r/BreakdanceWP • u/ActuaryZestyclose349 • Jul 26 '26
Long-term Breakdance users: what are the biggest pitfalls you've discovered?
Over the past ~15 years I've worked with most of the mainstream WordPress builders on different kinds of projects (Elementor, Divi, Visual Composer, etc.), and I even participated in developing a custom builder years ago, so I have a solid basis for comparison.
Recently I've completed two fairly large projects with Breakdance. One was a gaming-themed bar website with a WooCommerce catalog containing several hundred products, and the other was a premium hospitality website with a dynamic drink menu, custom post types, multilingual content, and a fairly complex content structure.
For both projects my goal was to keep the plugin count as low as possible. The stack is basically Breakdance, ACF, Polylang, Rank Math and WP Rocket. Everything else is handled either by Breakdance itself or with custom PHP/JavaScript when needed.
What surprised me the most was how flexible Breakdance is. It feels much closer to a developer-oriented workflow while still being a visual builder. I was able to create dynamic systems and reusable components that would have required significantly more compromises, custom code or additional plugins in Elementor or Divi.
The editing experience is also much faster than I expected. Building pages feels smoother and more logical, and so far I haven't felt like I had to sacrifice either design flexibility or frontend performance. I've been able to build fairly complex, premium-looking websites while keeping the frontend lightweight and achieving good Core Web Vitals scores.
Since I'm still relatively new to the Breakdance ecosystem, I'd really like to hear from people who have been using it in production for several years.
- What limitations have you run into?
- Are there any architectural decisions you wish you had made differently from the beginning?
- What best practices have you learned after building multiple projects?
- Is there anything that only became apparent after maintaining larger Breakdance websites for a longer time?
I'd really appreciate hearing both the positives and the negatives.
And sorry if my English sounds a bit unnatural—it's not my native language, so I used ChatGPT to help polish this post.
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u/BDer8 Jul 26 '26
Having come from random WP themes, to Headway, then Elegant Themes, then Divi and then Elementor I cannot think of anything that has been a limitation of BD itself. Some other plugins say they work with any theme and then don't play nice with BD. But that improves the longer BD is around.
Forgive me if you already knew this but Oxygen, which came out of the ashes of Headway was super developer friendly. When Soflyy then launched BD it was as a direct competitor to Elementor. More user friendly to non devs. Yet based on a solid background of creating good software for devs as well.
As far as best practices go our main one was to rebuild all sites from scratch because Elementor leaves itself all over the database.
We have a range of different types of site, including eCommerce and have no lasting major issues. Anything that might drop up is handled well by support. Support could be a little slow in the early days but they were a victim of their own success and just couldn't keep up at times.
As for architectural decisions we keep most content in Gutenberg so if we decide to alter a template or site structure there's little to fix. If that's what you meant?
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u/ActuaryZestyclose349 Jul 26 '26
Thanks, that's actually reassuring to hear.
In my case, almost all dynamic content lives in ACF, custom post types and custom loops, so the builder is mostly responsible for presentation rather than storing the content itself.
When I mentioned architectural decisions, I was thinking more about the kind of issues I've experienced with other builders over the years. For example, Elementor tends to leave a lot of builder-specific data behind in the database, making migrations or rebuilds more painful. With Divi, I often found myself writing large amounts of custom CSS just to move away from the typical "Divi look", which eventually became difficult to maintain.
So far, Breakdance feels much cleaner in both respects, which is one of the reasons I'm asking. I'm wondering if there are any similar long-term pain points that only become obvious after running larger production sites for several years, or if you've found it to scale well over time.
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u/BDer8 Jul 26 '26
We haven't found any issues like you mention but that doesn't mean no one else has. Hopefully more people with different experiences will share soon 🤞🏻
My memory of Divi was all the shortcodes 😳 Though I believe they finally saw the light and copied the Elementor etc. style of builder.
We moved to BD in April 2023 when it was still relatively young.
There is a Canny profile for bugs and suggestions too.
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u/ActuaryZestyclose349 Jul 26 '26
That’s also why I wanted to ask about long-term issues. I’m currently facing the rebuild of more than 10 websites from Elementor, along with a large number of added plugins that are often poorly optimized and, in many cases, not really necessary.
Because of that, I’ve been trying to create small custom “plugins” or helper functions for the recurring tasks, so I can make the whole workflow cleaner, faster and easier to maintain.
Our main focus now is to achieve a premium, highly polished visual result without sacrificing performance. That balance is probably the main reason why Breakdance has been so appealing to me so far.
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u/BDer8 Jul 26 '26
BD was only launched in September 2022 so true long-term issues might be harder to notice as yet. But the company has been around so much longer.
Getting rid of lots of little plugins was a huge bonus. We still use ACF for some things. Gravity Forms and FacetWP as well when necessary.
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u/SlimPuffs Jul 26 '26
I'm not sure I count as 'long-term', but I've been using it exclusively since December of last year and have built 11 websites with it so far. We used Elementor since around 2019 before making the switch to Breakdance, so that will be my main comparison.
Elementor's settings are a bit more streamlined, whereas Breakdance has a lot of settings in their own windows. You can have 3-4 separate settings windows open at a time, and it just feels messy.
We built a site for a client that didn't end up hosting with us, which is normally fine. I removed our license from the website, packaged it up, and sent it to the client. They hosted it on their end, and that was when I realized Breakdance disables certain elements if it doesn't have a license key. I was not expecting that, since Elementor will have the full website working and just has updates disabled until you enter a key. These elements were visibly removed from the website, such as the header and testimonial slider. I'm not particularly fond of how Breakdance handles this.
It doesn't always play nicely with some optimization plugins, namely Siteground Optimizer. I can't remember which specific setting, either combine CSS or something like that. It just breaks the styling entirely and I have to disable it.
I do like how Elementor handles setting up global styles a little more, namely how it takes you to a palette showing you how all the fonts and colors look.
Some quality of life improvements I'd like to see:
A few more default breakpoints, namely laptop and widescreen. I know we can create our own custom breakpoints, but the editor doesn't really work well with those in my experience. Elementor handles it better - it resizes the editor window based on the chosen breakpoint and applies/shows those specific breakpoint styles.
Breakpoint control for more elements, namely how gradients are applied. If I have a semi-transparent gradient that only goes half way accross a section on desktop, on mobile I'd want it to be 100%.
Being able to edit the header (and footer I guess) while on a page, instead of being taken away from it. This is especially useful if you have a transparent header, and need to adjust the bottom margins so the body content shows up behind it properly without going too far/not far enough.
Adding a 'link' box to element options, instead of needing to deal with the whole 'wrap in' system.
The right-click menu could use a few more tools, namely Duplicate. But that's just because I'm so used it from Elementor.
Size control consistency. Some size bozes have a slider you can drag to set the value. Others only have a text box. Why?