For about ten years, I have been working with WordPress at a very basic level. Like many others, I started with some commercial themes from sites like ThemeForest. My theme of choice for the past eight years has been Avada. Before you roll your eyes, Avada is not the theme you remember and has evolved into a pretty decent page builder. Unfortunately, due to its ongoing popularity, it has had to support backward compatibility at the expense of modern capabilities.

TL;DR Bricks Builder

When Bricks Builder entered the market, I immediately snatched it up. I recognized that as a version 1 product, it probably wouldn’t meet my needs, but the interface, the performance, and the developer’s focus convinced me it was worth the investment. Two years and several releases later, I made a good choice. The addition of CSS Grid, the new navigation tool, and the ever-expanding third-party ecosystem convinced me the time was right to give it some serious focus. The interface seems perfect to me, with a level of consistency that I was seriously missing — a pet peeve of mine is that the location of controls in Avada varies by element.

Now for the backstory.

Website Coding

While getting familiar with WordPress, I have also been building sites from scratch, initially using Bootstrap and then the US Web Design system. Those sites gave me far more flexibility than any WordPress theme I had tried, but I was able to make Avada play nicely. Then Gutenberg was introduced.

Gutenberg’s Influence

As I began to follow the progress of Gutenberg and the commitment to this as the replacement for the legacy editor, I wondered where that would leave so-called classic themes. As Gutenberg matured, I became enamored with its simplicity and now use it exclusively for posts, but the builder experience, even today, is lacking — that may change after 6.3.

Builders and the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)

About three years ago, as COVID was starting to hit the world, there seemed to be a steady onslaught of new builders either emerging from the shadows or being released. This coincided with my desire to start finding a replacement for Avada that would give me more control. It also coincided with my discovery of Appsumo. To that end, I started my quest of buying a lot of builders and block packages and running a lot of comparisons. In almost every instance, my experience with Avada made me far more efficient, and most builders failed for one reason or another.

The list

In case you are wondering what I tried and tested over the past three years, here is a list of builders and block packages:

  • Oxygen
  • Zion
  • Cwicly
  • LiveCanvas
  • Breakdance
  • Bricks Builder
  • GenerateBlocks
  • Kadence
  • Stackable
  • Quebly
  • Divi
  • Spectra
  • Elementor
  • Builderius
  • Greenshift

The results

Oxygen was intended to be my go-to, but the builder performance and the lack of needed updates pushed me away — before the Breakdance debacle. With my desire to be Gutenberg first, I focused on those products that were Gutenberg-centric with the hopes that Cwicly would be the winner. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get past the UI, and Zion Builder suffered the same fate. In the end, I narrowed the list down to three options — GenerateBlocks, Bricks Builder, and, believe it or not, Breakdance. Even with these options, updates to Avada kept pushing a clear alternative away. Enter Kevin Geary.

Page Building 101

If you are unfamiliar with Kevin Geary, he is a very opinionated website developer and entrepreneur who can sometimes say things that inflame the community, but he is usually right, and he makes great educational videos. His Page Building 101 series on YouTube — a must-watch for any website developer or designer — changed my perspective forever. It is not that Avada falls short in all aspects; it was some of the key aspects that made me relook at my research. In particular, his focus on sections and containers really pointed out a glaring issue. You see, Avada limits the number of divs you can use, and each div is wrapped in a div that you cannot control without some very specific CSS. Add to that the focus on CSS Grid, and for me, the only clear alternative was Bricks Builder.

CSS-centric

The other big factor that made me lean toward Bricks Builder, especially after watching Page Building 101, is the focus on CSS. While you can write custom CSS is every builder, it is rarely straightforward where your CSS can be applied directly, but has to target some element within an element — this is true in Gutenberg and most other builders (Avada is one of the worst). Bricks Builder, on the other hand, gives you the ability to write quality CSS and have it work as expected.

Generally speaking, Bricks makes you a better website creator. From development to design, there are almost no limitations.

You may have noticed that I never mentioned site performance along the way. While all the modern builders and block packages produce much cleaner code, there are enough optimization solutions out there that this became a non-factor.

If you are a novice and Bricks Builder seems to be a little too much for you, I recommend taking a look at Breakdance. If you are in the Gutenberg-only camp and native Gutenberg is not enough for you, my recommendation would be GeneratePress + Generate Blocks (pro versions).