If you’ve been building websites for yourself or your clients, chances are you’ve heard of Divi 5.
It’s one of the best all-round WordPress premium themes I’ve found so far.
A short history of Divi
Divi has been around since late 2013, when guys at Elegant Themes decided this is the way to go. They’ve produced a number of WordPress themes before Divi, and they were good. Just nothing like Divi.
I’ve joined Divi users in 2017, soon after version 3.0 was released. It looked great as an all-round solution to create almost anything one could think of, and it was.
A number of developers saw the potential and created numerous third-party solutions, like plugins and layouts, that made Divi relatively easy to use and made many things possible.
Divi 4 brought the theme builder functionality in 2019. It allowed us to create layouts that were used all over the website, and many of us were tremendously happy to use it everywhere.
Divi was great to create a simple site fast. Using the theme builder and certain third-party solutions any site was available in a few days.
It was also relatively forgiving and let the users use it with not too much training, so web designers could safely hand their creations over to them.
But it had one problem that was obvious when your website has grown a little.
Divi was built on shortcodes – a functionality brought over from WordPress, a very powerful thing by itself. But in reality, when used within a theme, it started to show problems and limitations. For one, Divi’s Visual Builder was notorious for becoming slower and slower as your sites and Divi’s functionalities grew. In the latest releases, it became such a pain sometimes that people actually started to think about switching. Divi also hit some natural limits with its HTML code, because it’s just logical that shortcodes can’t be nested indefinitely.
Divi 5
In late 2023, Elegant Themes’ CEO revealed a plan that would change how Divi is seen. The new Divi 5 release was to be an evolution of Divi 4 to a completely new system that would – that was the main point – leave the shortcodes behind and made it fast again.
Just yesterday Divi 5 official release became available to the public. Does it bring the promised improvements? Oh yeah.
The main improvements of Divi 5 over Divi 4
Like mentioned, the shortcodes Divi used at its operational level are gone. Divi is using a better and more modern way of storing things before creating HTML code. The direct result is that Divi sites are now much faster regarding response times, sometimes even 10x. And we all know how visitors react to slow websites, let alone the search engines like Google.
Divi now fully supports Flexbox. If you’re not familiar with the concept (read more), let me just say it opens up a whole new level of web design possibilities. It was available before too, because it’s a satndard part of CSS standards, but we always had to add separate CSS rules and code manually in order to get it working. It’s finally part of the core now.
The Divi 5 Visual Builder is a whole new beast. While many miss the classic UI that made Divi 4 so popular, most still agree it’s light years ahead. For one, there’s speed. The visual builder is now so fast that there are almost no lagging when you edit things. Compared to Divi 4’s builder, there is actually no comparison at all. It’s almost like having a supercomputer now in place of your old laptop.
Divi 5 also introduced the Variable Manager. One can now create variables (like colors or numbers for padding or font sizes) and use them throughout the website. While this looks nice, it actually makes it possible for any developer to create a style guide for a website. Just imagine – you define your primary colors, and of you change your mind later, you have to update a few variables, while changes propagate through the entire website. Oh boy.
These variables can be used everywhere, within modules, presets and simple HTML.
Presets are the next big thing.
In Divi 4, one could build presets on the module level – I’ve built a module, a blurb for instance, and set it up exactly how I wanted it to look. When I needed another blurb module, I’ve simply assigned the same preset to it and I had everything I wanted done in a moment. Fantastic by itself, but Divi 5 took another step.
In Divi 5, you can build modules presets just like before. But additonally to that one now has the power of something called Option Group Presets at hand. A bit confusing, right?
It’s about properties that affect a single setting. Imagine a text module; it has a setting for the border. I can now create presets for this exact setting (like a solid border, a dashed border, a read border, …). Moreover, I can use this exact preset with every module that has a border setting included. See where it goes?
There are many more improvements and new functionalities, much more than I could possibly stuff in this post. I suggest you go and check Divi 5 for yourself if you’re interested.
Is Divi 5 still beginner-friendly?
Well, this one is debatable, I suppose.
To me (and many within the Divi community) Divi made a significant shift from being for everyone to being more targeted to professional developers. Which is understandable from the developer’s point of view. A product so powerful can simply not be targeted at an audience so wide, because it has to fund the development, while there are so many beginner-friendly products out there.
If you’re a complete beginner and want to dive into WordPress to create a simple site for yourself, you’ll find thousands of free themes inside the WordPress repository. You don’t need a premium solution for that, even if it’s so cheap (Divi costs $249 for a lifetime unlimited license!). Besides, it brings a steep learning curve that you don’t want in order to build a simple blog, unless you really want to learn for the sake of learning.
Divi 5 has evolved into a full-featured design tool that pro developers will use efficiently for sure. There will be bugs in the beginning, and there will be troubles switching tools. But in my humble opinion, it’s worth the trouble, because I’m not able to see a real downside with it. Once it’s fully accepted and supported by the third-party solutions as well, it will be a toolbox to count on.
I’m personally very happy I’ve made that descision back then.
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