visual Composer Hub or via the Visual Composer Dashboard - Font Manager section in your WordPress Admin Panel and find the font that best fits your theme.

Once you have navigated to the Font Manager, enable it to start the magic!

You can change the font, styling, and size of your headings, paragraphs, and blockquotes. Plus, you have the ability to switch the styling of your links as well (underlining and hover color options).

The Visual Composer Font Manager works with the Visual Composer layouts that you can choose from in the page settings in the frontend editor and Visual Composer Starter theme.

For additional options, you can also change the letter spacing and line height, margins, and capitalization (UPPERCASE, lowercase, or Capitalize) of your selected text sections and even improve page loading speed by including only required language subsets.

To make it easier to find the perfect design for your texts, the Font Manager provides a preview to see how any changes would look on your website. Once that's done, and you have found the right fit, save the changes.

Note: If you disable the Font Manager toggle button before saving and exit the Font Manager, all changes will be lost.

When to Use Font Manager

Choosing the right font for your or your client’s website might be tricky.

It's important to choose a font that matches your product, brand, or personal style because most likely you will be sticking to one or a selected few font styles (good practice) for a while.

The font you choose also affects the readability of your texts, so don't go too over the top when trying to find a unique font and applying styling to it. To help you stay within the guidelines of accessibility, which directly affect the user experience, check your color palettes with this app.

If you are still trying to figure out your style, look for some inspiration from our amazing websites made with Visual Composer.

And once you have found the perfect font and styled it, don't hesitate to share it with other Visual Composer users via our Facebook community.

Finally, a big request!! 

Once you had a chance to play with the new addon, we - the whole team would be extremely happy if you left your feedback below in the comments.

It will help us a lot in improving the Font Manager version 3.0 -- Thank you!!

The past year has introduced a lot of great features for Visual Composer Website Builder. But today, we are happy to announce that the latest update (41.0) brings in a new feature — the Layout Builder. This feature completes the Theme Builder functionality.

From this point on, you can create your own, completely custom layout templates (including headers, footers, and sidebars), and assign them globally, as well as individually for pages, posts, custom post types and archives. No more depending on theme-defined layouts or design. You have full creative control. And to put the cherry on top, you can manage every aspect of your website easily — from one place!

When it comes to cloud hosting, there’s no dearth of options available in the market - all of which are quick to swear customizable plans, maximum uptime, user-friendliness, and a score of other features they may or may not deliver. With a field growing as fast as web hosting, it takes a little extra oomph to stand out among the competition.

We checked out Cloudways, now a major player in the industry, to see how it lives up to its name. (Spoiler alert: we’re impressed enough to recommend it to all our Visual Composer users, whether you’re an agency or business owner, designer or developer, marketer or freelancer).

Let’s jump right in.

Cloudways Overview

Here’s the basic rundown off the bat: Cloudways offers managed hosting solutions with a spotlight shining bright on ease of use, choice, and performance. Activities like launching a server or application are incredibly simple to execute through 1-click operations, even for those of you who don’t have a degree in computer programming. Users get to choose between cloud providers, style of workflows, and extremely customizable hosting plans. And once you get your website running on Cloudways, the risk of your visitors seeing a 404 page all but vanishes.

In other words, the whole idea behind Cloudways is to leave the headache of server management to it, so you free up time to devote to your work instead.

What Cloudways Have Going For Them

Cloudways combines an excellent mix of features to optimize just about any site’s performance - agency, business, developer, or marketer. While it misses out on domain registration and email accounts, you’re likely to find it makes up for those in other aspects.

Ease of Use

From the get-go, it becomes quite obvious that Cloudways is explicitly designed to be easy to use. Signing up for either a 3-trial or a plan is a fast and simple process, as is creating a dedicated server. An average of ten minutes is all it takes to select the resources you need plus the server location (for best results, choose the one closest to your physical location). Installing an application is a matter of a few clicks on the user panel.

Cloudways’ 1-click installation for WordPress websites made in Visual Composer is sure to be a major draw - it eases the whole process even for developers. As for the user panel, it has a sleek design that’s easy to navigate, and which lets you monitor your server and applications, manage security settings, scale according to your needs, and more. And then there’s also access to SSH and FTP if you need to execute more complicated tasks on the server.

Customer Service and Technical Support

Cloudways offers round-the-clock customer support through its chat option that links you directly with a customer service representative. It took no longer than 5 seconds to reach someone ready to take a question from us. We asked them about the company’s hosting plans, its payment structure, and then some slightly more technical questions about the hosting stack and security.

