You’ve heard wonderful things about this awesome WordPress page builder called Oxygen? At the same time you heard about a steep learning curve it has to master it?
Now you’re wondering if Oxygen builder is the right choice for you?
In this review, I’ll answer all of the questions you might have.
Is Oxygen builder good choice for me?
Let me just start by saying that if you’re used to other page builders such as Elementor or Beaver Builder, mastering Oxygen builder will take you much more time.
If you know how to code, or you’re at least familiar with technologies such as PHP, HTML, CSS JS, it would be much easier for you.
Understanding WordPress template hierarchy and structure helps out a lot too!
Should this fact turn you away from trying Oxygen? Not at all.
Oxygen builder is much more powerful WP page builder than any other you tried.
But with great power comes great responsibility, huh?
Yeah, it sure does!
With Oxygen, you can create pretty much everything you want within WordPress. Custom templates for your pages, blog posts, archives. Custom 404 template, search template… You get the idea.
You can even add code snippets wherever you want.
Choose to start with a completely blank installation or install a ready-made website. By the way, when I say blank, I really do mean blank. Oxygen builder shuts down the entire WP theming system, so when you install the blank Oxygen site, you don’t have any styling at all.
Is it safe to switch to Oxygen builder in production?
I get asked a lot if it is OK to install Oxygen in production site. Not at all!
You won’t lose any content, as content is stored in the database, but your site would look really ugly until you style it through Oxygen, and this is why you should have a staging environment if you want to redesign your live site. After it’s completely done, then you can push to production and replace the live site.
So is Oxygen a good WordPress page builder for you? If you don’t mind spending some time learning how it works, you can really get some nice benefits such as full control of your website appearance and the possibility to add custom code snippets wherever it’s needed. On top of that, Oxygen is very light and doesn’t inject a lot of garbage HTML which is a very nice SEO benefit.
You get a really smooth, fast loading website.
Oxygen builder benefits
Besides the above-mentioned benefits of speed and complete control, one of the biggest benefits of the Oxygen builder plugin is the fantastic pricing. You get a lifetime license and support for the price of the annual fees you normally pay for other page builders.
Other benefits include a powerful drag & drop editing feature, advanced column manipulation, CSS grid support, flexbox controls, rich user design library,…
One of the most important features for me is the flexible builder elements. You can add all sorts of dynamic data with repeaters and loops in your custom-made templates. Works well with the Advanced Custom Fields plugin too!
All of these are amazing features that make Oxygen Builder truly stand out from the competition. With Oxygen, you can create stunning WordPress websites that are lightweight and load really fast. Google and more importantly, your users will really appreciate that.
Having said that…
Are there any Oxygen builder disadvantages?
OK, so it’s not all ideal with the Oxygen plugin. I’ve been using it for a lot of my projects and here is the list of things I don’t like.
I didn’t waste a lot of time explaining all the benefits, I think they’re pretty self-explanatory and awesome, you can find more on the Oxygen Builder pages and how they stack against the competition.
I am going to talk a little bit more about the things I don’t like about Oxygen, cause it’s important to truly understand the pros and cons in order to get a full picture.
Pre-made websites are not completely done
This is really annoying. While I do appreciate that nobody *has* to use them, you can build a great site with Oxygen from scratch. But given that there is an actual library of ready-made websites that you can import and tweak, they aren’t exactly completely done.
I’ve tried almost all of these sites from the design library, and most of them have some templates missing. Usually not the most important templates, but it’s still annoying. Templates such as 404, search template, or even category template. For users that are not really comfortable with WordPress template hierarchy, this can be a problem.
Also, sometimes the CSS styles are lacking some important rules. For example, at one point I tried Oxygen on this blog too, and the pre-made template I used, didn’t really support the long strings well on mobile phones. my blog looked really ugly when there were long words (URLs) shown within the post.
You can’t have more than one developer working with Oxygen at the same time
This was actually a huge problem while building an enterprise site for a client. There were multiple pages to be built, but I couldn’t work at the same time with other developers on it. In fact, you can only have one page/post/template edited at the same time with Oxygen. Otherwise, as more than one page is being saved, it can create conflicts and data loss.
This is something I really hope Oxygen can fix soon.
Drag and drop structure pane in the backend can be difficult to use sometimes
A minor but annoying issue nevertheless. The structure pane in the Oxygen editor is really powerful when you want to re-order elements on the page, but it can be really frustrating to use sometimes. You’ll see.
Sometimes it’s difficult to migrate the site live
Sometimes there can be problems while migrating the site to another domain caused by the way Oxygen saves the data in the database, but usually, all of this can be fixed, especially with the help of a helpful support team and/or community on social media. Still, it’s annoying a bit.
How hard it is to learn using Oxygen Builder plugin?
I hope I didn’t scare you away from using Oxygen Builder plugin, it really is an awesome tool. The problems I mentioned above, might not be important to you and in that case, Oxygen is a fantastic WP page builder.
So if you are convinced, how much time do you need to learn how to use it and build fantastic sites with it?
It depends on your level of understanding of how WordPress works and your ability or willingness to learn some of the basics of web design. It’s definitely not that hard and you can probably master it if you give it some time (few months) and after a couple of websites built.
For beginners, I would definitely recommend checking out official Oxygen Builder YouTube channel and especially beginners intro:
Good thing is that you can practice and play around before purchasing a license.
When to use Oxygen Builder plugin?
So how do you decide when is a good opportunity to use Oxygen Builder plugin and not something else?
I would say definitely when you’re working on a complex WordPress website on your own when you have enough time at your disposal to really customize and polish all of the details.
They also have great integration with Gutenberg, so you can have your clients manage the Oxygen website completely through Gutenberg without them even knowing oxygen exists. This is very powerful when you have nosy clients that might ruin your carefully built website.
On the other hand, if you are working in a team, or you don’t have much time to deliver a project, or you don’t need all of these powerful Oxygen capabilities, you can opt to use some other page builders. Personally, I like to use Elementor, which is really user-friendly and doesn’t have a steep learning curve as Oxygen.
Conclusion
Hopefully, by reading this Oxygen builder review, you have a better understanding on what can you do with it, when is the best opportunity to use it and should you even buy it.
I’ve built a lot of client websites with Oxygen and I’d be happy to help you should you need more info or struggling to build something with it. Please share and leave a comment if you have any questions.