Divi 5 review
When Divi was launched in 2013, it was one of the first drag & drop page builders for WordPress. Then, in 2016, Divi introduced it’s Visual Builder, revolutionizing the page builder landscape together with Elementor which was launched the same year. Now, you could finally build your site on the front-end, so you would see exactly how your page would look for visitors while building it. In 2019, Divi launched the theme builder, allowing you to build all parts of your site in Divi, including headers, footers and (custom) post templates. In November 2022, Elegant themes (the company behind Divi) announced they were working on a complete rewrite of Divi, called Divi 5.
What's new in Divi 5?
When Divi 5 was announced, it was said Divi 5 wouldn’t bring any new features initially. Instead, it was focused on rebuilding the current version of Divi from the ground up on a new, future proof technical foundation. But developing Divi 5 took way longer than expected, and it would take almost 2 years to give users an alpha version of Divi 5 to play around with on their own site.
However, even though Divi 5 Alpha had a slicker and faster interface, it didn’t bring anything new to the table. On the contrary, it was still missing a good number of features from Divi 4. Meanwhile, Divi’s competitors weren’t standing still so a lot of users fled to more capable builders like Greenshift, Bricks and Elementor.
The Divi Feature swap
That’s why Elegant Themes came up with the Divi feature swap in January 2025; a number of less popular / important features from Divi 4 would be postponed of decrepated, and the time saved would be used to develop some highly requested new features. Well, they did not dissapoint!
Customizable breakpoints for Divi 5
Just a few weeks later Elegant Themes announced the first new feature, and it was a very important one; customizable breakpoints.
Breakpoints determine at which screen resolution you can make certain adjustments, such as showing the mobile menu instead of the desktop menu, and placing columns underneath each other instead of next to each other.
In Divi 4, there were only 3 breakpoints with a fixed width; the first one was for desktop, the second one for tablet at 980px, and the third one for mobile at 767px.
That was very limiting; for example, the desktop menu wouldn’t look good anymore on a tablet in landscape, but that has a resolution of 1180px or 1024px. Since the tablet breakpoint of Divi 4 had a fixed resolution of 980px, you couldn’t show the mobile menu for tablets in landscape.
With the new customizable breakpoints, you can just change the 980px value to 1024px or 1180px, or add a new breakpoint for that; Divi 5 supports up to 7 different breakpoints.
Divi Presets
Presets are an important feature to keep you styling consistent and maintainable. Presets let you create a standardized design which you can re-use all over your site.
If you adjust the styles of a preset in one place, it will change everywhere you’ve used that preset.
Advanced users will recognize this as classes, but Divi’s preset system is a bit more limited than a real class system that builders like Bricks and Greenshift have. For example, you can only add 1 preset to a module or option.
Even though Divi 4 already had presets for modules, Divi 5 takes presets to a whole new level with option group presets.
In Divi 4, you could only create a preset for the entire module. In Divi 5, you can create presets for each separate option in every module. So you can create presets for backgrounds, borders, shadows etcetera, and use those presets on any module (or section, row, column) you want.
Variables, relative HSL colors and advanced CSS units
The next updates were also about improving maintainability and consistency, using variables and advanced css units like clamp and calc. For example, you can create a variable called “radius”, and use that everywhere you want a border radius.
That way, you don’t have to remember which value you’ve used for the radius, you only have to remember (or select) a logical name. Moreover, variabels give you global control: if you want to change your border radius, you only have to change the value in one place and it will change everywhere you’ve used that variable.
Divi wouldn’t be Divi if they wouldn’t make this very easy for you, so they also introduced a variable manager.
However, Divi takes variables a step further; you can’t just set values for CSS attributes, you can also create global text strings and links for things like your phone number and e-mail address, and images for things like your logo.
Again, by using variables for this, if your phone number, e-mail address or logo ever changes, you just adjust it in the variable manager and it will change everywhere you’ve used it.
