46:13 An otherworldly site builder

WordPress tools to try before you die. Sorry about that. Time for the next tool.

Welcome to this final episode of WordPress tools to try before you die. My name is Lee Matthew Jackson, and in this series, as we celebrate Halloween, we’ve been sharing a problem that we’ve had. We then look at the solution we put in place as an agency in the guise of a WordPress tool or service. And finally, we share some real life use cases. Right at the very end of the episode, you have the opportunity to get involved in the conversation, so be sure to stay tuned.

Today, our problem is quite simple. Page builders are awesome, but the websites they produce can be very slow. And please, before you get defensive, I know that there are a whole load of amazing best Practises and tools that you can add to make the site super fast. I get it, I do. I totally get it.

But wouldn’t it be great if there was a page builder that allowed you to create an intricately designed website that worked out of the box and scored amazingly well on GT Metrics, Pingdom and Google Insights or whatever they call it now? In our agency, we have been a lifelong Beaver builder fans, especially because of the ability to take it beyond the stock product, ie. We’ve been able to make loads of our own modules and customizations so that we can offer extra features to the industries that we serve. However, we still have the problem of speed, both the speed of using Beaver Builder but also the output site. No matter how much we battle with those caching plugins, we find there are problems.

The solution, however, comes to us in the form of a relatively new page builder called Bricks Builder. This is actually all built into a theme, which is a very strange experience, being used to installing any theme or creating our own theme and then adding a third party page builder. This all comes in one package out of the box. We were really impressed by how fast the builder loads, but also how ridiculously fast the final web pages are. So, for example, one of the websites we’ve built using Bricks Builder is an extremely image heavy and multimedia heavy website, and yet its contentful, Paint, is milliseconds.

We are scoring 96% on performance and we’re getting a grade A on GT Metrics, which is super rare. If we were to rebuild that entire page in Elementor, or in Beaver Builder, or in insert a random page builder in here, I’m not that confident we’d be able to get that sort of score out of the box. Out of the box, Bricks Builder comes with a whole load of performance enhancements and you can add more, such as disabling emojis, disabling embeds, Google Fonts, disabling jQuery migrate, you can Cache query loops, you can even change the inline styles to loading via external files. So there are a whole load of extra bells and whistles there, all built in to add extra speed to your website.

It also integrates with Unsplash for grabbing images, with the Google Maps API, with the Google Recapture keys, with MailChimp, with SendGrid, and also your Facebook app ID if you need to do all of that. So no third party plugins here for each page you create. You can also control your SEO, meta descriptions keywords, you can configure your meta robots, you’ve also got access to your social media, OG, image description, etc. So everything’s all built in. Again, no need for another plugin.

You can control the theme style and you can create multiple theme styles and add conditionality, so different styles for different types of content. The page building or the design experience is really intuitive and it almost feels like you’re using Photoshop. I guess it’s a combination of the powerful features of Beaver themer combined with beautiful interface such as Oxygen or Elementor. My favourite features include copy and paste straight from the keyboard. Also being able to see the entire structure of my page so that’s all of the assets in hierarchical mode I can reorganise things whenever I want.

And then finally the ability to only have Bricks Builder available to me as the agency. So my client would be using WordPress as it was intended. For example, they would create a post or a page in the standard way using the page editor, and if we had any custom fields, they would see those and fill those in. In the meantime, we’ve been able to build the entire site code free and we’ve been able to create something that is fast and efficient for our client. And finally, as I continue to rave about Bricks Builder so far there has been nothing that has required me to do copious amounts of custom CSS.

I’ve been able to do everything inside of the builder. So let’s jump straight into the use case for this episode. It is agencytransformation.live. It is a very media heavy website and yet it scores so well on GT metrics. Coupled with Meta box which it supports.

Out of the box which we mentioned in the first episode of this season, we’ve been able to create a powerhouse website. I’m so proud of it. You can check it out over on agencytransformation.live. Feel free to put it through it’s paces on some of those third party page analytics. I can’t say this page analyzations, you know what I mean.

Those page speed test “bobby doodles”. Now it’s your turn. What page builder would you use in order to produce a rip-roaring fast, gorgeous, efficient website that’s compatible with multiple devices? Let us know in the comments. Check out the show notes for the link to get involved in the conversation.

Did you know? You can also have this conversation with me in person at Agency Transformation Live this year. It is a two-day event on the 10th and the 11th of November 2022 day one is a fully fledged conference with amazing speakers. Day Two is an intimate in-person mastermind where with the combined brain power of the room, we help you unpack your next small achievable actions to the success of your business. It will be amazing to see you there. So check that out over on agencytransformation.live. Folks, this is the end of WordPress tools to try before you die 2022. Something that we did many years ago and we decided to do again because so much has changed in the WordPress landscape. I hope you’ve enjoyed sharing in our problems, our solutions and exploring those use cases. Be sure to hit us up in the comments. Be sure to check out our little WordPress Facebook group that we relaunched. You can find that over on trailblazer.fm/group.

Be sure to check out the event. It’d be great to see you there. And stay tuned for our up and coming season 47. It’s not to be missed. We’ll see you there.