Welcome to Day 31 of our Divi 100 Marathon. Keep tuning in for 100 days in a row of awesome Divi resources as we count down to the amazing release of Divi 3.0 on the final day of the series!
Last week we invited the Divi community to partake in the Divi 100 Survey. Over 5,000 people completed the questionnaire, which is more than 3x the turnout we had for our previous survey. The questions covered a wide range of topics and we are confident that the community will benefit from their answers just as much as we will. I have broken down the results into three difference categories: Customer Insights, Divi Theme Usage, and Divi Theme Professionals.
Customer Insights paint us a picture of what the Divi community looks like. Divi Theme Usage give us information about how people are using Divi and what they want from Divi in the future. The Divi Theme Professionals section focuses on WordPress freelancers and web design agencies, how they are using Divi and how they run their businesses.
All individual statistics were rounded to the nearest 1%. In addition, we asked a few open ended questions at the end of the survey. I featured some of the most common responses at the end of this post.
I have designed four infographic to showcase the results from each category, each of which can be viewed below. Click on the images to zoom in if the text is too small for you to read.
Customer Insights
The Customer Insight questions help us better understand “who we are” as a community and what Divi means to us on a broader scale.
A Few Things We Learned
- Our Customers Love Divi – We were very pleased to find that the vast majority of our customers would highly recommend Divi to their friends and peers. This resulted in a net promotor score of 75, which is very strong and is something we are very proud of. Matt Mullenweg recently shared a study on his blog that showed WordPress at the top of its class with a NPS of 73, and Divi is right up there with it! You can learn more about how Net Promotor Scores work here.
- People Earn Their Livings With Divi – 25% of our customers make their living using Divi, and 44% make a portion of their income using Divi, which means that 69% of our customers are using Divi on a professional level to support themselves and their families. This is such an amazing thing for us to see and it shows us just how impactful the software has become and how quickly the Divi economy is growing.
- 3rd Party Extensions Are A Big Opportunity – Something amazing started happening in the Divi community over the past year, which is that we started to see a huge increase in third party development. We were surprised to find that 68% of our customers have purchased a third party Divi extension, child theme or layout pack. This is truly a growing market and something we plan to help support very soon. The more third party development that exists, and the more people who are able to make a living and therefore dedicate themselves to building Divi related products, the stronger the community will become.
- Divi Conferences Could Be A Real Thing! – We have always toyed with the idea of hosting a Divi conference. We share so many amazing moments with each other in the forums, on the blog and on Facebook, it would be great to meet some of those familiar faces in person. ~800 people said they would definitely travel to attend a Divi conference, and ~2,600 people said they might travel to attend. What do you think, is that enough people to get the party started?
Divi Theme Usage
The Divi Theme Usage category focused on asking questions that would help give us insights into how we can make Divi even better, and to help us better understand the various ways that people use Divi.
A Few Things We Learned
- Divi Customization Options Are Still Lacking – 41% of customers always use a child theme in order to customize Divi beyond the controls provided in the Theme Customizer and Divi Builder design settings. This tells us that there are still places for us to expand and improve upon these options so that custom coding isn’t so often necessary.
- Divi Remains Easy To Use – According to the survey, 84% of customers want us to add more features to Divi and are not worried about the theme becoming overcomplicated. This is a good sign, because it means we have done a good job balancing ease of use with the addition of new features so far. This is a line we plan to walk carefully moving forward.
- Customers Want More Features, But Not At The Expense Of Loading Speeds – While our customers do want more features, there is definitely a concern about the impact these features will have on loading times. 48% of customers would rather us make Divi faster before adding more features. This validates our decision to commit to our “developer release.” After Divi 3.0 is finished, the first thing we will be doing is working on our Divi 3.1 Developer Release, which will focus on performance improvements as well as more hooks, filters and documentation for third party developers. Moving forward, we will continue to think carefully about how new features may affect loading speeds.
- New Features Are Equally Important To Feature Improvements – When thinking about what to do next, it’s easy for us to get wrapped up in new ideas for exciting new features while ignoring the features that already exist. The survey showed us that there is nearly a 50/50 split between the desire for new modules and a desire for module improvements. As we make our plans for Divi 3.2 and beyond, we need to think about ways the we can improve Divi’s current module set and Theme Customizer controls.
Divi Theme Professionals
As shown in the results from our Customer Insights section, a vast majority of our customers are WordPress professionals that make a living building Divi websites for their clients. In fact, this statistic has increased since our last survey 2 years ago. We took this survey as an opportunity to learn more about this growing demographic.
What We Learned
- The WordPress Freelancing Business Is Stronger Than Ever – 68% of the WordPress professionals that use Divi describe themselves as “solo freelancers.” There is obviously a lot of opportunity for individuals to make a career building Divi websites, even without the help of a team. Of course the support of the Divi community doesn’t hurt either!
- Maintenance Plans Are Common – 70% of Divi WordPress Professionals offer paid maintenance plans for their customers, and we suspect that this greatly contributes to developer incomes. The majority of these maintenance plans sell for between $25-$100 per month.
- Most WordPress Websites Cost Less than $5,000 – 95% of our customers charge between $0-$5,000 per website, 47% of which charge between $1,000 and $5,000. Only a small 1% of customers charge more than $10,000 per website, but it’s inspiring to know that these types of project exist. Similarly, a small 1% of customers consider themselves a “large web design agency,” and I would guess that these two statistics are correlated.
- Building Divi Websites Is Relatively Fast – 58% of Divi Professionals finish their client projects in less than one month.
The Open Ended Questions And A Few Standout Answers
At the end of the survey, we asked a few open ended questions. We received over 20,000 responses, and I am confident that they will prove an invaludable resource for our team moving forward. These are countless suggestions and we can’t begin to list them all, but I did observe a few common trends and have featured some of the most common responses below.
Thanks again to everyone who participated. It means a lot to us that so many of you took the time to fill out the survey, and your responses will surely help us to improve Divi. What did you think of the results? Did anything surprise you? I look forward to hearing your opinions in the comments!
Divi 100 Day 31
The Countdown To Divi 3.0
This post is part of our Divi 100 marathon. Follow along as we post free Divi resources for 100 days in a row! This 100-day countdown will end with the game-changing release of Divi 3.0, including our brand new visual editor built from the ground up using React. Divi 3.0 will change the way you build websites with the Divi Builder forever!