Divi 5 also introduced a new color management system, which is based on variables and HSL colors.
Build any layout you want using nested rows, module groups and flexbox controls
Presets and variables made sure you can build a maintainable website, but what about flexibility?
In Divi 4, you could only choose from one of the 20 pre-built row structures, and even though those were enough for most use cases, it wasn’t flexible. Moreover, from the tablet breakpoint, all columns were placed under each other, so a multi column layout on tablet or mobile wasn’t possible.
With Divi 5, we first got nested rows, which allows you to place rows inside of columns from other rows. That way, you can create way more flexible layouts.
But unfortunately, you still can’t adjust the column structure per breakpoint.
That problem was kind of fixed 2 months later, when Divi finally got flexbox controls.
I say kind of, because flexbox doesn’t work when you use Divi’s row system. But if you use a row with 1 column and put all your modules in there, or use the new group module – a container in which you can put any modules – you can use flexbox for the layout.
Loop builder
Modern, maintainable websites use dynamic content, which means the content is managed in 1 place (much like variables).
The most common example of dynamic content in WordPress are blog posts. You could already manage all your blog posts in one place, and then create a template which is the same for all blog posts. The content for each post is loaded from the database. Divi 4 also had a blog module, which would let you display your latest blogs on your blog page, on your homepage etcetera. That’s called a “loop”.
The same is true for WooCommerce products; you manage those under products, they have a single template and there’s a products module that let’s you display a grid of all your products.
In Divi 4, you could already build a custom template for single posts and single products using the theme builder. But the blog grid and product grid was quite limited; you could switch some elements on or off, and choose if you wanted to display all posts below each other or in a 3 column grid, but that was about it.
You couldn’t change the order of elements (for example, display the post title above the featured image), let alone add extra elements like custom fields.
The new loop builder in Divi 5 changes all that. Now, you can build your loops (like post grids, product grids and custom post type grids) any way you like, using any module you want.
Moreover, you can now also use custom fields. For example, I can now create a custom post type for my portfolio, using the free Advanced Custom Fields plugin. I can use custom fields for things like the website, description, client name etcetera, and display them in my loop.
Interactions
Interactions was a surprise feature that wasn’t initially announced, but it’s very powerful. With this feature, you can manipulate an element based on what a user does.
For each interaction, there’s a trigger and an effect action. For example, in the image on the right, I’ve set a “click” trigger on a button, and the effect action is to show a section that was initially hidden. That way, you can finally build a popup in Divi!
Other triggers are “mouse enter” and “mouse exit” with which you can create hover effects, and “viewport enter” and “viewport exit” to create scrollbased interactions. Finally, there’s an “on load” trigger.
The effect actions include show or hide an element, add or remove a preset, and for advanced users, add or remove custom attributes and cookies, scroll to a specific element and mirror mouse movement.
The things that made Divi so popular
So Divi 5 introduced a lot of new, much needed features to bring Divi back in the game. But even before all of that, millions of websites were built with Divi. What makes Divi so popular?
As I mentioned in the intro of this article, the Divi Builder is a really powerful drag & drop page builder that lets you adjust everything live on the front end of your site so you immediately see the effect of the changes you make.
So when you adjust things like colors, borders, background images, margin / padding, animations etcetera, you see the page change in real time and it looks exactly the same as your visitors will see it. Editing text is just a matter of click and type.
The Divi Theme Builder
When I say the Divi Builder lets you adjust everything, I mean everything; since the launch of Divi 4, the builder can also be used to build your own header, footer and all kind of templates like your posts archive, WooCommerce product page, 404 page etcetera. That takes the Divi Builder from a page builder to a complete theme builder!
The most important part for any template builder is dynamic content.
Dynamic content means the data is taken from the database. So when you’re building your blog template, you can add an image module and automatically insert the featured image from the post there. Next, you can add a text module and insert the post title there, and more text modules for the author, publish date, categories etc.
