Breakdance Builder is a cutting-edge visual site builder designed for WordPress that simplifies the process of crafting stunning websites without requiring any coding knowledge. Launched in September, this innovative page builder emphasizes both power and speed, making it an excellent choice for users of all skill levels.
Speed is a critical factor when it comes to building and ranking a website. Fast-loading pages not only provide a better user experience but also improve search engine rankings, as search engines like Google prioritize websites with quick load times. Breakdance is not only powerful, but already extremely fast thanks to its streamlined design. By utilizing Breakdance, you can create visually impressive websites that are also optimized for performance.
Even though Breakdance is intrinsically fast, there are some additional optimization tips you can follow to fully harness its potential. Over the next few minutes, we'll go over some techniques to ensure that your Breakdance-built website offers the best possible performance, user experience, and doesn't interfere with search engine rankings.
Why Is Website Speed Important?
In today's fast-paced digital world, users expect websites to load quickly and efficiently. Slow-loading pages can lead to increased bounce rates, reduced user engagement, and a negative impact on overall website performance. Furthermore, search engines like Google prioritize faster-loading websites in their rankings, which will directly affect your site's visibility and organic traffic. A speedy website is also crucial for higher conversion rates, as visitors are more likely to engage and complete desired actions when the site is responsive and efficient.
Breakdance was developed with these factors in mind, providing a powerful and fast alternative to other popular page builders such as Elementor and Divi. While all of these builders offer a wealth of features, they often contribute to website bloat, ultimately slowing down site performance. Breakdance aims to strike the perfect balance between power and speed by offering an extensive range of features without the unnecessary bloat. This ensures that you can create visually stunning websites that load quickly, enhancing user experience, search engine rankings, and conversion rates.
But regardless... how can you optimize Breakdance even more? Over the next few minutes we'll go over the best plugins and settings to speed up your Breakdance site.
How To Speed up a Breakdance Builder Website
The goal of Breakdance is to ensure you don't need many plugins to create and host a great website (and yes, this is true). Ideally, try to stay away from plugins you don't need. If you have intermediate development experience, it might be worth downloading a plugin like Code Snippets and adding individual functions to your site rather than getting 1-off plugins that do a single thing.
WPRocket & Caching
In the context of optimizing website speed, introducing a caching solution like WP Rocket can further enhance the performance of your Breakdance-built website. Caching is a process that stores frequently accessed or static website content, enabling the content to be served more quickly to visitors. By utilizing caching, you can reduce server load and expedite page load times, leading to a more efficient and enjoyable user experience.
WP Rocket is a powerful and user-friendly caching plugin for WordPress, designed to improve website speed and performance. It works by generating static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress content and serving those files to your visitors instead of processing resource-intensive PHP scripts. This reduces the overall load on your server and minimizes the time required to load your web pages. I've been using this plugin for years now and it's my go-to plugin when suggesting how to improve speed. Just simply installing it boosts site metrics by a lot, although some WPRocket settings make more sense than others.
Think of caching like this: Imagine your WordPress website as a busy kitchen, where every visitor's request requires the chef to cook a meal from scratch. This can be time-consuming and resource-intensive, leading to longer wait times for the visitors. WP Rocket acts like a smart kitchen assistant who prepares popular dishes in advance and keeps them ready to serve. This way, when a visitor requests a meal, the kitchen assistant can quickly serve the pre-prepared dish, reducing the wait time and ensuring a more efficient and enjoyable experience for the visitor.
Integrating WP Rocket with your Breakdance website can help enhance the already impressive speed and performance of your site. By combining the efficiency of Breakdance with the caching capabilities of WP Rocket, you can further optimize your website, ensuring fast load times, improved user experience, and better search engine rankings.
Use Imagify to Compress Images
Next up is image compression. This is often overlooked as people don't realize how massive the size of their images are on upload.