Let the countdown begin.
i already mention this in the chat with a divi support member, i think 2 or maybe 3 things are that has to change and would make divi the top of all themes: one is the image and portafolio module, it just does not have effects, they are too simple if you check out themes like massive dinamyc or uncode theme you can see that this themes are beautiful designed in this aspects, and the fonts they used make the website even more beautiful and engagement, they have preloaded layouts that are pretty awesome but despite this , this themes are a bit difficult to learn or load too slowly, i couldn´t put background videos with out having to use revolution slider ….
second i think divi should have preloaded layouts like “about us” in massive dynamic or fonts like poppins of google font that are really good, and third divi should have a gradient color effect for the header and backgrounds and i think that also should be possible to put a background image in the header. Despite that, i think in divi as a great theme but the other themes i mentioned i think are better and beautiful designed , and also they are created with the best seo practices and divi should have that also. I wish all of the divi team a lot of successes
Ttrying to find out if divi 3.0 has a built in survey feature to integrate with mailchimp or if fqsm pro ipanelthemes selling through envatothemes is the way to go for our own surveys of customers or free options like wp pro quiz have enough functionality?
Found monkeysurvey link on your survey :-/ ? Too costly and cumbersome. No built in elegantthemes option in divi 3 either?
what software did you use for the survey? (trying to find out if divi has a built in survey feature to integrate with mailchimp or if ipanelthemes selling through envatothemes is the way to go for our own surveys of customers? Found monkeysurvey link :-/ ? Too costly and cumbersome. Guess there is no built in elegantthemes option?
what software did you use for the survey? (trying to find out if divi has a built in survey feature to integrate with mailchimp or if ipanelthemes selling through envatothemes is the way to go for our own surveys of customers?
I love Divi but I really think the Advanced Design Settings could be greatly expanded.
Some things like adding ‘nofollow’ attributes to anything with a link is a no-brainer for anyone developing sites for customers that want to offer affiliate links for example.
Also being able to change the bullet styles on ordered and un-ordered lists plus there are many more basic requirements that should just be available.
Working through the forum questions should identify a whole list of basic requirements that people ask for on a regular basis.
The support is great when you ask for something, but I can’t help thinking on many occasions that these things should be already available.
Still love the theme though.
First, I’ve got to say that I LOVE Divi!!! And regardless of any issues I’ve encountered, I can’t imagine anything that would keep me from using Divi for the long haul.
Having said that, I know for a fact that Divi’s VERY limited number of fonts to choose from (when compared to, oh say, Google Fonts) is a problem for me and many, many others. And yet, it remains an issue that ET seems to ignore entirely.
While taking the survey, I did make sure to include my disappointment over the limited font choices. And I have a feeling that I wasn’t the only one who brought it up. Yet, once again, it isn’t being mentioned by ET.
Yes, there are ways to incorporate different fonts into the Divi theme. But among the many supposed ways to do so, I only discovered one that works every time (thank you, Geno Quiroz). And although it does work, it isn’t nearly as convenient as it could be if ET would simply include expanded font choices within the theme itself.
Honestly, I’m done asking for this feature to be included. I’ve learned that it’s a pointless endeavor and it’s not likely to happen any time soon. But I can’t help but wonder, why doesn’t anyone from ET every address this topic? Why does the subject of increased font choices get swept under the rug at every turn? I just don’t get it.
Personally, I never had any doubts that the DIVINE, because of its amazing practicality of use and excellent final result in the realization of a project is the best theme, not disparaging others. But before this insight, I realized that my concept was too small near the market talks about, having a greater than mine.
They are to be congratulated !
I just find that child themes are much faster to design and customize. What I like about using divi exclusively is that I have increased my skills in css html & php in order to push the customization. Frankly the customizer becomes a bit tedious at times to design with and css coding just works faster. And with every new project I become faster at coding with divi as a framework. I love the white label idea! that would be a huge plus. Considering working on $10k+ projects
Big bonus would be to be able to integrate these post/product-post hover effects:
http://tympanus.net/Development/HoverEffectIdeas/
thats my
I’m glad you guys did this survey and I’m pleased with the results. I’d say most of my answers fall with the majority. I realize I was late in submitting for the survey, but I’m hoping my answers are still of use. And great to see the statistics on how many Divi users are offering monthly maintenance packages for their clients. Keep up the great work guys! 🙂
My love/hate relationship with Divi over the years….
Divi needs too much custom CSS to make tweaks. For basic layout it is great. Thank goodness for support forum – even if it is a little slow. Almost every tweak or basic change requires custom CSS. The Theme Option – Custom CSS field is so small you can’t see what you are doing. A Child Theme is a must-have in order to add your custom style sheet.
Full-width video, custom menu, change footer text and alignment, portfolio carousel image sizes, and many other basics need custom CSS. Hopefully, Divi 3.0 will make some of these things easier. important!
Thanks for the survey. Lots of good information. Would be interested in how many hours to complete typical site instead of months.
I would like a support section with FAQs divided into sections: Header, Footer, Content, Sliders & Galleries, etc.. With “How To” sections and CSS code. Current support is OK but when searching “how to xxx” I have to scroll through pages of posts trying to find something relevant.
Even with all my complaining, Divi is still my go to theme when doing client sites. Glad to see I fit in with the majority on most of the survey questions.
Hi Divi’s
As always I am surprised with each article you publish within your Divi 100 day marathon.
BUT, I WONDER, why you didn’t mention the 70% White Label request???
you didn’t mention this although it’s the biggest customer demand among all survey questions!
We need the white label as we are making LIVING with divi.
Again I still acknowledge your awesomeness.
Divi developer documentation will be great. Also if you can give a preview of changes in Next Divi Version for developers, it would be great for us to start building new extensions. Since front-end editor is going to be introduces, we expect a change in functions documentation while releasing. So that we can update extensions and child themes to match with new builder. Else most of the sites are gonna give a headache for us.
Please address ghosting/ white labelling i feel u ignored it.
Looks like most ET customers don’t stick around…interesting? Only a small percentage have been around 4 plus years.
