We build websites for a living, so rebuilding our own is a strange kind of pressure. It also gave us a rare chance to do the thing we tell clients to do: strip everything back and ask what the site is actually for. Part of that answer was a change of tooling. After years on Elementor, we rebuilt Velocity Web on Bricks Builder — and it’s worth explaining why.
What Elementor did well, and where it stopped
Elementor got a lot of sites built quickly, and there’s no shame in that. But every page builder leaves a fingerprint in the code it generates, and Elementor’s is heavy — extra markup, extra stylesheets, a dependence on jQuery. On a brochure site you might never notice. On a site where performance is a selling point, you notice constantly. We were spending time fighting the tool to claw back the last stretch of a PageSpeed score.
Why Bricks
Bricks produces clean, lean markup by default. No jQuery, a tidy DOM, and styling that lives where you’d expect it rather than scattered through inline rules. For a team that reads the code its tools produce, that matters — it’s the difference between a builder you supervise and one you trust. It’s also genuinely developer-facing without being hostile to designers, which suits how we work: the person who designs the page is usually the person who builds it.
The payoff shows up in the numbers. Our new site runs on our Velocity Bolt hosting stack, and the two together get us to a place most builder-based sites can’t reach — which is the subject of a separate post.
Honest caveat: it isn’t for everyone
We still build in Elementor where it’s the right call — usually when a client updates their own content often and wants the most familiar possible editor. Bricks rewards a team that’s comfortable thinking a little more like a developer. For our own site, and for most new builds where we control the updates, it’s become the default.
The best tool is the one that gets out of the way. We wanted to stop fighting our builder and start shipping.
Thinking about a rebuild, or wondering whether your current builder is holding your site back? Talk to us.