As WordPress’ Full Site Editing functionality aggressively moves forward, there have been a lot of discussions around what is going to happen to the page builder market.
Ironically, as the block editor and FSE have become more mature, there are more page builders than ever!
When work started on the block editor and FSE there were, maybe, five well-known page builders. Now, there’s at least double that number.
But FSE (full-site editing) is becoming more and more capable. So what will happen to all these builders?
For now we believe that there are only a couple of paths that they can take to remain relevant:
Better UI But Deploy Blocks
In this scenario the page builders would actually morph to deploy blocks. The UI for most page builders are far superior to the current block editor. And their components (and related 3rd party components) are far far better.
So, why not keep their superior editing experience, but when the page/post/parts are saved, they are saved with the components being WordPress blocks?
Is this technically possible? We think so but likely will take major re-engineering on the part of the builders and will break backwards compatibility.
Keep Going As Is
WordPress has basically locked in the block editor editing experience for the next few years. Which means that there is going to be a market for a better page and post building experience for at least that time period.
So over the next, say 5 years, there’s probably nothing to worry about.
After that, maybe the core WordPress devs will get a clue, hire a UX expert and fix the block editor / FSE experience.
What About The Smaller Builders?
How many new sales/renewals are required each year to sustain active development for a page builder? We don’t know the answer since it’s not the business we’re in. But whatever that minimum is, we would expect that the market share for the smaller builders will trend DOWN towards that level and then below it – which means that those builders will exit the market.
We suspect at least one will pivot and do something really innovative. But there’s no way to tell which one that will be.
So, if you’re a customer not using a ‘top 5’ page builder, you’re likely going to regret it. As FSE matures and start to take on more page-builder like functions, the smaller ones are most likely to become unprofitable and fall by the wayside.
Wrapup
The above is just an opinion that’s not deeply held. They’re more like ‘deep thoughts’ and ruminations on an important subset of the WordPress add-ons marketplace. It will be interesting to look back on this post in a few years and see how accurate it was.
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