+1 for WooCommerce integration
The big question is how much integration do you really want. The Woo Layout Injector plugin does exist at the elegantmarketplace
Hi Richard, thanks for valuable reply.
Interesting information. I was just thinking today how great Elegant Themes really is. Hoping for some more awesome features from Divi.
I am so surprised at the lack of interest by both Elegant Themes and customers in reducing the sizes of images used by Divi, by loading appropriate sizes in each location instead of the original, and in the lack of support for “srcset”.
Am I missing something?
Yess thank god…..Thankfully this is no surprise in my eyes, and its a testament that the community is on the right track…. to sum it up in a paragraph.
The ET community are largly based as freelance web developers and that would rather you spend more time and effort in extending Divi with what it already has to be more powerful and more documented so it can organically grow.
I hardly see a need and a push for a front editor as Divi 3 is moving towards…..
I still stand by my comment even before this survey took place that extending Divi to be more powerful, introducing a decent form module should of been a priority over a front end builder.
Oh well….. hopefully this survey can now push the devs at ET to putting Divi on steroids .. 😀
The stats & data are brilliant & really inspiring. We started couple of years back with the DIVI & now being part of thriving community is even greater.
Marathon on blog has been equivalent to conference. Such a huge interaction has been mind blowing. I think some more participation from biggest divi designers (third-party) can further exploded the community .
Fab..Awesome Work – Elegant Themes Team
Also more header options would be nice. Jupiter theme has 18 you can choose from, would love to have this option with Divi too … maybe not 18 but more than one to start with 🙂
+1 for more header options!
Seeing loading speed being addressed here (finally) is a huge plus for the ET theme.
Currently, Divi is *slow*. Even on a freshly install site with absolutely no customizations and no plugins Divi is slower than most other themes out there.
I truly hope that come 3.1 speed will be greatly improved. 🙂
1. Blogging is almost antediluvian.
2. What stuns me most is the 1% large organization/corporate users.
Ask yourselves what keeps them from using Divi.
What is missing? Cooperative development? Code management? Role definition?
Since I’m using Divi, you added around 50.000 users adding how much $’s in one year?
Corporate businesses bring in a lot more. My company was operating in the US as well as in most European countries. Sales brought in 65 % , maintenance 35%, year in year out.
Your lifetime – one-off – licenses bring you no maintenance revenue.
So, if my company could work with most international Stock Exchanges, large Banking Corporations, including BoA, NASA, HP, IBM and other Top-100 companies, from the Netherlands, with products less user friendly and rich than DIVI, then maybe you start thinking about future extra and steady income.
Good luck!
Cees.
BTW I just checked a new site I am making with Divi and I purposely avoided having too many child pages hoping to avoid the dreaded hamburger style menu–which I did accomplish. BUT it, too, has the same problem! On a tablet you cannot access ANY of the top level parent pages if they have child pages, which most of them do. This is crazy…since the parent pages are the most important. I don’t see how you can call this theme mobile friendly when it doesn’t work on tablets! Am I missing something? No one in the forums seems to be able to solve it either.
I agree about the support, it needs to be ramped up to be a world class company. The guys in the forum are helpful, but it takes a LONG time to get a reply and very often several rounds of back and forth befire a solution is found, which means DAYS. One thing that would help RADICALLY is better search function in the forum. I have no doubt that many answers I need are in there somewhere, but they are impossible to find. Search results return mostly unrelated posts. The whole knowledge base needs to be reworked, expanded, better indexed. You need a specialist to do that, at least to set it up so it can work better going forward. It’s not a task for an intern or something! I work with Divi/Extra every day, and I kepp my own tech docs detailing solutions I find so I can at least avoid my own duplications.
Please please allow templates to be applied against the WooCommerce pages:(
I’m so relieved to have access to a WP theme that is only going to keep getting better!
75 rue Du Château De Rouquet
I do agree with Stefan’s comment above too
One things that surprised me was the lack of any comment about Retina support. I was embarrassed when a client who in my office to review her nearly completed site check it on her phone and found that none of the images in her galleries were Retina responsive. I work mostly with artists and this is a big problem for them.
Top survey, thanks.
What we really need to go all in with Divi and drop other frameworks is a new sort of page templates, that stay connected to the library. Global page templates, in Divi terms, that can contain individual sections as well. Before that, Divi is great for but also limited to smaller projects, because if major layout changes have to be made, you have to click thru every single page or post.
Indeed.
Thank you for Divi and the survey!
To read the results and all the comments is very interesting and for me it is showing that we are all different 🙂
In my opinion Divi is one of the greatest WP themes which are available and of course it is not perfect, is it? I am always greatful for this theme because I know how much work and brain is included I would never could do on my own 🙂 While I was studying lots of years ago I have understood the complexity of developement and since this time I don’t really complain anymore!
So, keep going the way you are ET!
Best from Germany, Bettina
I don’t know that I would ever drop the child theme concept for the sites I build. I used to working with my own stylesheets and making changes quickly using them. I don’t really want to have to hunt down my changes in multiple different places.
The big dealer breaker for me is media queries – Divi’s breakpoints work pretty well in general, but with a customized design, the design often breaks in different places. I want to collect my changes on one sheet so I can get an overview of what’s going on and quickly move things around as needed.
Awesome insight! But hope to see a post slider module (not carousel) because some articles with numbers don’t need to spread down the page.
Going to the top with Divi and Extra.
Cheers!
Although I did not take the survey, I think I would side with the majority of the populous. Great questions and I hope that the Divi Team will implement these ideas.
I love the developers edition idea! Looking forward to it.
Amazing results! I don’t know if someone from the ET Stuff will read this, but if there is a chance to add a suggestion to the pipeline (I forgot to mention this in the survey) it would be great…
A huge thing which is not seen neither in the Divi, nor other themes (very rarely) are Conditional Modules. They work that way, if a certain action is taken by a user (let’s say a button click to reveal more), then a new row (or section) appears beneth.
The second brilliant feature would be to make a Slider Module, which contains all other modules available in the Divi builder. This way you could not only scroll a page down, but dive deeper moving things horizontally!
