The page-builder argument usually gets framed as a question of purity. It is not. It is a question of who has to change the site on a Tuesday afternoon six months from now.

Where builders earn their keep

If your marketing team needs to publish a landing page for a campaign that starts on Thursday, and the alternative is a developer ticket in a two-week queue, the builder wins. It is not close. Speed of iteration beats elegance of markup for content that changes constantly.

They are also good for the long tail of a site: the pages that matter to somebody but never get enough developer attention to be built properly.

Where they stop being the right tool

• Genuinely custom interaction. A configurator, a booking flow, anything with real state. Build it properly and embed it.
• Content with structure. Products, events, team members. These want custom post types and templates, not fifty hand-built pages.
• Anything rendered thousands of times. Loop templates deserve tighter markup than a builder will give you.

The rule we use

If a human will edit it, build it in the builder. If a machine will repeat it, build it in a template. Most sites need both, and the projects that go wrong are the ones that pretended they only needed one.

Keep the builder tidy

Name your sections. Use global colours and fonts rather than hard-coded values. Save the patterns you repeat to the library. A builder site can be as maintainable as any other codebase — it just requires the same discipline, and people rarely apply it.