However, speaking to a person is a more involved process - you first have to fill out a form to request a call.

Security

According to Cloudways, it’s fully encrypted end-to-end and releases regular updates to the firmware and operating system. They also offer free SSL certificates - a must for all our e-commerce and online store operators - and all accounts come with a host of security features including firewalls, bot protection, two-factor authentication, and more.

Advanced Features

As mentioned above a few times, Cloudways uses its 1-Click operation to great effect. We especially liked how easy it was to scale server resources with just a few clicks. This is bound to be a great help whenever you experience an uptick in traffic and need to adjust your resources. Even if you’re only scaling for a week or so, like for Black Friday, their pay-as-you-go system means you’ll only be paying for the resources you consume.

We’re also big fans of Cloudways’ server monitoring, which makes it simple for even non-tech savvy users to monitor a number of variables like Idle CPU and incoming traffic, all in easy-to-read graph form. You can surveil RAM, CPU, bandwidth, disk storage, database, and caching services using the relevant monitoring section of the server. What’s more, Cloudways has server monitoring alerts enabled across all servers and accounts, so you remain aware of non-contact with the server before your site visitors do.

Oh, and you can set up automatic backups as often as you like, or manually back up your server with - you guessed it - one click.

Performance and Speed

Here’s where Cloudways really excels.

If you use their services, the WordPress site you make with Visual Composer will be hosted on probably the fastest WordPress hosting stack out there. Cloudways claims their uptime is 99.99%, and their loading speeds average out to 400 to 600 milliseconds. And that’s about how it worked for us.

Take a look at Visual Composer running on GTMetrix, Pingdom, and PageSpeed Insight here. We chose a Vultr server and tested a VC website on those tools.

Resources that we used

GTMetrix Performance Analysis

Performance: 100%
Structure: 96%
LCP: 569ms
TBT: 0ms
CLS: 0

Pingdom Performance Analysis

Performance Grade: 87
Page Size: 968.4 KB
Load Time: 295 ms
Requests: 33

PageSpeed Insight Performance Analysis

Overall Grade: 99
FCP: 0.4s
Speed Index: 1.9s
LCP: 0.9s
TTI: 0.4s
TBT: 0ms
CLS: 0

Note: We used Cloudways managed WordPress hosting with dedicated servers and built-in cache plugins.

Part of the reason behind their performance is Cloudways’ partnership with five of the top cloud providers in the industry: Digital Cloud, Vultr, Linode, Google Cloud, and AWS. Plus, you can scale your server as your website grows and receives more traffic - all you have to do is allocate more RAM with 1-click. Those of you who spring for the Cloudways CDN will see further reduced latency as well. Then there’s the optimized stack consisting of Apache, NGINX, MySQL/MariaDB, all of which combine to produce a supersonic hosting environment.

You can read more about how Cloudways drastically improves uptime through one of their clients’ success stories here.

Setting Up Your Visual Composer Site On Cloudways

Setting up on Cloudways is quite an intuitive process - launching your website is just a question of a few clicks. After selecting your cloud provider, you get to configure your server. Cloudways helps in this regard by suggesting a server size that would be able to handle your hosting needs based on your anticipated page view numbers. Or you can straight up specify your specifications in terms of bandwidth, RAM, processors, and storage.

We’ll show you the process of setting up your Visual Composer site on Cloudways, and we’ll also take you through the manual installation if that’s what you prefer.

System Requirement for Visual Composer

Server and WordPress Requirements

• Recommended PHP 7.2 or higher
• MySQL version 5.6 or higher (you can also run WordPress on MariaDB 10.0 or higher)
• HTTPS support (this has become mandatory in terms of good SEO)

Browser Requirements

• Safari
• Edge
• Chrome
• Firefox
• iOS Safari

Devices Requirements

• Mobile
• Tablet
• Laptop
• Desktop

Note: Visit the Visual Composer system requirement page for more details.

Launch Visual Composer on Cloudways in 1-Click

Go to the Cloudways partnership page on Visual Composer and click on the Get Started button.

You’ll be redirected toward the Cloudways x Visual Composer page.

Click Launch Visual Composer Free, fill the signup form and click on the Start Free button.

If you already have an account on Cloudways, then you can directly log in.

After successfully logging in to the Cloudways platform, click on the Add Server button. In the Application and Server Details section, you’ll see an option to select the WordPress application with Visual Composer. Enter the managed app and server names and select the project. This will enable your servers. You can then select the server according to your required size, specification, and location.