Cheers regards 🙂
A possible issue with conditional modules would be that Google will regard all content that is visually hidden from a user as less important. This might negatively effect your SEO slightly.
suggestions as in -> https://www.elegantthemes.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=22&sid=5f83497cd9d335000864c82257ace4be
Conditional Modules +++++
The second brilliant feature would be to make a Slider Module, which contains all other modules available in the Divi builder. +++++++
As far as I know stacking modules on top of one another is JUST too complex for the DIVI builder code.
A conditional module is not something I have thought of at all. Could be of use.
Nice one idea. +10000
“Most WordPress Websites Cost Less than $5,000 – 95% of our customers charge between $0-$5,000 per website, 47% of which charge between $1,000 and $5,000. Only a small 1% of customers charge more than $10,000 per website, but it’s inspiring to know that these types of project exist.”
The followup questions(s) would be why? Is WP or Divi lacking in some way that $5k+ websites are the ceiling? What other functionality are larger builds needing?
Storing, retrieving, sorting, searching products and web applications come to mind.
Super large websites are like netflix and Amazon. They are certainly going too advanced for what DIVI can do.
Which exit intent popup plugin are you guys using?
I am very surprised nothing about meus was mentioned. I’m new to Divi and was looking for a Megamenu. I bought two; Max Mega Menu and Ubermenu and neither works with Divi straight out of the box.
What are ppl here using for mega menus?
I use Ubermenu and it works just fine. Granted there were about 2 small function additions that had to be made, but well documented.
Hi Gary,
Yes, Uber seems to be the strongest, but I was looking for something right out of the box for Divi. Also, I would like Divi module support inside the MM.
Divi has it’s own mega menu functionality: http://www.elegantthemes.com/gallery/divi/documentation/mega-menus/
Hi William, Yes, they have a very basic MM, but nothing like Uber or Max.
Also, I would like to see a Divi MM that allows Divi modules to be added.
Since many of the theme usage answers were so evenly balanced, it might be worth your time to segment by type of user to get a clear picture of how your most active segment is using the theme. What I mean is, taking the 69% of folks who answered that they make a living from DIVI and seeing if the usage questions yield a clearer picture. If that doesn’t help, look at only the people who make a full time from DIVI and see if their usage answers differ. This could give you a better understanding of your active user base.
I love Divi and have recommended it to friends. I am a first time buildwer of a website and the project went much better than expected with Divi compared to my first attempt with some “normal” WP themes.
One thing that I could not find in the module selection was a Table build. I did find a 3rd party extension. I was wondering why a Table module was not highly requested……
DIVI Conference would be awesome! I know me and my team would make an effort to make it a yearly trip to enhance our skills and maybe learn some best practices from others in the DIVI community. Also #TaxWriteOff LOL #DIVIcon2017
Why can’t you pinch and zoom images using Divi on iPhones etc? For the life of me I can’t seem to solve this issue. My clients with restaurant menus etc want them zoomable (is that even a word) is there an extensions or plugin I could be using. I swear I used to be able to do this or am I just dreaming. Thanks in advanced.
Points:
From Canada
We use child theme to so no overwriting of CSS due to theme updates
Charge $1500-2500 for websites
Maintenance starting at $45/month
Wish list:
Live Chat Support as mentioned above, your support needs help. I can’t wait days months years to get an anaswer.
A Divi Form Builder similar to the Visual Form Builder plugin. The form looks good on both ends, on the site and on an email.
Yeah Teri,
Those numbers sound reasonable based on our experience. Most of our sites fit into that range, as well. Our monthly maintenance is $50.
Very intersting and usefull.
But no mention to” search page”. ??
I don’t understand nobody interest in some search custom options like search page, search results page layouts, etc.
Very cool! I was surprised that three things didn’t come out in the survey:
1. WooCommerce support is poor. There are bugs and a lack of features.
2. CSS REALLY needs a rework. Way no many “!important”
3. Divi makes amazing pages, but the blog roll layout is not the best. I have to do a lot of custom work for clients that actually want a blog!
All in all, I love Divi and the direction it is going. Developer release yay!
+1 Improved WooCommerce integration
+1 Improved WooCommerce integration
+1 woocommerce iteration. How can this be so overlooked these days is a little surprising. Yes divi has great content but a lot of websites sell stuff!
This whole 100 Days of Divi campaign has been really great! You have a ton of people actively participating. I want to see the CTR on your end. Great work and a tip of my hat to your marketing team.
I’m really glad I helped, and even more glad that you shared the survey results! Thank you 🙂
Thanks for sharing, interesting stuff. There was lots of good feedback that brings up even more questions. I appreciate ET’so willingness to let the community share thought and opinions. Recently another builder I toyed with started a very negative and ugly conversation with their customers. It was a great lesson in how NOT to treat customers, or other people for that matter.
Thank you Sir Nick & Elegant Themes team for sharing the answers & related info. from the survey!
Please do add the following features in Divi 3.0 — conversion tools (pages & plugins support)…
1. Layouts for landing pages & thank you pages
2. Layouts for membership pages (and/or plugin/s) to protect & secure members & content
3. Scarcity (or a countdown) plugin
Thank you & more power!
Nice results! I’m really looking forward to DIVI 3.0!
You asked the question “what module to improve” but there is more than that i think. For example: a search function in the “add module” section will make it even faster to find and select the right module.
Keep improving guys! You do such a great job!
I’d like to see a little more integration (or tutorials) as to how we can use Divi and Types/Toolset to really bring Divi and our data alive with almost endless possibilities…
I would like that too, most of my clients require some kind of custom post type or content scripted/laid out in a certain way and I find myself trying new custom post type plugin only to find they don’t work with divi or there is too much coding involved or you have to go into the functions.php to make it work which is not something I do even with a child theme as these things are too easy to break with an update. I know Types would be useful especially if we could use it with the divi builder and not have to get the toolset views as well. I found that adding the toolset views just adds more complexity and more styles and just too much more of what I don’t need that slows down the site. Making a custom module would be cool or a tutorial on how to do it.
You guys should be very proud of that NPS, that’s the highest I have ever seen. Nice work!
Great survey and fascinating results!
One quick note, as a suggestion for next round. This survey’s wording seemed to assume that I either use Divi for my hobby websites or as part of a freelancing/web design business. I use Divi as part of my full-time employment; in my case, I work in a web design role for a college.
