In this review, we will be taking a look at one of our team's favorite WordPress themes on the market: Divi!
Created by one of the biggest names in the WordPress ecosystem, Elegant Themes poured everything into developing Divi, with beautiful results.
Divi is Elegant Themes' magnum opus, a ridiculously flexible yet easy to use WordPress theme. Our fondness for this theme is an opinion shared by millions, as it is currently one of the most popular WordPress themes worldwide.
As a web design company, we have been using Divi for the longest time, crafting hundreds of websites using Divi, stretching and testing its capabilities every time.
If you're looking to get started with WordPress themes, follow along as we deconstruct and review all aspects of Divi.
Introduction
The History of Divi
The Divi WordPress theme first launched way back in 2008, but has since gone through numerous major updates & improvements – leaving it almost unrecognizable from the original product. To this day, Divi is still being regularly updated, ensuring the newest cutting edge features, security, and ironing out any bugs.
This review will be referencing to the latest update of Divi, version 4.8.2
A full log of Divi's updates can be found here.
What is Divi?
Divi is a theme for WordPress, a content management system used to create websites. Without themes, your WordPress website will just be a cold, boring, husk that nobody likes to look at – however, using themes (especially Divi) flips this on it's head.
Divi aims to be a multipurpose theme, covering your designing needs for almost any kind of website you can dream up.
Divi is split into two forms: the WordPress theme, and the Divi Plugin (also known as the Divi Builder.) The beauty of this, is that using the Divi Plugin allows you to still utilize Divi's page builder functionality – regardless of what theme you're using.
So if you've already got a theme in place on your WordPress site, don't fear, you can still make use of the best of Divi – including website layouts and templates, and split testing, to name a few.
With that being said, let's get to the fun part – let's dive into Divi's features.
Divi Features
Website layout template gallery
To aid you in speeding up the process of building a website, Divi comes pre-packaged with more than 800 premium-quality templates for several pages, including welcome pages, about us pages, 404 pages and much more.
This is great news for novice web-designers, or invididuals looking to design their own website, as it takes away a lot of design efforts and time. Of course, using these templates means your website will not look unique, as thousands of other Divi users share these templates with you.
These templates range anywhere from corporate websites & personal trainer websites to eCommerce stores.
Take a look at the Divi Library to see what templates tickle your fancy.
Divi Builder
When you're not using templates – you're going to be using the Divi Builder to create designs from scratch. This tool has been extensively tested and updated throughout the years and is now a potent page builder for WordPress.
The Divi Builder makes use of rows and columns to help you construct your page layouts. After creating a layout, you can insert Divi's Modules into them. Modules serve as the building blocks of Divi's Builder. There are 40+ “modules” available that you can easily add and edit. These modules include buttons, sliders, galleries, testimonials, blogs, and much, much more. These modules can be completely customized, ensuring that they fit your website design pixel perfectly.
Divi Builder is powered by React, a JavaScript library that ensures real-time visual updates. The days of refreshing pages over-and-over to see a change that you made on your site – Divi does it all on the fly.
All of this might seem amazing – but isn't it overwhelming for new users?
The price of all these shiny features and funcionalities is the relatively steep learning curve of mastering the new interface. Divi Builder's interface is in no way weak or hard to understand – but it is however quite different to the default WordPress one, which might leave some users confused. However, after a few hours of testing and playing around, you should be able to maneuver your way around Divi Builder confidently.
Divi Theme Builder
Theme Builder is a new feature that was added in Divi 4.0 – this addition allows complete control over every aspect of your webpage, letting you alter previously rigid elements.
For example, before the Theme Builder's addition, the ability to create customer headers and footers in the Divi Theme was unheard of.
The beauty of the Theme Builder, is that you're going to be using the same interface as in the page editor, meaning there's no need to re-learn anything!
Divi Leads
When it comes to building a website, one of the major reasons people decide to invest in one, is to generate more revenue. Divi Leads jumps in here to aid, helping you to get good leads to grow your customer base.
Divi Leads was inspired by one of Elegant Themes' other products, the Bloom WordPress Plugin. Bloom is an email opt-in plugin that allows you to conveniently generate leads for your online business. Divi Leads takes this idea, and goes well beyond Bloom – even incorporating a split-testing feature!
Even the tiniest optimization in your website's lead-generation can cause drastic improvements, which makes Divi Leads a welcome surprise – as lead-generation and split-testing functionalities in a WordPress theme is quite uncommon!
Let's take a look at a scenario you might want to utilize Divi Lead's split testing function. In a nutshell, split testing is when you compare two versions of a web page – to see what resonates with your visitors the best.
Every split test you conduct has a goal, like clicking on a specific link, or maybe a button. Once the split test starts gathering data around these queries, you can find out which version of the page was most successful in reaching your goals.
But split testing with only two variables at a time sounds super tedious, doesn't it? Luckily Divi Leads doesn't limit you to comparing only two versions of a page – this makes it possible to test many variations at once, even running multiple split tests at the same time to ensure highest possible conversion rates.
