WP Grid Builder Review: Recreate Pat Flynn & Brian Dean Layouts

What Pat Flynn and Brian Dean Do (And Why You'd Want To Copy It)

If you've spent any time studying top-tier content marketers, you've probably noticed something about their websites. Brian Dean's Backlinko features massive, in-depth guides — but some of them are locked behind an email opt-in. You click "Unlock Now," enter your email, and then you get access. It's a brilliant lead generation move powered by OptinMonster (which isn't cheap).

Pat Flynn's Smart Passive Income takes a different approach. His site features beautifully organized content cards that visitors can filter by type — podcasts, guides, blog posts — with a clean, professional layout that looks custom-developed. Both of these marketing techniques are proven to boost engagement and grow email lists, but they look like they'd require a developer to build.

The good news? You can recreate both of these approaches on any WordPress site using a single plugin called WP Grid Builder. No developer required.

What Is WP Grid Builder?

WP Grid Builder is a WordPress plugin built around three core concepts: cards, grids, and facets. Cards are the individual content tiles — think of them as the building blocks that display your post's featured image, title, excerpt, author info, or any other metadata you want to show. Grids control how those cards are arranged on the page — columns, spacing, responsive breakpoints, animations. And facets are the interactive filters that let visitors search, sort, and narrow down content.

Together, these three pieces give you the same kind of dynamic, filterable content displays you see on sites like Smart Passive Income — without touching a line of PHP or JavaScript. The plugin works with any post type (including custom post types), integrates with page builders like Elementor and Gutenberg, and supports Advanced Custom Fields for more complex setups.

Building Cards: The Foundation of Your Layout

The card builder is where everything starts. WP Grid Builder ships with a library of pre-built card templates you can import and customize, which is the recommended approach. Starting from a blank card means working with empty drop zones, and it's genuinely difficult to envision the final result that way.

Once you import a template, you get a visual editor that works like a simplified page builder. Every element — featured image, post title, excerpt, author avatar, tags, read-more button — is a draggable block you can reposition, restyle, or delete. The interface includes a clever 3D rotation feature that lets you visualize which layer you're editing (media holder, content holder, body holder), though it can feel a bit over-engineered for simple adjustments.

Customization options run deep. You can change background colors with transparency, adjust spacing and padding per element, swap out icons, and control the media aspect ratio. One practical limitation: the card preview mode doesn't pull in real post data, so you're working somewhat blind until you attach the card to a grid and preview it there.

Replicating Pat Flynn's Filterable Content Cards

To recreate Pat Flynn's clean card layout, you'd start by importing a template like the Jade card. From there, it's mostly about stripping things away — remove the author info, remove the category terms at the top, remove the excerpt — until you're left with a streamlined card showing the featured image and post title on a solid color background.

For video-heavy sites, setting the media width to around 39% with 16:9 thumbnails creates a nice horizontal card layout. Adding padding (around 15 pixels all around) and setting a background color on the outer container while making the inner body holder transparent gives you that single-color card look Pat uses.

The real magic comes when you pair these cards with facets (which we'll get to), allowing visitors to filter by content type — exactly like Pat's podcast/guide/blog post toggle.

Recreating Brian Dean's Content Lock Cards

Brian Dean's content lock strategy requires a bit more setup. The approach uses custom post types — you create a "premium" post type (using a plugin like Toolset, CPT UI, or any custom post type tool) to differentiate locked content from regular posts.

The card itself starts as a duplicate of your standard card. You then add a lock icon to the upper-right corner using the SVG icon block, adjust its background to be semi-transparent and dark, and add some margin to pull it away from the edge (around 15 pixels from the top and right works well). Below that, you add a title block set to "raw content" mode with the text "Member Exclusive" — centered, with a matching semi-transparent background.

One important note: WP Grid Builder handles the display side of content locking, but you'll need a separate plugin like Restrict Content Pro to actually protect the content or redirect visitors to an opt-in page. Grid Builder shows the card with the lock icon; the restriction plugin enforces the gate.

Building and Configuring Grids

With your cards built, the grid is where everything comes together. Creating a grid starts with a content query — you select which post types to display, how many posts per page, and optionally filter by author, taxonomy, or specific posts to include or exclude.

The layout settings are impressively granular. You set column counts per device breakpoint — four columns on desktop, three on laptop, two on tablet portrait, one on mobile — with independent spacing controls for each. The masonry layout works well for cards of varying heights, but if you want uniform card sizes, toggling "fit rows" mode forces everything into neat, equal rows.

The real power of grids shows up in the Card Styles section, where you can assign different card templates to different post types. So your regular review posts display with the clean Opalite card, while premium content automatically shows the locked card with the icon and "Member Exclusive" label. WP Grid Builder handles the logic; you just map card to post type.

Preview mode inside the grid builder is far more useful than the card preview — it pulls in actual post data so you can see real featured images, titles, and content rendered in your chosen layout.

Displaying Your Grid on a Page

Getting your grid onto a page is straightforward. If you're using Elementor, there's a dedicated WP Grid Builder widget — drag it onto your page, select your grid from the dropdown, and the content renders immediately in the editor. Gutenberg users get native blocks, and you can always fall back to shortcodes for any other page builder.

One quirk worth knowing: when you only have a single grid created, the Elementor widget sometimes won't let you select it. The workaround is to create a second blank grid, which makes the first one selectable — then you can delete the dummy grid. The same bug applies to facets. It's a minor annoyance that should be an easy fix on the developer's end.

Facets: Let Visitors Sort and Search Your Content

Facets are arguably WP Grid Builder's most practical feature, and they're surprisingly simple to set up. A facet is any interactive filter — a search bar, checkboxes, dropdowns, radio buttons — that lets visitors narrow down grid content in real time.

Creating a search facet takes about 30 seconds: create a new facet, set the behavior to "filter" with a search field, enable instant search so results update as visitors type, and save. The search engine defaults to WordPress's built-in search, with support for third-party engines like SearchWP. There's a sensible result limit (default 200) to prevent heavy database queries on large sites.

For content-type filtering à la Pat Flynn, you create a checkbox facet with the data source set to "post types." Drop it above your grid in Elementor, assign it to the correct grid, and visitors can toggle between your different content types instantly. With a bit of custom CSS, you could replace the default checkboxes with icon-based toggles to match Pat Flynn's polished look even more closely.

Final Verdict: WP Grid Builder Scores 8.3/10

WP Grid Builder earns an 8.3 out of 10 — a strong score that reflects genuinely useful functionality held back by some rough UI edges. The card builder's icon picker is buggy in Safari, the preview modes could show real data earlier in the workflow, and there are minor selection glitches in the Elementor integration.

On the positive side, the plugin delivers on its core promise: you can build professional, filterable content grids without writing code. The responsive breakpoint controls are excellent, the facet system is dead simple, and the ability to assign different card designs to different post types is a genuine differentiator. Customer support was also a highlight — a detailed, helpful response with custom code arrived within 16 hours, without any special treatment.

If you're running a content-heavy WordPress site and want to organize your posts with the same polish as Pat Flynn or Brian Dean, WP Grid Builder gets you about 80% of the way there out of the box. A touch of CSS closes the remaining gap. For most WordPress users, that's a very strong value proposition.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.