A few weeks ago I found myself getting terribly frustrated with Elementor as an update caused a widespread slowdown to one of our client’s busiest sites. Elementor has provided us with some incredibly efficient turnaround time for our web design customers and we continue to use it but after struggling with this latest update issue and its well-known bloat and page speed concerns I went searching for an alternative.
I’ve long known about Oxygen and a lot of Reddit users recommended Bricks Builder as an alternative. I don’t know how I stumbled upon the new Breakdance page builder but I’m certainly glad I did.
For the past month, I’ve been building and converting a few sites. Two will be in the public spotlight with an automotive dealership and another being a municipality.
Our Breakdance review has been overwhelmingly positive. We’ve found it to be a great replacement on all our websites. It’s easy to use and provides all the features we need to create stunning, professional websites quickly and easily. The drag-and-drop builder is intuitive and straightforward, allowing us to add and customize content with ease.
In addition, its code and lightweight capabilities help ensure that our pages load fast and without delay. All in all, we’re very impressed with what Breakdance Builder has to offer and are confident that it will continue to serve us well as we continue using it with WordPress for our web development projects.
Key Takeaways
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Built from the same team who created Oxygen, Breakdance for WordPress has been developed with that same philosophy in mind as it allows you to quickly and easily create beautiful websites.
It has an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, allowing you to customize your website quickly and easily. With Breakdance, you can quickly recreate or build a website from scratch and have it up and running in under a week’s time.
What we found most impressive was its integration with WooCommerce out of the box. What we’ve found with most other builders we ultimately ended up purchasing extensions and plugin addons to create the capability we needed for E-Commerce, this wasn’t the case with Breakdance.
The transition of Elementor to Flexbox continues and while this has helped with page speed problems that have plagued the page builder it still is trial by error. Flexbox was built with Breakdance and we no longer have nested columns on a page causing thousands of DOM elements. If you’ve ever been concerned or looked at pagespeed insights you know what we’re talking about.
Breakdance comes with a handful of integrations, animations, and pre-built solutions to make it easy to get a site up and running for any level of web designer. Here are some of our favorite features breakdance offers.
A lot of our favorite features in this new WordPress page builder can be easily attained in others. What we’ve found in using this is how quick and intuitive it is. Out of the box and on the first installation of the breakdance plugin it will allow you to disable the WordPress theme. It seems strange as every site developed you’d think needs a theme but in a builder’s case this just is unnecessary.
You can create a template for each of your pages and main elements (like the header and footer) all within the Breakdance editor. What really stood out to use after install of the plugin were some of these features.
No longer will you find the need to install a separate plugin to create incredible mobile and desktop menus. One of the best Breakdance elements is its built-in Mega Menu functionality. In the past, we’ve had to use separate plugins to build out multi-tiered menus but the ease of doing this in Breakdance is incredible.
Through the header builder (or any area you want to build a mega menu) you’ll add the “Menu Builder” element. Once it’s laid out you are given 4 options to start building it out.
Often times switching to mobile causes a headache and mess to try and customize this but the new breakdance builder has made a seamless transition. A few padding tweaks along with some simple CSS adjustments with the editor and this feature alone is a game-changer when creating a mega menu. Many other page builders will have this capability but it’s the speed that really blew us away.
One of the biggest advantages we found out of the box with Breakdance was its customization with the WooCommerce plugin.
Woo allows you to create and build out an E-Commerce shop to compete with the likes of Shopify but customization was cumbersome. For other builder plugins, we purchased separate addons to create and build separate elements or customize the checkout process which was inefficient at best. As page speed becomes more important with every Google update keeping plugins to a minimum is important.
The Breakdance team built this with its first release and it works well, if not better than most separate third-party addons.
Recently released, the post loop builder has been a needed necessity to customize your grid and post layouts. This addition allows you to simply drag and drop where you want your content to appear on the screen and customize the layout and query all within one element.
Websites in WordPress are powerful as is but the release of the Breakdance plugin 1.1 brought the ability and speed of customizing your post layouts and grids that much better.
ACF is a popular WordPress plugin on the market and for good reason, it alone has allowed the ability to create a website that pulls dynamic data and maps to ACF fields extending WordPress. We use it to create websites from industries like automotive, real estate, etc. as these niches have a need for dynamic data to be synced and displayed. Advanced Custom Fields allows us to do that.
