WordPress 7 + Divi 5 Changed My Mind About Web Design

My Medium friends can read this over on Medium.

I spent the last few years telling people and clients to skip WordPress. Too slow, too many plugins, too much babysitting. My German web design blog has a whole article about ways to leave it.

Then agency work put me back on it this year. WordPress 7, with Divi 5.

And it's good. Really. I did not expect that.

Divi 5

If you ever worked with Divi 4, you know the shortcode soup. I didn't care for it at all. Every page was a wall of nested shortcodes that WordPress had to parse on every single load. Deactivate the theme and your content turned into bracket salad.

Divi 5 left beta in February 2026, after more than a year of public testing. It's not a facelift. The shortcodes are gone. Layouts are stored as structured data now, and the renderer reads them directly. No parsing marathon on every page view.

You can measure the difference. One independent test ran the same page on both versions.

1.3 seconds instead of 2.3. And 20 HTTP requests instead of 39.

Your numbers will differ, this stuff always depends on hosting, images, and how many plugins you stacked on top. But the direction matches what I see in client projects. The editor doesn't feel sluggish anymore, and the finished pages hit green Core Web Vitals without tricks / plugins.

Elegant Themes has been shipping weekly updates since the release. Old Divi 4 pages keep running in a compatibility mode, and a migrator converts them step by step.

WordPress 7

The foundation moved too. WordPress 7.0 shipped in May 2026 with a redesigned admin and a central hub for AI features, provider-agnostic, so you plug in whatever model you want.

Version 7.1 followed last week. Hover and focus states without writing custom CSS. Responsive styling directly in the editor. A native Tabs block. Small things, but exactly the small things that used to need yet another plugin.

The backend that used to overwhelm my clients looks cleaned up now. Not minimal. But cleaned up.

Badly set up stays badly set up, no matter the version number. But set up well, WordPress in 2026 is a different tool than it was three years ago.

Downsides

Cost first. Divi runs $89 per year or $249 once, for unlimited sites (as of August 2026). Fair for what it does. Still a line item that a hand-coded site doesn't have, and hosting comes on top.

Maintenance is still on you. Updates, backups, plugin discipline. A neglected WordPress in 2026 fails the same way a neglected WordPress in 2020 did.

And Divi 5 makes the builder fast, not your plugin list short. Twenty extensions are still twenty extensions.

For a five-page business site that changes twice a year, WordPress is still more system than the job needs. In my eyes, at least. But for a complex project with blog, shop, and a dozen sites, WordPress 7 + Divi 5 is not a bad choice 2026.

The Bottom Line

WordPress with a page builder was my go-to example for how not to build a website before this year. Now I build with it again, for clients who want to edit their own pages. And I don't hate it. That says a lot.

My own blogs still run on vanilla PHP not WordPress, and my Search Console numbers still say Medium and Substack win the SEO game for writers. But that's another topic.

WordPress is sort of back. And Divi too. I kind of like that. How about you?

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