The fact that a website uses WPBakery is not, by itself, a reason to rebuild it. That is worth saying because older WPBakery sites are frequently treated as though the presence of the builder automatically means the whole thing needs throwing away.
Sometimes a rebuild is absolutely the right answer, but sometimes the existing site simply needs attention. The useful question is not whether the site uses WPBakery, but how difficult that website is going to be to maintain and improve over the next few years.
Look at the whole setup
Start with the theme. If WPBakery is running inside a maintained theme, using components that still work properly and producing pages your team can comfortably edit, there may be little urgency to change anything. If the builder is tied into an abandoned theme full of bespoke shortcodes and old add-ons, the risk is very different. Updating WPBakery alone may not solve much because the awkwardness is being created by the wider ecosystem around it.
It is also worth looking at how the pages were constructed. Some WPBakery sites contain reasonably clean layouts and reusable patterns, while others contain years of duplicated sections, inline styling and nested rows that nobody wants to touch. The builder name only tells you part of the story.
A rebuild becomes easier to justify when every improvement requires another workaround. Perhaps the design needs modernising but changing global typography means editing dozens of individual elements. Maybe the mobile layout is difficult to control, new landing pages take far too long to create or the theme prevents you from introducing the components the marketing team actually needs.
At that point the question becomes economic. You can continue spending money working around the existing structure, or you can use that money to create something cleaner that is easier to manage afterwards. The second option often costs more initially, but it may be considerably less frustrating over the next few years.
Rebuilding a WPBakery site does not automatically mean moving to another CMS. You may keep all the benefits of WordPress while rebuilding the front end using Elementor, the native block editor or another approach that better suits the team. Existing content can often be migrated or preserved, although the amount of work depends heavily on how closely the content is tied to WPBakery shortcodes and theme-specific elements.
A ten-page brochure site and a 600-page WPBakery site are very different projects even if the front end looks relatively similar, which is why we would normally inspect the site before proposing the migration route.
The editing experience matters, but a rebuild should ideally improve more than one thing. A good rebuild is an opportunity to improve performance, accessibility, responsive behaviour, templates, design consistency and the way the website is maintained. If the end result is simply the same website recreated inside a different drag-and-drop interface, it is reasonable to ask whether the disruption was worthwhile.
If your WPBakery site is becoming painful, show us what you have. We can help work out whether the sensible answer is a tidy-up, a partial rebuild or a cleaner start.