WordPress’s annual community surveys include categories for hobbyists, web design freelancers (or people who work for a web design firm), and people in the web design department of a larger organization.
If you were to word that question a little differently next time around, it might help you understand this portion of your community a little better. 🙂
Scenario
• Notification on my phone that I have a new email
• I check and see that it is another Divi update which I want to read
• I click the read full Read the Full Article
• Page loads and I have to zoom in to read the text
• I ask myself why I am doing this
• I close the page
Please, for heaven’s sake update your site so that it is mobile optimised!!!
haha lol 🙂 I ask the same question every time I look at this site on mobile.
Perhaps show us how awesome Divi can be by using it as your Theme?
+1 I can’t agree more !
I’m surprised automatic theme updates didn’t feature at all
Happy to see that I share most of the same feedback of the Divi community. Every time I use it, I found it better. For my last website, I create a custom module in one hour for my client perfectly fitting his needs and embeded in Divi Builder as any other module.
It’s very user friendly and that’s what I and my clients love.
I am part of the ones who still creates a child theme for every project. It allows more flexibility to make general changes (for header for example). Embeded styles in module are also great to change the size of the police just in one module, without having to create a class and CSS it.
Cheers guys ! Great job !
Love the results and insights! Have been using Elegant Themes for about 4 years now and am always amazed at the evolution over the years. Still remember the early days when I have to learn child theme in order to create the changes I need. We are still doing that now but Divi has definitely empower a lot of non coders out there, which was where we started out.
Looking forward to Divi 3!
Hi
The survey insights were very interesting, It would however be interesting to find out how many of your users are not just based in the US and what percentage of users use it in the UK for professional web development.
Great Feedback! +1 Vote for the micro adjustments comment. Clicking into each individual module to make the change – save and exit (x2) to see it live, popping back in to re-edit & repeat… Paying Hourly developers has caused our cost to rise significantly when supporting dozens of sites even with small changes. It looks like some of the upcoming features are going to address this so – Looking forward to it!
I agree with most people here, very importend for agentcy are the white label
This is, of course, already available through the Divi Ghoster plug-in. For my clients, Divi itself is a selling tool.
I don’t count on a ton of site business from a client once the thing launches, most of them update content themselves. On the other, most clients do engage us for social media campaigns, blog content development, and site maintenance packages.
We also get follow-on site work to further optimize for mobile users. (Where there are actual content and design changes).
Unless Divi Ghoster also changes the name of the theme’s folder, it’s a cheap patch to hide the fact you’re using Divi. Anyone can view a page’s source code and see what theme’s in use…
Very nice. I am one of those freelance developers. Reading these stats, seeing how the community is growing, and the level of support we get from all of you at Elegant Themes is really just amazing. Keep up the great work. Let me know when that conference will be held! I will be there.
Shame on you at ET! I may love Divi – but this Dark Text On Dark Background? Have you lost your minds? Gone sadistic?
Trendy? Yes. Readable? NO. User Friendly? NO. Stop it. Really. Yes, I love Divi. But this is nothing short of cruel, and unintelligible. And you aren’t doing us any favors creating modules like this. And BTW – Dark Type – WHITE Background. Non-negotiable for anyone who cares about their readers.
and I was thinking I needed new glasses… absolutely unreadable on smaller screens. The content however, and especially these comments are very interesting.
ditto
I can agree with you on this.
Interesting, although I’m very surprised that no talks about a better separation between Content and Design.
This is my biggest issue when building a site for a company that will maintain the content themselves.
Would really like to see an additional tab called ‘Content’ in the builder for nothing more that just content.
I second this request from Verdi. I’ve found it quite hard at times to hand over a Divi site to a client who wants to create their own content.
I used visual composer before to use Divi and the clients love Divi because it’s more steady, less buggy, faster, and easier to understand with blocks.
Width divi 3.0, I think they will love the front end editing and this will solve some ergonomy problem.
What I really love, it’s the facility to be able to create from scratch in one hour my custom module, for example an item for a restaurant menu. They can change it, change the police, add a picture, description and only what they need and the module has the right name.
But I agree with Rose & Verdi, you can still make it easier 🙂
As long as in 3.0 we are able to keep clients from ‘seeing’ layout options so they can’t accidentally jack the site up.
There should be a ‘content edit’ mode only.
+1 content edit mode
frankly, everything was cool, except the child theme question.
it wasn’t that clear. I use child theme with divi, but not a pre-made child theme.
otherwise it’s cool! I
Thanks for sharing the results with us – it’s cool to see how others use Divi and inspiring to see so many people make a living from it.
I’ve used many themes and joined many premium theme communities over the years and ET and Divi definitely over-deliver on expectations. I’m glad to have found you!
The work being done with Divi is excellent. I forgot to put in the survey (because I have not seen) to enable a subject to create memberships, if any please let me know. Congratulations.
Agree, interesting.
If 66% use Divi for clients then you should put more attention to make divi more scalable. For example Jupiter blog modules are much more scalable than Divi (number of columns, sort options, predifined layouts…).
I would expect this will be your primary focus.
More modules, more scalability.
Anyway thank you, Divi is one of best themes for wordpress!
Hi,
The Survey results are not much surprising to me. Divi is a wonderful theme with lots of customization options, that is the reason all Divi users (including me) loves Divi. Would love to travel to a Divi event.
Very Interesting numbers! Thanks for the infographic 🙂
There are thousands of people like me in this world 🙂
Please, keep growing Divi Community.
Great information here. GORGEOUS infographic too.
I was greatly surprised that so many people are building sites for under $1000. I’d be very interested to know some of the geographical data for Divi users. As a freelancer in the United States, I know that I’m usually much cheaper than the agency market and I’m still charging a lot more than that.
Yes, I would love to get geo data also on that. I start at $2500 for a build, but I know there are ppl promising the world for >$1000.
Yeah, impossible to include much in-depth SEO for $1000. You could spend that much JUST for the SEO!
Great idea. I’m always battling the question of charging less to get the gig or charging more to make some money. I think with this many users, ET is in a unique position to shed some light on what the market says we are charging by location or region. I would hate to be lowballing fellow freelancers or discover I am missing out on profits given my location.
Whoa, you guys need to up the cost of your maintenance plans!
