If you have inherited a WordPress website built with WPBakery, there is a reasonable chance somebody has already told you it is old, slow, terrible or completely obsolete. The reality is more nuanced. WPBakery itself is not dead. Version 9.0 launched in July 2026 with a redesigned interface, a rebuilt drag-and-drop system, modular CSS loading and wider compatibility work. The company also says the builder remains in use across more than six million websites. That does not mean the WPBakery website you inherited in 2017 is automatically a good website, because the important distinction is between the builder itself and the implementation sitting in front of you.
Why do so many people dislike WPBakery sites?
A lot of the frustration comes from the way WPBakery was historically packaged. For years it was commonly bundled into large commercial themes containing their own custom components, shortcodes and styling. The website therefore became dependent not only on WPBakery but also on the particular theme and add-ons it was originally built around.
Several years later, you can end up with a site where every page contains nested rows, old theme elements and styling decisions nobody remembers making. The person editing the website does not really know which bit belongs to WordPress, which bit belongs to WPBakery and which bit comes from the theme. That is less a criticism of one piece of software and more the result of years of websites accumulating technical history.
A modern WPBakery installation is not the same thing as the version many users remember from older sites. The product has continued to evolve and its recent releases have focused on editing experience, asset loading and compatibility. If you have a reasonably modern WPBakery website with a maintained theme, sensible component structure and people who are comfortable using it, there may be absolutely no reason to move simply because another page builder is newer.
Changing builder for the sake of changing builder creates work, introduces risk and can easily turn into a full rebuild. The better question is whether your existing site is still serving the business. If editing has become genuinely difficult, the theme is no longer supported, the site relies heavily on old shortcodes, every update feels risky or significant design changes require increasingly awkward workarounds, it is reasonable to look at alternatives. That does not automatically mean Elementor. Depending on the site, the right answer could be native WordPress blocks, a different theme architecture or a more fundamental rebuild.
A well-built WPBakery website can still work perfectly well, while a badly maintained one can be painful. Exactly the same is true of Elementor, Gutenberg or almost any other WordPress tool. If your WPBakery site is becoming difficult to live with, we can look at what is actually creating the problem and tell you whether we would improve it, update it or use the opportunity to move to something else.
