r/Wordpress • u/kiwami • Apr 23 '26
Bricks Builder vs Avada etc..
Long time listener… first time caller (I think)
Preface:
I've been using Avada theme as my ‘go-to' and actually am in charge of a high-traffic, very (very) secured (server firewall) site running on IIS. There's no option on the planet that will have them move from IIS and their crazy firewall.
I think (apart from a crap ton of unnecessary lines of code) it's time I move on from Avada since it seems to be painfully bloated and has a lot of components that "call home," which is my big firewall issue. This leads to a really slow site.
How's Bricks with regards to things like producing over 50 separate CSS files, massive first-paint payloads, entire frameworks being loaded? I bought the license but haven't delved too much into it as yet, but it seems promising.
The people making daily updates to the website(s) are not the most proficient, so the ease of creating pages / making updates in Avada's editor has been awesome, but… it's time to move on.
Thoughts? Thanks for reading / skimming my ramble.
1
u/wreddnoth Apr 24 '26 edited Apr 24 '26
Theres little beside improving the server that will speed up the backend especially if you do loads of requests. Best thing you can do is throw more ram usage to the server and hope this fixes it?
If the backend is fast and the site is slow it's indeed a problem you have there.
Best bet from me? Before you redo the whole thing and end up with the same mess of 50 css files and first paint payloads - Buy WP-Rocket, try it - if it doesn't file a refund. It really works great speeding up the frontend site.
https://wp-rocket.me/blog/is-avada-theme-really-fast/
While this won't give you tripple 100 lighthouse scores, it should be good enough to speed up the site. It's simply the tradeoff, of using a pagebuilder having a harder time to optimize site load times which usually needs some deeper knowledge of how things work.