Hey Erik. I’m curious… I’ve never charged for any kind of maintenance plan. How big are the sites(and businesses) you’re charging maintenance fees for? Could you also give an example of the type of monthly maintenance work you do to justify the fee to your clients?
Thanks!
I use to charge my clients €50 per month, that fee includes hosting, maintenance (updates, WordPress security, back up) and any change they want to do in their websites. This last part is what some times take more time if the change is big but, they barely ask me for deep changes. The idea of this service is that they don’t have to worry about their websites.
Hope this give you an idea (sorry about my english)
I’ve found that the most one can charge for typical maintenance plans is in the $35-$50 range per month. I offer these as quarterly subscriptions, paid in advance. At site launch, I offer the package for $99 for the 1st quarter, regardless of site complexity, to assure a smooth launch and initial operational phase. About 80% of my clients subscribe.
Just my experience.
Terrific, Patrick…thanks! That sounds like a great business model. I’m assuming this is maintenance only: WP version, theme and plugin updates, fixes if something breaks with an update, etc.? Or does it cover client-driven changes/updates as well?
And it occurs to me: You say that 80% of your clients subscribe. What about the other 20%? Do they maintain the sites/updates themselves?
Hi Erik…It’s a little off Divi topic, but I’d love to hear more about how you structure your maintainance plans. Honestly, I don’t yet charge a set maintainance fee & just do hourly instead, but I’m considering a different system. It’s heartening to see how many people are generating steady monthly income as a result.
20,000 responses shows you must be doing something right.Really interesting read and love the colours of the infographics!
Some comments on the above post:
The Blog module itself can use a special builder here. That way we can have our own specialized blog post loops which will really extend how the theme looks.
The Contact Form module must have add ons that have been talked to death at this place, but really needed for 3.0
Slider module here could have the same functionality here as revolution slider, but then the theme will be too big and slow.
Shop module and dealing better with multiple pages would be great.
Most WordPress Websites Cost Less than $5,000… I will say most online freelance jobs always run under 500 bucks.
loading speed is critical as a slow loading site can lead to a higher bounce rate.
Version 3.1 of DIVI is going to have to deal with speed and main-modules.php documentation with included website for it.
Let’s not get themes and plugins so intertwined that we’re bloating up the framework and causing some slow loading sites.
According to the codex, themes are about the appearance of the site. Plugins are about the functionality of the site.
While ET has been very successful in marrying these two, the fact that half of us are begging for rapid loading is a big deal.
Personally I think that ET should be trying to go the way of Gravity or Woo – build the basics and then allow the community to build add ons and extensions.
That way people can add as much as they like to their setup but they aren’t stuck with a bunch of things that are probably better served by plugins, like forms – we are solidly in the Gravity camp, and there are people who swear by Caldera, Ninja, etc, and that’s fine. Everyone has their own idea of what’s important in a form and we shouldn’t all be stuck with slow pages loading stuff that isn’t important to half of us.
This is why we got rid of Woo Commerce. We found a way to change our checkout process and now we’re only using Gravity to manage it.
One thing Kim… The DIVI builder part of DIVI is more plugin than theme though.
Problem with this is, yes, you may have faster loading pages, but it would drive up the cost. Why would I pay for Divi then turn around and have to spend time searching and pay for some third-party extension or plugin?
Not to mention developers are not alway on top of keeping their stuff up to date and what happens when support is gone. When it comes from one place, you know for the most part it going to work seamlessly. Except when it’s from Adobe.
I agree with both Matt and Kim, and I believe the right path lies in the middle. Provide features for those who want a complete out of the box setup, but expect some people to switch to other plugins. Make sure the features you provide doesn’t slow down the site, or provide them as separate plugins so users can chose what to install.
I also believe that a lot of people will always ask for more features over simplicity and speed, but that’s because they take simplicity and speed for granted.
Well Daniel I could see elegantthemes coming up with some modules that will go in a separate plugin all by itself for people that need them.
Speed will be vital.
Well you do need a marketplace like elegantmarketplace for third party stuff.
It would be nice if elegantthemes.com did everything, but that is not going to happen.
Sorry Richard, but I don’t agree that most freelance sites are built for ~$500. I would suggest that an average Divi site including content development is $1000 to $2000, depending on the number of pages and extensions like e-commerce or sophisticated forms.
If you look at $50/hour as a standard rate, I would find it hard to believe that credible sites could be built in 10 total hours.
I agree! I would not bother with a site at $500. Obviously client expectations are very low at $500.
Yep…. I START at $500… just to set up the generic site with security. Content insertion and tutorials are extra!
When I say 500 and less that includes ALL online freelance jobs which includes writing jobs, logo creation, etc..
Patrick may be able to get 50 bucks an hour standard rate, but in low wage countries you can expect to see under 20 bucks an hour.
And some clients want the WHOLE moon and more for for under 100 bucks.
Ever been to clientsfromhell.net
100% agree. I can’t imagine doing a divi site for only $500. I was glad that my $1800 minimum was right there with most other people.
I still feel that the customer service should be by chat or some other instaneous system. It is very frustrating when you hit a problem and you cannot get help. I don’t rely on communities because I have been given enough bad information over the years to make this not a viable business option.
I have to agree with Suzanne.
Customer support can get very frustrating via the forum. There must be a better way to provide support, especially in the rare situations when the support person (with the best of intentions, I am sure) asks a question already answered in the original request…then disappears for over 24 hours (this is my most recent experience with the support forum).
There is room for improvement.
That’s really cool. Thanks for posting. I’m trying not to get hyped about the pending 3.0 release, but you guys are making it difficult with all these cool snippets.
Thanks so much for this and this is incredibly insightful! It looks like Elegant Themes is growing as a company too which is great!
It is interesting to see how many people are freelancing. I think that Divi provides a great entry point for this and means that websites can be built at a lower cost for clients. Graphic designers who only have a small amount of web development and WordPress experience can now build beautiful websites due to Divi.
I can see this increasing with Divi 3.0 and the front end builder!
Interesting to see the insights of how a large group utilizes Divi. There are definitely some great takeaways here. It was pretty cool to see where we/I fell in the ranges also, thanks for sharing the answers Nick.
Some very eye opening results. I just wanted to cover off a few areas where my interpretation of the results differed to yours..