You can always scale your server size whenever required. At the bottom, you can see the hourly and monthly rates of the server. Launch the server according to your preferences.

After the server installation, click on the www option to access the application. The application management section will show you all the details related to your application. Go to the admin panel to access your WordPress Visual Composer website with the given URL, username, and password.

After logging into the WordPress website, you’ll see Visual Composer is already installed on your site.

Launch Visual Composer Manually on WordPress

While there’s no need to install Visual Composer manually given the 1-click process, the manual installation process isn’t too hard either.

1. Login to your WordPress website and go to WordPress Dashboard
2. Navigate to the Plugin option
3. Click on an Add New Plugin button
4. Search the plugin on the right-side search bar
5. Install the Visual Composer plugin
6. Activate it after installation

Once you’re done with that, you can edit your WordPress site pages with Visual Composer. All WordPress sites are equipped with a pre-installed and pre-configured Breeze cache plugin to boost speed and performance. The server is optimized through Varnish.

Why Doesn’t Cloudways Use cPanel?

That Cloudways doesn’t use cPanel might come as a disappointment to some users, but to be honest, we found its control panel to be a cut above. Yes, cPanel is a popular tool for both first-time and professional users. But it’s a clunky tool - a visual mess that’s hard to navigate. Multiple aspects of its functionality are outdated, and the Cloudways control panel easily eclipses those.

For instance, cPanel does not offer in-built server monitoring tools. Instead, cPanel users have to purchase tools like MycPAdmin to secure their servers or download free services such as Munin. Cloudways, on the other hand, offers ready server monitoring. Since this is a fully managed hosting provider service, you don’t have to worry about the hassles of server operation at all.

We’ve also run into our share of speed, functionality, and security issues with cPanel. Its limited usage has often caused hosting lags, particularly if you start to go over their limit. In fact, it’s almost too easy to get kicked off the service if your usage is too high. And the end-user is responsible for installing a firewall, configuring SSL, and actively looking out for malware plugins that target cPanel security. All of these are non-issues for Cloudways whose dedicated resources allow for much faster hosting, and have integrated security at all levels of the platform.

Then there are the automatic backup limitations. While cPanel’s Dedicated Hosting and VPS plans do allow for automatic backups, the same does not hold true for all versions of the hosting service. And users with Reseller or Shared accounts cannot use their cPanel interface to automatically restore a full backup; they instead have to submit tickets to cPanel’s Support department. This is very much in contrast to Cloudways’ more modern control panel – with this, you’re just a few clicks away from setting up automatic backups.

Plus, cPanel is sadly bereft of WP-CLI, which makes it so much easier for WordPress users to accomplish tasks like taking database backups and upgrades and managing numerous WordPress plugins, making it quite the nifty service. Utilizing WP-CLI on cPanel involves a difficult multi-stage installation process first. And it’s entirely possible that WP-CLI does not function with your WordPress install if a theme or plugin is conflicting with the load process. Cloudways, on the other hand, has WP-CLI pre-installed, thus negating the problem of conflicts with themes or other plugins on your site. Cloudways even has additional resources to help you get started, so you can manage WordPress plugins easily using WP-CLI.

For the TL;DR version, Cloudways easily scores above cPanel in terms of visual layout, ease of use, and advanced features.

Customize Your Cloud Hosting Plan

Perhaps what we liked best about Cloudways was the flexibility and choice it offers in terms of cloud hosting servers. They offer you a choice between five of the very best providers: DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, Amazon Web Services, or Google Cloud Platform. And it’s quite easy to move from one cloud provider to another, so if you realize down the line that Vultr’s the one for you, you can move to it from any of the others. That said, performance on each cloud doesn’t differ much, thanks to the overlaying Cloudways infrastructure.

Cloudways also offers pay-as-you-go rates, as mentioned earlier. What this means is that there are no restrictions on the number of websites you want to host, or installations, or traffic. You can scale as you like according to your requirements, and you’ll only pay for what you’ve consumed.

Cloudways vs the Competition

Cloudways faces some pretty stiff competition in the hosting industry. Managed hosting providers like Kinsta, Siteground and WPEngine offer some excellent services as well and have their fair share of loyal fans. Of course, depending on your requirements and preferences, you might find one of those providers better. But we found Cloudways offers more value and better services for your Visual Composer website.

In fact, Cloudways consistently outperforms all three of the providers we mentioned in terms of ease of use, quality of support, and ease of setup, according to G2.com. It offers more choices of hosting providers, much more affordable rates across the board, and better scalability.

