What is Divi 5?
Like so many other users of Divi, I’m following Nick Roach, the founder at Elegant Themes. He’s the go-to person when it comes to news regarding Divi, and he’s posting them regularly on Elegant Themes Resources pages and social media.
Back in 2022, a post came out that Elegant Themes are looking at something completely new, something that would bring Divi back among the best. It became known as Divi 5, and lots and lots of debates are firing ever since.
One of the most important reasons why Elegant Themes would start such a project is that Divi, no matter how powerful it really is, has some serious limitations. These started to affect the users in a negative way, which of course is a dangerous situation for a software vendor.
Divi 4, which was a little bit revolutionary at the time, was based on shortcodes – as most page builders are. This by itself is not such a bad thing, but it has its limits.
Table of Contents
The basic limits of shortcodes
For one, it’s about performance.
WordPress supports shortcodes natively, so there’s no problem about that, but it brings a lot of overhead to the rendered page. Every time WordPress encounters a shortcode, it breaks the rendering process and jumps over to the code that the shortcode called, in order to get whatever the code’s output is – only then the rendering continues. So if you have many shortcodes on the page – like all builders do – it is automatically slowing down the rendering of the page.
There’s no problem if you have a few shortcodes, timing is measured in miliseconds. But Divi, like most builders, uses them for just about everything. So there are huge numbers of shortcodes on even basic pages, and yes, this became a struggle, especially in slower (= shared) hosting environments. Build a complicated page with lots of modules, i.e. shortcodes underneath, and you can easily get a 5-6 seconds added to your page’s loading time. Nowadays it became simply not acceptable.
The other thing are technical limitations.
Each shortcode has a code behind it that runs whenever it’s found on site. So nesting, for instance, is very limited, simply because the code would loop sooner or later. It’s just not possible, not in a way that would work reliably and not inside the theme itself.
Imagine a row with two columns. Insert a new row with three columns into the first column, then a text module inside each column. Then, insert a row inside the second column and define two columns, each with a simple Image module inside.
No. Impossible, unless you plug in some serious CSS and code.
Divi 4 has its own structure for such a purpose, called Specialty Sections. It works, but it’s – again – very limited, because there are only a few structures available that are hard-coded inside the theme.
If you want a structure different that those, there’s no way to produce it with the theme alone.
Which is why the 3rd party solutions are so common. One can get practically every imaginable module online.
The API that Divi supported was nice and widely accepted, but also rather complicated, because of the reasons stated above. This API has opened the gate wide for 3rd party developers that worked on Divi modules, and there are thousands of modules and add-ons for Divi available on the web today, making almost everything possible with Divi. But, of course, adding costs.
The basic reasons why Divi 5 was initiated
The question “what is Divi 5” is often seen and heard these days. Divi 5 was initiated as a project that would get rid of Divi shortcodes completely. That meant the complete rewrite of the core theme files, and practically a completely new theme had to be developed. Doing this promised a huge advance in theme’s speed.
The Divi visual editor by itself is a great thing and I like it very much. But again, it can become really slow in certain cases, especially when pages become more complicated. There’s a lot of user posts about that, and it’s true. It can get tricky, slow and even freeze sometimes, causing you to lose the work that hasn’t been saved.
One of the targets, besides getting rid of shortcodes and improving speed, was of course compatibility with older versions of Divi. The Divi user base is so big that not providing this would mean a possibly deadly user base decline, and that’s surely something Elegant Themes don’t want.
So shortly, if the new Divi 5 finds some Divi 4 shortcodes on the page (either from the import process or a 3rd party plugin), it should step back and use the Divi 4 logic to deal with them. Otherwise, it would run normally and not use any shortcodes.
Sounds coplicated? It is.
Divi 5 Roadmap
Back then, Elegant Themes published their roadmap without actual dates, because it was not completely clear how much time the core rewrite would take. Now, it’s clear it took over a year to complete that, and then the Alpha was published.
And more important, the functionalities started to be added to the backbone, making it usable more and more.
Divi 5 is a completely new WordPress theme, and it can be an answer to “what is Divi 5”.
Divi 5 Alpha and the most asked questions
Prior to a Public Alpha release, Elegant Themes release the Dev Alpha and Dev Beta releases of Divi 5. With these, Elegant Themes focused on solidifying the backend framework and giving developers in the community a head-start on converting their custom modules before moving on to user-facing features.
Then, mid of 2024, the Divi 5 Public Alpha version was released. It was immediately grabbed by a number of users and tested thoroughly.
Since then, the community sites (like Facebook groups) aree buzzing with tests, reports, questions and everything in between.
At the moment of writing this, Divi 5 Alpha 14.1 is out and this website is built around it. There are lots of user features implemented already, although there are still bugs here and there.
Should I use Divi 5 Alpha on new sites?
This is by far the most asked question all over the community. And the answer is not quite simple, although the word “Alpha” tells the story of a developer’s circle. Let me put it this way.
If you’re building a simple site, meaning not using any 3rd party Divi modules, it is rather stable and you can by all means use it. One big drawback is that the Alpha by definition is under development, so you actually risk loosing something with the next update.
If you have a site built on Divi 4, it’s not so simple anymore. The migration platform can be tricky for now, and chances are you’re going to have to rebuild directly in Divi 5 if something fails. Plus, using any of the 3rd party modules built specificaly for Divi 4 could cause additional troubles, for the same reason.
In general, Divi 5 Alpha is a great toy and something you should start using to get familiar with its features. Otherwise, wait for the Beta version.
Will Divi 5 be a free update?
This is the second question that pops out the most.
The answer is a clear YES – if you have an existing Divi subscription (yearly or lifetime), you will get Divi 5 as an update inside your WordPress dashboard.
The pricing structure of the new theme is however not clear (at least to me) – it remains a mistery whether it will keep the price as it is right now or it will go up slightly. If you’re interested in Divi and like where it’s going, I’d say go and get Divi now.
What about the 3rd Party solutions I’m using?
3rd party developers are working on their solutions for some time now, and the first updates supporting Divi 5 are out, like Divi Pixel and many others.
It’s a pretty chaotic marketplace right now, and I’m having troubles following each and every update they’re releasing.
Personally, I’m using solutions from these developers on various sites:
- Divi Pixel
- DiviLife
- Divi Engine
- PeeAye Creative
All of them announced some level of Divi 5 preparedness in their modules already.
It is very important to remember that they depend heavily on Divi 5 framework; should it change for whatever reason, they will be forced to do a rebuild and this could take some time.
If your question is about add-ons, I’d suggest you take a look at your developer’s site and follow their updates – it’s the only way to get informed at the right time.
Divi 5 Beta
The Divi 5 Beta version is a much anticipated thing. According to Nick Roach, once the have the Woocommerce modules ready, they plan to release the Beta. This should happen during the summer, if the tests work well.
The Beta version should be the one you take to build new sites, and hopefuly it will be stable enough to really start working with Divi 5.
But let’s wait and see.
What’s next?
The Divi 5 Beta phase should be rather short, definitely shorter than the Alpha phase. With any luck, this should mean a few months, meaning we could see the official Divi 5 release somewhere around the end of 2025. I personally will be very happy if it works out this way, becase I like where Divi is heading.
If you like it too, I’d suggest you buy Divi now, because nobody knows what’s going to happen to Elegant Themes’ price structure once Divi 5 is out. Since it will set some new standards, it might easily get a bit more expensive.
I hope I’ve managed to answer at least some aspects of the question (what is Divi 5).
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