Integration as of this writing (version 1.1) isn’t quite as polished as some of the other page builders but development on it has been moving quickly.
For example, repeatable fields are now just being introduced into the Breakdance environment and we fully expect with the next major release that it will be fully integrated allowing you to edit anything you need.
The Pre-Built Elements are a great way to quickly create a professional-looking website. These elements are ready-to-use and come with a wide variety of customizable options, making it easy for anyone to create stunning websites without the need for coding knowledge.
The elements include headers, footers, menus, galleries, form builder, popup builder, and more. With these pre-built elements, you can easily add content, style, and even animations to your WordPress site. And best of all – these elements are responsive and mobile friendly so they display perfectly on any device.
With the 120+ Pre-Built Elements you will be able to quickly create a beautiful website that looks great no matter where it is viewed from which should allow you to create websites quicker.
If you’ve had any experience with other site builders you’ve likely run across an instance where you need to show content based on a set of conditions. Breakdance also has two incredible features built-in already. Dynamic Display and Animations.
The dynamic display allows you to use WordPress the way you want and customize a layout based on a set of specific conditions. For example, in our instance of building an automotive site we needed a dynamic display like this: IF the price is set to $0 then please display “Contact Us For Pricing”. Simple but we can use Breakdance to create this quickly.
Another trend in today’s web is animation. With its built-in animation and animation builder, it looks like the sky is the limit for what you can accomplish. 99% of our websites use little animation but everything depends on the use case and what you’re trying to accomplish. Lottie files for example are fully integrated with this builder plugin and you can create some pretty fun scrolling animations.
Breakdance, Oxygen, Elementor, and Bricks are all popular website-building tools. Each of them offers a wide range of features and customization options for creating beautiful websites.
Breakdance is often praised for its intuitive drag-and-drop design capabilities, allowing users to create stunning websites without any coding experience.
Oxygen builder is another great option as it offers a comprehensive page builder with powerful features that give users the flexibility to customize their web pages in any way they wish.
Elementor is another popular choice as it provides an easy-to-use interface with plenty of features that let users quickly build pages without having to know any code.
Finally, the Bricks website builder for WordPress is a great choice for those looking for more control over their page designs as it allows users to customize each element on the page with detailed control. All in all, these website-building tools offer something unique and provide plenty of choices when it comes to designing your website.
But which one should you choose?
Having edited with Breakdance and seeing the speed of updates we recommend this for newcomers to page builders and any of those who are getting frustrated with others. Our goal in 2023 is to eliminate as much bloat as possible and really focus on improving the speed of our client’s websites. In most scenarios, we are finding good PageSpeed insights with multiple builders with customization and cache improvements but straight out of the box Breakdance already provides a pretty impressive score.
If you’re looking for the most addons, plugins, etc then builders like Elementor are likely your best choice. Breakdance is a brand new builder to the market but where it fails at this moment is its lack of addons and pre-made themes/templates.
Oxygen offers a lot of the same philosophy as Breakdance as it’s developed by the same company. That being said it’s geared more toward developers and web designers who want more customization and coding options to their websites. We don’t think you can go wrong with either builder but use Oxygen if your like customizing. The updates to their plugin aren’t exactly robust but it should still provide a good experience and page speed.
Finally, Bricks is another page builder plugin and theme that is getting a lot of praise for its speed. You can create any type of website with it and it integrates with a lot of the same third-party plugins (like Advanced Custom Fields) you’d need to make a rich dynamic website.
Having tested Breakdance and multiple builders on the market we recommend both Breakdance and Bricks, you truly can’t go wrong either way.
Breakdance is an excellent choice for your websites in the upcoming years of 2022 and 2023. Not only does it make WordPress development simpler and faster, but also makes it more secure. Responsive websites are the norm and using any page builder today makes it incredibly easy to do so.
Breakdance’s intuitive user interface allows for quick and easy website building, with a wide range of plugins to customize the look and feel of your site which you can use to create pretty much anything.
Breakdance is optimized for speed and performance so that you can build more efficiently but more importantly, your visitors have a smooth experience while navigating through your website.
All in all, Breakdance can be an invaluable asset to your websites in 2022 and 2023, with its powerful features that will help you make the most out of the digital age.
If you’re still on the fence, install the plugin and give the builder a try with its 30-day free trial below!
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