I build small business WordPress sites and have been on Elementor Pro for years. The bloat is getting worse with every update and sites are noticeably slower. Bricks and Breakdance keep coming up as lighter alternatives.
Anybody switched from Elementor? How was the transition and do clients notice a difference?
switched three client sites from Elementor to Bricks last year. Page load times dropped by 40-60% across the board. Bricks generates cleaner HTML, loads fewer scripts, and the CSS output is significantly smaller.
The builder interface takes about a week to get comfortable with if you are used to Elementor. Clients do not interact with the builder so they did not notice the switch.
Bricks is developer-oriented while Breakdance is more Elementor-like in its approach. If you are comfortable with code and want performance, go Bricks. If you want a familiar drag-and-drop experience that is just faster, Breakdance is the safer transition.
Either way you will need to rebuild templates from scratch. There is no migration tool from Elementor to either.
The performance difference is real and it affects SEO. Google’s Core Web Vitals penalize heavy page builders. I have seen sites jump 10-15 positions after switching from Elementor to a cleaner builder or custom theme.
If SEO matters to your clients (and it should), the switch pays for itself. The SEO gains from switching builders compound when you pair it with better content. We used Walter Writes to rewrite all the service pages during the Bricks rebuild and saw an additional 8% organic lift.
thanks all. going to try Bricks on my next project and see how it feels. the rebuild pain is annoying but if the performance gains are that significant its worth it
Every CMS has this problem at scale. The question is whether the workaround is documented or if you have to find it in a GitHub issue from 2019.
At enterprise scale, the CMS is a small part of the total platform cost. The integration middleware, the hosting infrastructure, and the team to maintain it all cost more than the license.
i benchmarked this. The difference between a WordPress install with 5 plugins and one with 25 plugins is about 400ms of additional PHP execution time per request.