Apologies if this has been posted before but I’m curious to see everyone’s tech stack.
I’ll start!
But let me start at the beginning…I use to just buy themes on Theme Forest. There are a lot of quality themes on there I’ve used for various projects. Not starting from scratch was nice.
But as my agency matured, custom design was the name of the game. Content dictates form, not one size fits all etc etc.
I’ve used Elementor (always got hacked, lots of shortcomings) and Oxygen for awhile after realizing Webflow was too expensive…
And then I finally settled on Bricks Builder. It’s honestly the best page builder I’ve ever used and to my knowledge the only professional page builder on the market that creates clean semantic code that has accessibility in mind out of the box. Powerful for developers and nice quality of life for developers.
Combined with Automatic CSS and Frames it’s a powerhouse.
ACSS allows for scalable and maintainable websites and Frames is for rapid wire framing and design.
TL;DR
So this is my current stack:
– Bricks Builder
– Automatic CSS
– Frames
– Gravity Forms
– Nitropack
– RankMath
– WP Login Lockdown
I’d love to hear what everyone has settled on, how long you’ve been building on WordPress and why you made those choices.
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Bricks builder for me, tried oxygen, flatsome, before
Take this with a grain of salt as I know I’m not the norm, but over the past 15+ years I’ve tried various themes/builders out but always settled on custom built for my clients. I come from a developer/designer background, so custom isn’t that much work, in many cases it’s way LESS work for me.
I tried out every new builder or fad that came about years ago and they were all pure shit (in my opinion) and my clients were super confused. So I just started building everything custom with ACF. I know things have matured and there are some decent builders out there now, but I still just am building everything 100% custom. I’ve built a few Gutenberg sites using custom ACF Blocks and patterns, but I still tend to use Classic Themes with ACF and ACFE dynamic previews.
Over all these years I’ve developed my own personal “base theme” that I start every project with, so it’s not like I’m start from scratch each time. But almost every site we design is custom and requires completely custom CSS and build-outs for many components. It’s just faster to do it custom for me, than to try and finagle it into a page builder.
I do use Gravity Forms for all of my form needs though. I kept meaning to try out Ninja Forms as I have a lot of annoyances with Gravity, but for now I’m still sticking with it. FacetWP for all of our filtering needs on the front-end.
To note, these aren’t tiny “Mom and pop” shop websites, these are agency level websites for medium to large businesses. If a friend came to me, or I had time and a small shop came to me, I would definitely consider just buying a theme or using a builder for them to knock it out quick and easy.
Carbon Fields, Carbon Fields, Carbon Fields.
Working with Breakdance, one of the best builders out there.
Elementor, ACF
Elementor. Their new containers cuts down on bloat. Also, we use another set of plugins to build everything from a hotel booking site to other complex builds that requires Elementor. Yeah Elementor adds some bloat, but we know how to offset it all with deferment, offloading, caching, and a custom, HA hosting stack.
Elementor, with Astra if I want a theme they already have.
I use Divi Builder. I bought a lifetime license many many years ago.