And when you build a WooCommerce product page, you can dynamically add the price, product info, reviews, related products etcetera anywhere you want.
You can have as many templates as you want, so e.g. you can have a separate template for the homepage which uses a different header from the global header,
a different look for your blog posts or even a complete unique layout for a certain page, for example a landing page of your contact page.
Building a template works exactly the same as building a single page of post, so you can include any of the Divi modules (also in the header and footer). That gives you a lot of design freedom!
Over 40 Divi modules
Divi comes with more than 40 modules, which are content elements. The module I’m typing this text in is a text module, the image next to this text is an image module and so on.
There’s a video module, an image gallery module, a Google Maps module, a contact form module, an e-mail opt-in module to get more subscribers on your mailinglist, a countdown timer module and a number counter, an image-, post- and video slider, an accordeon module, a testimonials module, pricing tables etcetera.
The modules are searchable so you can find the one you want easily, and even though they look quite nice out of the box, there are a lot of styling options available.
Styling options
Actually, Divi probably offers the most styling options of all the page builders I tried.
A few of the things you can adjust in the styling options are:
- The colors (you can set default colors in the theme settings and/or use global colors)
- Backgrounds (solid color, but also gradient, image or video for any element)
- Fonts
- Box and text shadow
- Alignment
- Min and max width and height
- Borders (including shape dividers)
- Color filters
- Transform options (rotate, skew, scale etcetera)
- Animations (both entry as on scroll)
- And so on
Moreover, those styling options are much more visually displayed than with other builders, which makes Divi very user-friendly. For example, if you want to set a shadow in Divi, you can choose from a number of presets, which you can then fine-tune. Other builders like Elementor don’t offer presets, you have to set the shadow values yourself (see the screenshot above). You can also see the difference when adding shape dividers; in Elementor and other builders, you only see the name of the shape (mountains, waves, clouds). In Divi, you just see an image of the shape dividers so that you can immediately see what it looks like.
Responsive content
You can style just about anything: any module, column, row, section… and you can even have different styles for different devices.
Just look at the first screenshot on the page to see how that works. With a lot of elements, you see a phone icon when you hover over it. When you click on that icon, you get 3 tabs: desktop, tablet and phone.
So for example, when you click that icon with the font-size setting, you can set a H2 header to be 26px on desktop, 22px on tablet and 18px on smartphones. But you can also adjust things like the alignment, the (background) color, borders, animation settings, transform options… and of course, you can choose to completely hide any element on mobile, tablet or desktop.
But what makes Divi really unique is what they call responsive content: you can’t only change the font-size and color of a text on mobile, you can even change the actual text (or image, video etcetera) itself! So if you heading doesn’t fit on mobile, you can change it to a shorter one just for mobile, while your desktop version stays as it was. Wow!
Divi also has a built-in simulator so you can quickly see how your page looks on a tablet or smartphone.
Global presets, the Divi Library and other time savers
So you’ve spend a lot of time to get that testimonial exactly the way you want it, and you want the same design on every other testimonial. Don’t worry, Divi has a bunch of handy features that make sure you don’t have to manually style every module again 🙂
First of all, you can copy a modules styling options and just paste all styling options on to the next module. You can also copy and paste just one styling option, like the h2 color for example.
Or you can extend the styling option(s) to all other modules of the same kind, so you can paste the styling options of a testimonial to all other testimonials on the same page (of just in the current row or section).
That’s a huge time saver, but those options only work on the current page. What if you have testimonials on every page, and you want all of them to have the same styling?
That’s where global presets come in. With global presets, you can save the current styling and extend it to all testimonials on your entire site!
You can have multiple presets for one module, so you can have a testimonial with a blue background, one with a yellow background and one with a red background, and set one of those as the default style for all new testimonials. Of course, you can also select a different saved style per module (or row, or section).
You can also save your design to the Divi Library, which is like the WordPress media gallery, but for Divi elements instead of images. You can store every element – from a button to a text block and from a row to a complete page layout, incl. all of its content and styling, in the Divi library.
