Migrating from one page builder to another

Why switching builders isn’t a one-click job

How the layout is stored differs from one builder to the next, and none of the formats is interoperable. Native Gutenberg and WPBakery both write into the post_content field of the wp_posts table — the first with HTML comments delimiting each block, the second with nested shortcodes. Elementor instead keeps its layout as JSON in the dedicated _elementor_data meta field, replayed when the page loads. All three describe the same idea — a page made of sections — but none of them can read another’s format.

There’s no reliable converter that automatically translates a WPBakery layout into an Elementor one, or the other way round. Some plugins claim to do this conversion, but in practice the result keeps misplaced blocks, lost styles or empty sections on anything but the simplest layouts. The method that actually works is manual rebuilding in the new builder, optionally using a text and image export to avoid retyping the content.

The breakage doesn’t stop at layout: each builder also generates its own element identifiers (for instance classes like elementor-element-xxxxx), which separately added custom CSS often targets. That custom CSS stops applying as soon as the page is rebuilt elsewhere, since the new elements carry different identifiers — it has to be rewritten, not just copied over.