We found there are considerable performance gaps between Cloudways and the rest. Kinsta offers less control over your site and servers. Siteground has a reputation for not being able to handle larger websites. On the starter plan, Cloudways offers 1TB of bandwidth, and WPEngine only 50GB. Of course, all these hosting providers have their own competitive edges. But on the whole, we’d recommend Cloudways first to our Visual Composer users.

Verdict

Count us converts. We’re won over by the performance of WordPress and Visual Composer sites on Cloudways, and by how it hands easy to control for web creators to save time and work more efficiently. Their customer service is excellent, and their speed and uptime are unrivaled. Their scaling mantra lets you grow your website as you need, and the server management is a breeze, as is the setup process. If you’re in the market for a hosting provider, you can’t go wrong with this.

Halloween 2021 is creeping right around the corner. Have you put your WordPress website in a “costume” yet?

People always appreciate when companies get creative with their websites for holidays. Just look at Google for example, and how well they “dress up” for each occasion. Doing so is a good way to drive traffic to your site and higher conversion rates with clever campaigns.

If you don't have anything planned, we got your back! ​​We have already listed all the Visual Composer features, elements, and templates to make your website Halloween-ready once before. But, with these following easy WordPress Halloween website tips, tricks and ideas - your web presence will be the most festive (and bone-chilling) of them all.

Are you looking to figure out how WordPress widgets work? Most WordPress users are not aware that widgets are the hidden gems of WordPress.

WordPress does a lot of stuff for you, and managing widgets is one of them! But, if you want to take control over your website design it's important to know how they work.

In this blog, we will cover what WordPress widgets are, where they live on your site, and why they are so awesome!

The Purpose of WordPress Widgets

Widgets are tools with different functionalities to help you manage and display content on your site for easy access on the user side. The areas (most typically the sidebar, menu area, or footer) where you can add widgets on your site are defined by your selected WordPress theme.

You can install different third-party widgets via the Plugins section in your WordPress Admin Dashboard or from the WordPress Plugin Directory. You can also check out this guide to free WordPress widgets to see which ones would fit your site best.

There are so many widgets that all serve different purposes, but we can break them down into two categories:

• Default WordPress widgets, such as archives, calendars, categories, latest comments and posts, social icons and feeds, search bar, video player, and more.
• Additional widgets that come bundled with themes and plugins, such as contact forms, galleries, weather, location, testimonials, reviews, polls, live chats and so much more.

Some popular widgets that come in handy are:

• WP Forms
• Mail Chimp
• Ninja Forms
• Contact Forms 7
• Envira Gallery
• WooCommerce

Note: All of the plugins mentioned above also are integrated into the Visual Composer Website Builder. Which is also compatible with all of the top WordPress plugins and themes.

Adding Widgets to Widget Areas

After installing WordPress widgets you will have them all listed on your WordPress site and ready to use.

This tutorial explains how to navigate your widgets in the new block-based widget editor for WordPress 5.8, as well as in versions before that. Both editors are similar and also offer to manage widgets in the live preview, for easier operating.

In WordPress 5.8

To add widgets to your designated-widget-areas follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Appearance and select Widgets in your WordPress Admin Dashboard;
2. Select an area where to display widgets (depending on the theme in use - these areas may vary);
3. Click on the + icon either in your selected area or next to Widgets (top left corner of widget editor);
4. Drag widgets from widget list and drop them in the selected area;
5. Click Update to save changes.

Note: You can edit, rearrange and remove widgets by simply clicking on them, and selecting from a list of available editing options.

In versions pre WordPress 5.8

To add widgets to your designated-widget-areas follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Appearance and select Widgets in your WordPress Admin Dashboard;
2. Select area where to display widgets (the right side of the screen);
   
3. Drag widgets from the left side to the widgets area;
   
4. Save changes.

Note: If you prefer to use the previous widget editor format you can downgrade to an older version manually or by using plugins. While it is possible, we do not recommend using outdated versions, as it subjects your site to vulnerabilities.

Adding WordPress Widgets to a Page

Adding widgets to the sidebar, menu, or footer (for most themes) is a native process for WordPress. But what if you need to add a custom widget to your page content areas (or anywhere else) instead? With the WordPress Widget content element, it is simple:

With Visual Composer, you can add WordPress default and custom widgets in any place of your layout more intuitively.

Also, Visual Composer offers over 500 content elements, designer-made templates, addons, and integrations to create a stunning website that your clients can manage themselves!

With Visual Composer, there is no coding required (for non-tech-savvy users). Yet, it is possible to add custom code, as well as create custom elements via API (Developer-friendly). And, best of all - it helps create SEO-friendly and high-performing websites while saving precious time.