And after this extensive testing, Divi Leads even lets you analyze and pick apart results, presenting said results with beautiful visual graphs.
Is Divi Secure?
Over the years, WordPress has had its fair share of security vulnerabilities – and Divi is no stranger to security concerns either. Back in July of 2020, a remote-code execution vulnerbility was identified in Divi, which left almost 700,00 websites open to attacks.
However, Elegant Themes does a great job of putting out fires, quickly responding to any security issues with swift patches to iron out any flaws.
Expert WordPress security company Sucuri has also audited Divi's code, accrediting Divi as safe.
Divi User Support – Is it any good?
In the past, the chink in Divi's armour would have been the lacking post-purchase user support. The proccess went as follows: If you had a question or query, you would have to visit a private discussion forum and wait around for Elegant Themes to notice your thread and reply. This proccess is just as tedious and slow as it sounds, and customers grew even more and more frustrated as their questions got ignored.
Luckily, Elegant Themes have made an effort to overcome this issue – They employed a huge team of technical support agents, ensuring all your queries get resolved, as well as getting rid of the support forum in favor of a one-on-one live messenger service.
Purchasing Divi automatically gives you access to full support from Elegant Themes.
Divi Community Forums
Even though Elegant Themes have now switched over to live messenger support in favour of using forums, their discussion forms are still alive and well. This is the perfect breeding ground for Divi site ideas, as users can inspire and innovate among each other.
Divi User groups are also abundant on social media, with many active Facebook groups dedicated to Divi and other Elegant Themes products. Users often share useful tips and advice in their creative endeavors using Divi.
Divi User Documentation
Another gleaming highlight about Elegant Themes and Divi specifically, is their robust user documentation! Every feature and functionality of Divi is crammed into this online documentation, filled to the brim with answers for just about any question you can think about. Their blog, is also jam-packed with tips and tricks on how to make the most out of Divi, as well as showing off some beautiful Divi sites to spark inspiration.
Divi for eCommerce
While it's not news that Divi can create jaw-dropping sites with unique and beautiful visuals, how does it compare to other themes from an eCommerce point of view?
Divi's WooCommerce Modules give you the ability to completely customize and style WooCommerce elements through the Divi builder. This allows you to use the powerful Divi builder to craft beautiful custom product pages from scratch. To do this without Divi is tedious, as you would have to resort to using custom CSS to modify and manipulate WooCommerce page templates, with some elements even being completely uneditable.
Using the Divi Builder, a GUI is used when editing a product – making it easy for newer users to understand and explore these Woo modules. There are more than 60 Woo modules available through Divi, for example, the Woo Breadcrumb Module – which lets you add and completely customize your breadcrumb navigation indicator. Breadcrumb navigation is very useful for giving customers an idea of where they are inside your online store.
Moving back to the front end, your new Woo modules are now visible, and easily editable by simply clicking on whatever you choose to change. Clicking on a product image while editing with Divi, provides you with a large range of options, such as displaying a “SALE” badge, displaying a gallery of images, or even removing the product image completely in some cases.
Divi's WooCommerce modules aren't limited to just product pages, you can place them on any page throughout your website's hierarchy too. For example – are you raving about a new producton your store in a blog post? Why not add an add-to-cart Woo Module at the end and link the product to allow customers to check out even from your blog page!
Here are some examples of stunning product pages created with Divi and WooCommerce:
VIEW A LIVE DEMO OF THIS PRODUCT PAGE
VIEW A LIVE DEMO OF THIS PRODUCT PAGE
How much does Divi cost?
Divi is an affordable WordPress theme, especially if you consider all the extra products you get access to. It isn’t much more expensive than some of the other best-selling options out there, including those that don’t come with any additional products.
For what you're getting with Divi, it's an affordable WordPress theme. Note that when you purchase Divi, it's bundled with all other Elegant Themes products, all of which are super useful. Divi's price is among the same price of other best-selling themes, even those that do NOT include additional products like Divi.
Divi has two pricing options available:
Yearly access, as the name implies, gives you access to Divi, and all other Elegant Themes products for a year. Whereas lifetime access grants you a permanent copy of all Elegant Themes products, including future releases, support, and updates.
For companies concerned about security risks, it is advised to purchase lifetime access to Divi, which gives you access to updates that might include crucial security fixes. You would also be missing out on brand new features and fixes that Divi constantly pushes out as updates, too.
If you're still uncertain about Divi, and want to test the waters, a 30-day money-back guarantee is given, that lets you use all of Elegant Theme's products, risk-free.
Final Thoughts
Divi is an amazing product that you can purchase, knowing you'll get a bang for your buck. With over 700,00 purchases in the last few years, very few of those customers have been left disappointed.
It gives you the potential to improve your productivity while designing, as well as guaranteeing a phenomenal end result. The graphical interface is beautiful yet simple, allowing anyone to make their vision a reality.
