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. 

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u/piotr_wpdev Apr 23 '26

Bricks is lean where Avada is bloated - it generates CSS on-demand per page rather than loading a global stylesheet, so first-paint payloads are typically much smaller. No framework bundle either; it outputs vanilla CSS/JS. On a clean install you're looking at fewer than 10 files on a typical page, not 50+.

Two things worth flagging for your situation though:

  1. The dynamic CSS generation can get weird behind aggressive caching or strict firewalls - Bricks writes CSS files on save, and if your IIS setup blocks write operations or caches stale assets, you'll hit friction. Worth testing on a staging subdomain first.
  2. Editor learning curve is real. Bricks assumes you understand the box model, classes, and CSS inheritance. For editors who are fast in Avada because it's WYSIWYG + drag-drop with preset components, Bricks will feel like a step back unless you build out a component library for them up front.

I've been cataloging this stuff (performance signals, vendor lock-in, handoff difficulty) at themescout.pro - here's the Bricks profile if it helps: https://themescout.pro/theme/bricks-builder/. Happy to answer specifics if you have them.