How do I make my archive page look like popular reviewing sites (e.g., Polygon and Gamespot) [closed]

Seems to me the desire to use that page-builder plugin has resulted in a solution far more complicated, laborious, and convoluted than whatever you’re calling the “long and manual way” 😛 . WordPress itself answers your question.

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WordPress Philosophy

Pages are for static, timeless, and potentially hierarchical content. Plugins abuse that notion sometimes, but never mind that.

A collection of content with the same properties is called an “archive”. Archives can be ordered, filtered, paginated (displayed across a number of “pages”) – and WordPress does every one of things really well out of the box.

WordPress theme templates give you full control over the way content is displayed by way of direct HTML, PHP, and CSS. The Template Hierarchy provides a simple model for organizing which files display what content. The Loop provides a mechanism for accessing all the properties of a particular piece of content.

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Solution

Unless you have more constraints and needs that have yet to be mentioned, the only reasonable solution is to:

1. delete that “review” page and forget it ever existed. It’s absurdity to try to turn a page into an archive when WordPress’s built-in archives already fulfill all of your needs.
2. modify your archive-reviews.php theme template file and associated CSS to achieve your desired appearance; possibly functions.phpas well if WordPress is not “behaving” as you wish. If your reviews archive doesn’t look right, then you’re not yet done with your archive-reviews.php file and CSS styles – it’s as simple as that.

Read up on Theme Development and Template Tags if you’re struggling to understand what’s going on in your theme files.