When you’re starting up you’re wise to choose the path of least resistance to get stuff done, including getting a website ASAP. That was a couple of years ago and since going live we’ve been guilty of not practicing what we have been preaching to our customers: to limit the number of plugins and third-party scripts installed and run a lean WordPress stack.
We were running 32 plugins, which isn’t a crazy-high number but high nevertheless. Did we need them all? Nope.
Here’s a couple that we deleted as part of the first phase of our diet: Pixel Cat Lite (replaced by Google Tag Manager), Slider Revolution (as we didn’t have any sliders on our site), and Head, Footer and Post Injections (which became redundant once were-built pages using Oxygen Page Builder).
I’m not naming and shaming here. These are good plugins that have proved their worth many times over. They’re not just not must-have plugins for us anymore.
If you want to go on a diet, best not to hang out at WP Bakery
Gotta cut the carbs out, right?
WPBakery hasn’t got the best reputation but is still used and liked by many.
It’s one of the older page builders and often bundled in themes you can get via marketplaces such as Theme Forest and Template Monster. I built my first WordPress website with it and it allowed me, a non-programmer, to have control over layout, design and quickly put together a decent website. It wouldn’t be my choice of page builder today because I perceive it as a car manufacturer that has decided to stick to the combustion engine for the long term.
The case for switching to a new page builder
I’ll explain why Oxygen Page Builder in a sec. First, let me point out why it made sense from a practical and business perspective.
- We wanted to ditch Nitro Pack and a number of other performance-related plugins. Nitro offers incredible performance we experienced too many conflicts with other plugins
- We wanted to either develop our own Theme or use a page builder to do so (generating some lean and mean code in the process)
- Having used Elementor extensively we wanted a more visual tool to speed up our workflow significantly, but that was also dev-friendly
- Flexibility – you can easily create completely different designs in the same instance of WordPress. Which is what we did with our blog.
- Performance because milliseconds matter.
