Your layouts live inside your posts, and that changes everything
Divi stores a page as shortcodes in the post content itself — [et_pb_section], [et_pb_row] and the rest — rather than in a separate field. Switch Divi off and the page does not revert to plain text; it displays the shortcodes. This is the single most important fact about owning a Divi site and it is rarely explained at the point of sale. It is not a reason to panic and it is not a reason to leave. It is a reason to know, before you commission anything, which work adds more shortcode and which work adds content you could take with you.
Divi 5 is a rewrite, and the honest advice is not "upgrade now"
Divi 5 rebuilds the builder from the ground up rather than extending Divi 4, so the questions that matter are which of your third-party modules have been rewritten for it, whether your child theme touches anything that moved, and how much of your library converts cleanly. The right sequence is a copy of the site upgraded first, the templates and highest-traffic pages compared side by side, and a written list of what actually broke. Sites that went first and read the list afterwards are the ones that had a bad month.
One Theme Builder template edit changes every page using it
Divi's Theme Builder assigns headers, footers and body templates across whole groups of pages at once, which is exactly what you want until somebody edits the wrong one. The blast radius of a careless change is the site, not a page. So template work happens on a copy, assignments are written down before they are changed, and anything that touches a global template is treated as a release rather than an edit — which is not how most people are taught to use it.
Presets and global modules are the cheapest thing you are not using
Most Divi sites we are handed style each button, heading and section by hand, so a brand change means opening two hundred modules. Divi has presets and global modules that make one definition apply everywhere it is used, and retrofitting them is unglamorous work that pays for itself the first time you change a colour or a font. It also makes the site far cheaper for us to work on afterwards, which shows up in your hours.
A custom module beats another layout pack
When Divi cannot do something the usual answer is a third-party module plugin or another layout pack, and each one adds assets, a settings screen and a vendor who may lose interest. Divi has a module API, and a purpose-built module appears in the builder beside the stock ones, does the one thing you asked for, and lives in your child theme. It also produces cleaner shortcode than a stack of nested rows imitating the same effect.
WooCommerce in Divi is fine until the checkout
Divi's WooCommerce modules are good on product and shop templates and worth using there. The checkout is different: it is the one screen where a broken layout costs money immediately, and it is the part most exposed to WooCommerce, payment gateway and shipping plugin updates. We generally build product and archive templates in Divi and leave cart and checkout closer to stock — and we will tell you which way we would go on your site before building either.
Speed work on Divi starts with the settings most sites never opened
Divi ships with dynamic CSS, dynamic module loading and deferred jQuery, and a large share of the slow Divi sites we see have none of them switched on. That comes first because it is free and reversible. After that it is the ordinary work — oversized images, fonts loaded twice, plugins loading everywhere — and only then anything structural. Nobody needs a rebuild to get a Divi site to a respectable loading time.
What Divi work costs to buy
Small pieces — a module, a Theme Builder template, a preset system, a speed pass — start at $300 and are fixed-quoted once we know what is involved. Larger work is quoted after a scoping call, never open-ended. If it is ongoing rather than one-off, prepaid hours are usually better value: $750 for five hours or $1,400 for ten. $700/mo and $1,300/mo put development time and maintenance under one arrangement.