Ending Thoughts

WordPress widgets are a great way to add more functionality to your WordPress site for your visitors to enjoy! 

Widgets can be managed easily from within the WordPress Admin Dashboard, both in the latest versions of WordPress (5.8) and in versions before that.

And even better, you can manage your widgets, layouts, and design of your website more easily with Visual Composer. Which has helped build over 90 000 blogs, portfolios, business sites, and online stores worldwide!

One of the first things you need to do when building a website is to choose a theme.

A theme defines the styling of your entire website. The difference between a theme and a template is that a template controls the layout of a single page, and a theme consists of several different templates.

While choosing a theme with a cool design might be a priority, you should always consider choosing functionality and performance over style. But of course, some themes offer both!

This tutorial will walk you through the step-by-step process of customizing your theme with:

• Theme Customizer
• Visual Composer Website Builder
• Theme Editor (via coding)

So, let's dive right in!

How to Choose a WordPress Theme

Before we get started, you need an appropriate theme that suits your brand and makes your website perform efficiently. The reason you should be wary of what theme you choose is that there are tens of thousands of themes for WordPress out there, and not all of them are optimized.

When selecting your theme, you should have a list of features, a layout preference, and a purpose in mind - are you creating a blog, portfolio, or an online store perhaps?

Although selecting a multi-feature theme might be tempting, it's not worth risking your website performance. Luckily, WordPress allows you to find the perfect starter theme (free versions only) by filtering out the ones which match your selected features:

1. Go to your WordPress Admin Dashboard;
2. Navigate to Appearance and select Themes from the dropdown menu;
3. You will be redirected to your theme library, on the top of the page click Add New;
4. From the list of tabs, select Feature Filter and apply the features you need.

When choosing your theme, look for these factors:

• Responsiveness to all devices is a key core web vital.
• SEO-friendliness helps to rank higher in search engines and increase traffic to your website.
• Minimalistic design, that means a site is lightweight and will load faster.
• Accessibility is a big factor in making your website accessible and navigable for all users.

We would recommend choosing these WordPress themes:

• Visual Composer Starter Theme is a simple yet beautiful theme, perfect for portfolios or online businesses, that is SEO friendly and responsive.
• Astra is one of the fastest loading multipurpose themes that work great with Yoast and WooCommerce integrations.
• Kadence WP - a good theme choice for creating not only a beautiful and fast-loading but also an accessible website.

As Pablo Picasso once said: “Good artists copy, great artists steal”. So if you have a website whose design & layout you adore, you can detect the WordPress theme and plugins in use.

Note: In case you want to purchase a premium theme we recommend going to Theme Forest for quality themes.

Customize a WordPress Theme with Theme Customizer

To customize a WordPress theme you can use the theme options available in Theme Customizer. It is a default way on how to make visual changes to your theme by using options from default and a custom list.

Note: Custom options are the options that have been added to your theme via theme author.

To access Theme Customizer:

1. Access your WordPress Admin Dashboard;
2. Navigate to Appearance and select Customize from the dropdown menu;
   
3. You will be redirected to Theme Customizer where you can make changes;
   
4. Click Save & Publish to confirm changes.

Note: The customization options (for example, making changes to the background, fonts & style, headers, footers, sidebars, etc.) vary depending on the theme.

Customize a WordPress Theme with Visual Composer

Customizing your WordPress theme with a website builder is the most effective way to do it! Because, not only what you see is what you get, but also it offers a wider variety of customization options for your whole website (including the theme).

Visual Composer is one of the most advanced website builders, as it offers automatic responsiveness to all devices, a clean code resulting in faster loading, and overall greater performance for your website! Nevertheless, the front-end editor is compatible with all of the most popular WordPress themes and plugins, such as Yoast and WooCommerce.

The drag-and-drop interface is intuitive and lets you build your site without any coding or technical knowledge. Also, it’s a great solution, if you want to build websites for your clients that they can manage themselves.

With Visual Composer, you can overwrite any theme by changing the layout and background of your page (if you wish to change the theme’s default settings) as well as apply pre-made templates for faster results. All you have to do is add content to it, and ta-da, your page is ready!

Check out this quick video on how you can get started with Visual Composer:

Keep in mind that the color combinations you choose for your theme have an effect on how your brand is perceived, and raise certain emotions in visitors, so check out this guide to colors and color palettes, beforehand.

Note: Visual Composer Website Builder also offers Theme Integration, so if you are a theme author, check it out!