BoldGrid occupies an unusual spot in the website builder market. It is not a standalone platform like Wix or Squarespace, and it is not just another page builder plugin like Elementor. It is a whole suite of WordPress plugins and themes designed to make WordPress feel like a guided, drag-and-drop website builder while keeping real, portable WordPress underneath. If you have ever signed up with InMotion Hosting, you have almost certainly seen BoldGrid offered during setup, because InMotion bundles it with its hosting plans and the two companies are closely connected.
We have set up several test sites with BoldGrid over the years, both on InMotion accounts where it came pre-installed and on plain shared hosting where we installed the plugins manually. That experience left us with a genuinely mixed opinion. There are things BoldGrid does well, particularly for beginners who freeze up when they see a blank WordPress dashboard. There are also real frictions, and the biggest question hanging over the whole suite is whether it still earns its keep now that the native WordPress block editor has grown into a capable page-building tool on its own.
This review walks through what BoldGrid actually includes, who benefits from it, where it gets in the way, and whether it should influence your hosting decision at all.
What BoldGrid actually is
BoldGrid is best understood as a bundle of separate tools that share a brand and a design philosophy. The core pieces are:
- Inspirations — a starter-site wizard that interviews you about your site (business, blog, portfolio and so on), then installs a complete themed site with pages, placeholder text and stock imagery already in place.
- Post and Page Builder — a drag-and-drop editing plugin that layers rows, columns and content blocks on top of the WordPress editor.
- Total Upkeep — a backup and restore plugin with scheduled backups, remote storage options and a site-restore tool.
- Cloud WordPress and staging tools — sandboxed test environments where you can build or redesign a site before pushing it live.
The crucial point is that all of this runs on ordinary WordPress. Your content lives in normal WordPress posts and pages, your site runs on any host that supports WordPress, and if you deactivate BoldGrid tomorrow your site does not vanish. That single fact separates BoldGrid from closed builders and it is, in our view, its strongest argument.
The Inspirations wizard: a genuinely good on-ramp
The blank-canvas problem is real. We have watched plenty of first-time site owners install WordPress, log in, stare at the dashboard and give up for a week. Inspirations attacks that problem directly. You pick a category, browse preview designs that already look like finished websites, choose which pages you want (home, about, contact, blog and so on), and BoldGrid installs the whole thing in one pass.
What you end up with is not a demo you must reverse-engineer but a working site where the job becomes editing rather than creating. For a beginner, replacing placeholder text in an existing paragraph is dramatically less intimidating than composing a page from nothing. If you are at the stage of wondering how to create a website at all, this kind of guided start has real value.
The catch is that Inspirations works best exactly once. It is a site-creation tool, not a site-management tool, and re-running it on an established site is disruptive. It also nudges you firmly toward BoldGrid's own theme family, which brings us to the lock-in question below.
The Post and Page Builder: capable, but crowded
BoldGrid's drag-and-drop editor is a competent mid-weight page builder. You get rows and nested columns, pre-designed block sections you can drop in, decent typography controls, and background image handling that beginners can actually operate. It is lighter than Divi, less polished than Elementor, and noticeably simpler than either, which for its target audience is arguably correct.
The problem is not what the builder does; it is where it now sits. Modern WordPress ships with the block editor, which has matured from a rough replacement for the old text editor into a legitimate layout tool with block patterns, reusable blocks and full site editing on compatible themes. That means a fresh WordPress install already contains a page builder, and BoldGrid's plugin becomes a second, parallel way of doing the same job. New users end up with two editing paradigms in one dashboard, and content built in one does not translate cleanly into the other. If you ever remove the Post and Page Builder, pages built with it degrade into markup that needs manual cleanup — not catastrophic, but tedious. This is a standard page-builder tax, and BoldGrid pays it like everyone else.
Total Upkeep: the quiet star of the suite
Ironically, the least glamorous plugin in the bundle is the one we would most happily recommend on its own. Total Upkeep handles scheduled backups, manual snapshots before risky changes, remote storage so your backups do not die with your server, and a restoration process that can rescue a site even when the WordPress dashboard itself is broken. It also protects you during updates by making it easy to roll back if a plugin update goes wrong.
Every shared hosting veteran has a story about a host whose "included backups" turned out to be missing, stale or unrestorable at the worst possible moment. An independent, self-managed backup layer is not optional for a serious site, and Total Upkeep is a perfectly respectable way to get one. If nothing else from this review sticks, let it be this: your backup strategy should never depend solely on your host.