1. 41% of users always use a child theme –
Your interpretation is that users are resorting to a child theme to make changes that aren’t offered in the theme customisation options. I actually think there are many of us that use a child theme to make changes that are already available, but having visual changes sporadically stored through various theme options makes it difficult to identify problems and make changes as they are needed.
One solution would be to have all changes that are made through advanced module options and the theme customizer, outputted to a single style sheet where code can be manipulated and changed as actual CSS.
One other issue with the options as they exist in modules is that by providing boxes for before, main and after, the user can only manipulate the parent selector where as often you’d like to be able to target the container, row, column etc. A more generic ‘custom css’ tab within each module would allow more freedom. Combined with the output mentioned above and its winner winner chicken dinner.
More / better modules —
68% of polled users have used a third party resource for Divi with an overwhelming majority favouring extensions. This is very encouraging for developers building for Divi. I have said for some time I believe that a system is needed to load custom modules.
For example, in the Divi theme options, a tab for third party modules. Most developers are extending the builder class to add more modules so if we can do that once for all modules and then upload them just as a plugin is currently uploaded, but within the divi theme options, it’ll stop the plugin page getting crowded with what are in most cases, very small functionality adds.
It’ll also make it easier to convert existing plugins into divi modules. ie: tablepress, woocommerce, cf7 and caldera are examples of plugins that could be pulled into the Divi UI providing a more fluid experience, especially for clients.
Thats just my two cents 🙂 All the data is very encouraging and I look forward to watching Divi grow even further.
“One other issue with the options as they exist in modules is that by providing boxes for before, main and after, the user can only manipulate the parent selector where as often you’d like to be able to target the container, row, column etc. A more generic ‘custom css’ tab within each module would allow more freedom…”
Yes, totally agree!! Seems like an unnecessary and awkward constraint as-is.
QUOTE: “One solution would be to have all changes that are made through advanced module options and the theme customizer, outputted to a single style sheet where code can be manipulated and changed as actual CSS.”
This would be a game changer. I really like this idea. It’s a nuisance having to dig around in modules and their options to fiddle with settings whilst trying to get something to look right. Being able to jump right into the CSS in a stylesheet that contains everything Divi has declared, would be massively convenient and time-saving.
41% always use a child theme — this is probably about the average with all themes, or maybe a little low perhaps. WP community has spent so much time as a whole pushing the child theme idea that it’s taken hold and that’s how it’s don’t.
SJ is right, no one wants their bits and bobs spread out all over the place, it’s much better to have them all together and easy to edit.
The idea isn’t to never have to customize anything, unless you expect that every site will look the same (and I thought we’d moved away from that this past year) and be recognizable as Divi?
Would it be worth taking SJ 2nd point a step further and stripping divi back and making it modular? So all the wonderful new modules that you are working on can be added as required and even making current modules adons so that we can just add what we want when we want (would this reduce the bulk and slow loading). It would be great for those talented developers like SJ if they could build extensions that fit in as if they were always supposed to be there.
@Gareth Not worth it if they insist on allowing these plugin to “live on Github” (as Nick has said.
There are a number of things I use a child theme for:
– changing the footer bar
– changing the image size ratio in the blog and gallery modules
– adding social media icons (like pinterest, instagram and youtube) that aren’t in the options panel.
I have to get into the php to make these changes on every single site I do, and that sucks.
ALL of these things are front-end changes in Genesis, Meks, Visual Composer, etc. I’d like to see Divi catch up.
I’ve been wondering about the footer issue for a while and ran into the social media icon issue a month back when one of my clients wanted to add a linkedin icon to the header. I was surprised that I had to do a workaround. I love Divi, my clients loves Divi but we should not have to resort to a child theme or plugin for these types of things.
I agree with Dawn Headway Themes, etc. Have an fast and easy way to do this.
Can you answer as to why this is literally the only premium theme (which means we pay for it) that doesn’t allow us to edit the footer other than child theme or by editing the php file every time we update? I’m sure the designers at ET can figure out how… Maybe if I knew there was a reason other than assuming/hoping users won’t change it or forget to change it I might not be canceling after 3+ years.
You bring up a good point which I hope ET looks into. I bet a huge percentage of that 41% using Child Themes are doing so to get rid of the “Elegant Themes” credit in the footer.
I’d like to know what percentage actually do more than that. I personally finally learned how to create a child theme for that specific purpose and then learned how much more I could do with a child theme. I never looked back after that!
GREAT observations, SJ — I totally agree! And thanks too, Nick, for the survey- glad to see how much our input helps.
I echo SJ’s suggestion of a single stylesheet for CSS output. In addition, for those of us who are not professionals and/or lack a deep familiarity with Divi but would still like to customize CSS, it would be really nice to be able to click on a module or element and get the necessary selector information to be able to target that element with CSS. Trying to figure that out without going into the codebase itself (which in itself is difficult for non-professionals) is nearly impossible. Adding this option as a tool tip or in the popup menu for each Builder element, as well as its contents, would be a great help.
I agree, LOVE the idea of a single stylesheet for all CSS output. Much easier.
As you have seen a great number of Divi users are building sites for other people. My guess is most like myself would like the Footer to show the new sites we have built for clients to have the “Created by” with our information, not Divi.
I believe like myself many of these Child Themes have been created just to make this change to White Label the site with our information.
I would like to see an easy way to White Label our sites with a checkbox and text/html box to do this native in Divi.
Just my 2¢
You all should check out Divi Booster. It allows you to customize the footer (and some of the other stuff mentioned here) very easily. Now, I’d still love to see this supported right in Divi, and I agree that many are probably using a child theme, mainly for that 1 thing. But for now Divi Booster provides a simple solution that avoids a child theme, and has a lot of other great features/options.
I’m using Divi for my own business site. I’m not a web developer so I really don’t care if ET puts their brand on it. That said, I’ve been thinking of making the link go to an Affiliate page and make a few bucks from it while still helping ET build their brand. Any web designer can always use BuiltWith browser plugin to learn what tools were used to build my site.
I agree it’s time for ET to drop the link because now Divi is a tool and not a ET designed theme. Also the company has grown enough to drop its training wheels. It’s kinda creepy that they still include it. We don’t see images with a watermark saying, ‘Created by Adobe Photoshop’.