Images play a crucial role in enhancing the visual appeal of your website but also contribute significantly to its overall size, slowing down page load times. Image compression is a technique that reduces the file size of images without sacrificing their visual quality. By compressing images, you can minimize the amount of data that needs to be transferred when a user visits your site, resulting in faster page loads and a better user experience.
The Imagify plugin is a powerful and user-friendly solution for automatically compressing images on your WordPress site. By integrating Imagify with Breakdance, you can optimize your images without the need for manual intervention. The plugin works by scanning your site for images and compressing them using advanced algorithms (and you don't have to do anything after enabling it!). It offers different levels of compression to suit your needs, including lossless, lossy, and ultra-lossy, allowing you to strike the perfect balance between file size reduction and image quality.
Next up... lazy loading
Lazy Load Images
Ok, so you've turned on caching, compressed your images, but what about loading them?
Normally, when you visit a page on a website, all the images on the page are loaded at once, regardless of whether they are visible on the screen or not. This can lead to slower page load times, particularly for pages with a large number of images or heavy media content.
Lazy loading is a technique that addresses this issue by only loading images when they are about to come into the user's view. This means that images are not loaded until they are actually needed, saving bandwidth and improving page load times. Lazy loading is particularly beneficial for users on slower internet connections or browsing on mobile devices, as it minimizes the amount of data that needs to be loaded upfront.
The a3 Lazy Load plugin is an easy-to-use and efficient solution for implementing lazy loading on your WordPress site. By integrating a3 Lazy Load with your Breakdance site, you can ensure that your images are loaded only when they are required, even further enhancing your site's performance. The plugin works seamlessly with a variety of media formats, including images, videos, and iframes, making it a versatile choice for optimizing your website's load times.
Use Great Hosting
Last but not least is hosting! A good website host is the foundation of your online presence. It's the virtual real estate where your website resides and plays a crucial role in determining your website's speed, performance, and reliability. Choosing the right hosting provider can make all the difference between a successful online presence and a poor user experience.
Opting for a cheap, low-quality hosting provider might save you money upfront, but it will lead to slow website load times, frequent downtimes, and lackluster support (especially as you begin to scale!). These issues impact your website's performance, user experience, and search engine rankings. As your website grows and traffic increases, the need for a reliable and high-performance hosting solution becomes even more critical. Don't wait until it becomes a hassle, especially if your site is going to be business-critical. Please invest in a quality hosting provider if you are planning on developing a sustainable digital brand!
One of the best hosting options we've ever used is from Cloudways (Digital Ocean). This managed hosting platform combines the power and flexibility of Digital Ocean's infrastructure with the ease of use and advanced features offered by Cloudways.
Some benefits of a great website host include:
- Improved website speed and performance: High-quality hosting providers invest in advanced server technology and infrastructure to ensure your website loads quickly and performs optimally. People will leave your website almost immediately if you have a slow website.
- Scalability: As your website grows, a reliable hosting provider can accommodate increased traffic and resource demands without compromising performance. With a single click, we can increase server settings to allow a greater capacity of users.
- Enhanced security: Top-notch hosting providers prioritize security measures and protect your website from potential threats and vulnerabilities. There's nothing worse than having your hosting provider suffer a security vulnerability and cause your site to get hacked. This sucks, especially after months of hard work.
- Expert support: With a good hosting provider, you can expect responsive and knowledgeable customer support to help you navigate any issues that may arise. If you don't have much experience with web hosting, you should ensure your host has great support
PS: We don't like GoDaddy! We've used them for years. Subpar support, unreliable servers, and poor hosting security (we had our site get hacked!)
Final Thoughts
That's it! All of the sites we've made in Breakdance have these plugins & settings installed. Again, Breakdance doesn't need much to be great – but it never hurts to improve performance to a tee. It's truly a great builder & will be the future of WordPress page builders within the next 2 years.. just wait till everyone wakes up!
Do you have any additional tips on speeding up a Breakdance website? Leave a comment below with what works & what doesn't! We'd love to hear from you.