Strengths and weaknesses at a glance
| Where BoldGrid helps | Where it hurts |
|---|---|
| Real WordPress underneath — your site stays portable | Overlaps and competes with the native block editor |
| Inspirations removes the blank-canvas problem for beginners | Works best with BoldGrid's own themes, which feels like soft lock-in |
| Total Upkeep is a solid independent backup solution | Removing the page builder later means cleanup work |
| Staging and sandbox tools encourage safe experimentation | Its own interface conventions add a learning curve on top of WordPress |
| Free to use with any WordPress host | Development pace feels slower than the big page-builder rivals |
BoldGrid versus closed builders like Wix
This comparison is where BoldGrid shines brightest. A closed builder gives you an easy start and then owns you: your content, design and functionality live inside a proprietary platform, and "exporting" usually means copy-and-paste plus rebuilding from scratch. BoldGrid gives you a comparable easy start, but the result is a WordPress site you can move to any host, extend with tens of thousands of plugins, and hand to any WordPress developer on the planet.
For someone choosing between "easy but closed" and "powerful but intimidating," BoldGrid is a legitimate middle path. You get training wheels that can come off. Our WordPress guides cover what life looks like after they do.
Does BoldGrid still make sense today?
Honestly: less than it used to. When BoldGrid launched, the WordPress editing experience was genuinely hostile to beginners, and a guided layer on top of it solved a painful problem. Today the block editor, block patterns and modern starter themes have absorbed much of that value. A beginner starting fresh can get a respectable site using only what WordPress ships with, and learning the native editor is a better long-term investment than learning a vendor-specific builder.
That said, "less essential" is not "useless." Inspirations still delivers a faster first-day experience than stock WordPress. Total Upkeep is worth keeping regardless. And if BoldGrid arrives free with hosting you were already going to buy — as it does with InMotion — there is no harm in trying the suite and keeping only the pieces that earn their place.
Should BoldGrid affect your choice of host?
No — and we want to be plain about this, since our reviews may be compensated and we would rather be straight with you than flattering to anyone. BoldGrid is free software that runs on any WordPress-capable host. Bundling it is a nice touch, not a competitive moat. Pick your host on the things that actually differ between hosts: server performance, support quality, renewal pricing and refund terms. Our guide on how to choose a good web hosting service walks through that checklist, and our hosting reviews compare the options we have actually used.
FAQ
Is BoldGrid free?
The core plugins — Inspirations, the Post and Page Builder and the basic version of Total Upkeep — are free to install on any WordPress site. Premium tiers add extra blocks, advanced backup features and priority support. Hosts that bundle BoldGrid, most notably InMotion Hosting, typically include premium access with their plans, which is the most sensible way to end up with the paid version.
Do I need InMotion Hosting to use BoldGrid?
No. BoldGrid runs on any host that supports WordPress, which is effectively every host. The InMotion connection means the suite comes pre-installed and pre-licensed there, but you can download the plugins and use them anywhere. Conversely, being an InMotion customer does not obligate you to use BoldGrid at all — you can run stock WordPress and ignore the bundle entirely.
What happens to my site if I stop using BoldGrid?
Your content survives, because it is stored as ordinary WordPress posts and pages. Pages built with the Post and Page Builder will keep their text but lose their drag-and-drop layouts gracefully rather than perfectly — expect to spend time rebuilding layouts in the block editor or another tool. Backups made with Total Upkeep remain restorable as long as you keep the archive files. It is an unwinding job, not a hostage situation.
Is BoldGrid better than the WordPress block editor?
For most new sites started today, we would say no. The block editor is where WordPress development energy is concentrated, it has no lock-in cost, and its pattern libraries now cover most of what BoldGrid's blocks offer. BoldGrid's remaining edge is the Inspirations wizard, which assembles a complete starter site faster than assembling one by hand. If that first-day boost matters to you, use it — then do your ongoing editing wherever you are most comfortable.
Our verdict
BoldGrid is a decent bundled extra and a poor primary reason for anything. As a free companion to a hosting plan it adds genuine value: a friendly first-day setup through Inspirations, a trustworthy backup layer in Total Upkeep, and staging tools that encourage good habits. As a product you would go out of your way to adopt in the era of the mature block editor, it is much harder to recommend, and we would not choose a hosting company simply because BoldGrid comes in the box.
If it is already included with your plan, try it, keep Total Upkeep, and let the rest prove itself. If you are still shopping for hosting, weigh the things that really separate hosts — you can start with our web hosting plan comparison — and treat BoldGrid as a pleasant footnote rather than a deciding factor.