Another idea might be to have a free trial version of Divi or better yet, a basic version of Divi which would have the label. Pay the $79 bucks and it gets white labeled, tech support and more modules.
YES! There had to have been other users mentioning the footer/copyright issue – I’m not surprised it wasn’t including in this results since ET has been ignoring complaints about this huge issue. This is the only premium theme that refuses to allow customization in the theme settings for the footer/copyright. I wrote in the survey that this is the one issue that will keep me from renewing again this year. There are too many other competitors (Themefuse and it’s unyson framework) that are just as good but also allow you to edit the footer without having to create a child theme!
I didn’t create a Child Theme to do this, I just used Divi Booster, which made it totally simple as well as adding some other functionality that really helped, such as fixing the header icon from shrinking on scroll. But honestly I find some of these comments to be rather harsh and OTT. Divi is a beautiful theme that offers so much. Yes I was frustrated at first with not finding a way to easily edit the footer, but 5 mins of searching on the net and I found Divi Booster – so problem solved. But to carry on slamming them as arrogant and throwing such nasty sentiments around seems uncalled for. If you really hate it that much and your life is hell because of the Divi footer, then nick off and use other theme! SImple!
Keep up the awesome work ET. I love what you’ve done so far, and although there is room for improvement, that is exactly what you are doing so I’m looking forward to Divi 3 and the enhancements it brings.
Also I love the suggestions for a calendar and events module. Many of my clients need that functionality and I find that the plugins for that just look ugly unless you are really good at CSS customisations (which I am not), so a module that can also take on the look of the site will be very welcome.
All of these comments on “just use Divi Booster” would be very helpful if it didn’t cost $19. Yeah it’s not much but I am out of work and simply don’t have it.
I beg to differ. Having to use a plugin to easily change something that everyone wants to change is wrong. Should be in the theme settings imo.
That people are harsh about it is just a sign of frustration, and I can understand that.
Tommy I agree that it should be in the theme options, but my point is that it was easily fixed as a workaround for now. I chose to use the Divi Booster plugin not only for the easy editing of the footer, but for all the other awesome things it does.
Besides, I haven’t created a child theme (as I knew that I would not be needing that level of customisation for that particular site), so using a plugin will ensure that I won’t lose that footer change when I update Divi.
I just find that people can be overly harsh when commenting and it’s not necessary. Yes ET needs to take notice and change some of these things, as the community is making a clear statement, but it’s possible to do it without being nasty.
I agree with Mike. 90% of the cases where I use a child theme I do it just to remove ET’s enforced branding including backlinks in the footer of EVERY page. It is one of the first things almost every potential client complains about when I show a Divi mockup in a sales pitch until I assure them it will be removed in the final website. This is a customer demand that ET keeps ignoring for years now. I consider that very stubborn and unprofessional for a premium theme supplier/vendor. I’m quite sure that this complain showed up in the survey not only once but was censored to avoid feeding the flames.
For heaven’s sake, just give us a switch in the Divi options to switch it off and provide a module for branding purposes, where besides ET’s branding we can include our own credits, too. Then we can place it where it’s in compliance with the client’s preferences and everybody can live happily ever after. I don’t mind any branding in the backend at all, I have no problems telling clients about Divi. But the footer of EVERY page is not the right place for enforced branding, that’s where the client’s infos like a copyright notice belongs.
Besides that – the statement “Designed by ElegantThemes” is a pretty bold lie. After days or even hours of working on the appearance of a Divi site I consider that to be MY design and I bet most other web designers feel in a similar way. ET provides the technology and the tools, but not the design. That may be different regarding your other themes, but it does not stand true with a pure page builder theme like Divi. Without our design work every Divi website would look nothing more than painfully plain.
Divi is good enough to stand for itself and represent ET’s product quality, you don’t need such gagging methods. I have more than 25 years of marketing experience working for major international IT corporates before dropping out of the treadmill and “retiring” to freelance print- and web design and I can assure you, that means like that won’t do your brand much good in the long run. And only after removing that enforced and annoying branding you can derive from such a survey if child themes are really necessary for other customization purposes than that.
JM2C
Will
I actually cancelled my Divi subscription after the trial period over this issue. It seemed crazy that one can modify so much of the site but can’t directly modify the footer area just as simply.
Add me to this as well. I always add a child theme to change the footer. Sometimes I use it to fix bugs or make small customizations that should have been part of the theme (mostly for older themes). And since I’ve been forced to add a child theme I put css there as well since it’s more clean then to add it in the ET Panel.
Totally agree with the above
Totally agree!!!
Wilhem, I suspect that there were many of our voices about this footer issue in the “open-ended questions”, but as you can see it seems they have chosen again to subdue and ignore those voices. I’ve seen it over and over, and it’s ignored.
It really is strange too. For all other intents and purposes, it appears that ET is very concerned and focused on customer satisfaction and input, except in this one area. I just can’t wrap my head around it. I love using Divi, but at the same time this one point being ignored makes ET appear arrogant and smug, and makes me want to write it off and just deal with using a framework that I don’t like as much.
This!
If I ever kick ET to the curb it will be over his one single issue.
The arrogance is ridiculous.
It’s a PAID product. Get over yourselves ET!
+1000
Very good report. Agree with most people here.
I love the DIVI Theme, but since the release of EXTRA there was nothing more useful for me.
There’s a lot of potential in Extra and ideas that could make it better, no doubt the customization part is very easy to use and there’s quiet a lot of options at the moment which makes me a satisfied user!
Using it for my own websites and not clients.
Hats off to you ET!
Liran
By the way!
Which plugin are you using for the comments?
Love it!
We’re using Postmatic 🙂
Postmatic + Epoch is a solid combo.
That’s deadly guys, Just got both of them!
thank you so much… 😉
Very interesting Nick thank you, and really hoping for some Divi conferences, that would be awesome!
Yes, please in the Netherlands… \o/ 🙂
I agree Michelle, a Divi conference would be great… I’ve been to several WP conferences in Birmingham but a Divi specific one (somewhere in the UK) would be even more beneficial! Great survey Nick, and thanks for sharing the responses so quickly, its exciting to see how Divi is improving so quickly, even over just the last few years.
Yes please to in the UK, happy to help set it up 🙂