From there, you can import the part you want on any other page on your website, and even export it to use it in another Divi website.
You can also save any element as a global element, which is great for things like buttons. If you change the color of a global button, the color of that button will change everywhere that specific button is used.
Layout packs
Layout packs are professionally designed templates that come with Divi by default.
A layout pack consists of several templates in the same design style. So for example, there’s a layout pack for a restaurant that contains a template for a home page,
a contact page template, a menu page etc.
There’s a brand new layout pack added every single week, designs added every single week, so when you buy Divi, you don’t buy just 1 theme, you buy tens (and eventually hunderds) of themes in 1.
Still not convinced? Here are some more reasons why people love Divi 🙂
- Divi has a very active development team, so new features are added on a regular base.
- If you’re into conversion optimization – which every commercial website owner should be – Divi leads is a really valuable and unique feature. E.g. with Divi leads, I can test the button below in multiple variants to see which variant performs best. I could make a button with a yellow background and a button with a green background, and Divi will show half my visitors the yellow button and the other half the green button. Divi leads will measure how many percent of my visitors click on the yellow button, and how many percent click on the green button, so I can choose the variant that gets the most clicks.
- Divi also has a built-in role editor, which allows you to set what users with a certain user role can and can’t do. Most other builder have a role editor too, but those are limited to 2 or 3 presets: a user role can use everything in the builder, or they can’t access the builder at all. Some builders offer a third option where users can only edit text and images. In Divi, you can control much more. For example, if you want your client to be able to adjust background colors, but not the column layout, the Divi role editor lets you set it just like that.
- Next to the Divi theme and the stand alone Divi builder plugin, your Elegant Themes membership also gives you access to a few cool plugins from which the Monarch social sharing plugin and the Bloom e-mail opt-in plugin are certainly worth the effort.
- Divi is supported very well. There’s an extensive help function with video tutorials, on the website but also within the builder itself, en they publish a lot of tutorials about all sorts of subjects on their blog. Also, the support team isn’t afraid to provide a custom code snippet to achieve something that can’t be done with Divi settings alone.
- Last but not least: the Divi license system is really favorable for website builders, designers, agencies and others who build websites on a regular base. For a one time investment of 249 dollar, you can use Divi and everything else from Elegant themes on an unlimited amount of websites, and you also get lifetime updates and support. Most premium themes and plugins licenses are only valid for one website, and / or you have to pay every year to keep getting updates and support.
That almost sounds to good to be true… Are there any downsides on Divi?
Of course, Divi isn’t perfect either. Some of the main cons are:
- The learning curve. The Divi Builder is a very extensive tool and it will cost you a fair amount of time to discover all its possibilities. Even though it’s quite user friendly, it will take some time to get used to it. As I said at the beginning of this review, it wasn’t love at first sight for me either 😉
- The price. As I said before, it’s really favorable for people that build websites regularly, but if you only want to build one or two websites, Divi is quite expensive compared to the competition. You can also choose to get a yearly Divi subscription at $ 89 for one year of updates and support, but you can’t keep a website running smooth without updates so you’ll need to keep your subscription active. In just 3 years time, the lifetime option is a more attractive option already.
- Divi has a built-in slider, but that’s really basic and can’t be compared to the extensive animated sliders that come with some other themes.
Let Bob The Web Builder build your Divi website!
Bob The Web Builder, the author of this Divi review, is a professional Divi website builder who knows this popular theme inside out. If you let Bob build you a beautiful Divi website, a lifetime license for Divi (valued at $ 249) is included for free!
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Thanks for sharing this information about the divi theme review it’s very amazing and very helpful for me. keep it up. thank you very much:)
Can’t believe there’s only one other comment out here. Your review helped me make my decision and go for Divi. Thank you for the extensive review!!!
Cheers!
Thanks Young, you won’t regret it 🙂
Best regards from Bob