Frequently Asked Questions

Breakdance is a modern visual website builder for WordPress.

Yes. Breakdance is beginner-friendly.

If you've ever used builders like Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, or Visual Composer you'll be right at home in Breakdance.

Even though it's very powerful, it does not have a steep learning curve like Oxygen or some of the other "advanced" builders.

Breakdance includes 120 builder elements for every use case imaginable.

We have simple elements like sections, columns, headings, rich text, images, icons, and videos.

We also have more complex elements like pricing tables, icon/image boxes, fancy lists, image galleries, sliders, and much more.

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Absolutely. Breakdance has many advanced features such as:

• Display Conditions

• Dynamic Data, with ACF & Toolset integrations

• Div element - just one div; no divception

• Flexbox layout engine

• Developer APIs for dynamic data, form actions, conditions, and element creation (documentation coming soon)

• PHP Code - write it and run it live inside Breakdance

• CSS classes & custom selectors with visual WYSIWYG editing

• Write custom CSS, custom HTML, and custom JavaScript inside Breakdance

Breakdance has a number of unique features that will make your work much easier, including:

• Global Styles - we built the best global styling controls ever. These will save you weeks. Seriously. You can get your whole site on brand in just a few clicks, including WooCommerce, forms, typography, buttons, and more. It's one of our favorite features of Breakdance. See it in action here.

• High Quality Elements - Breakdance includes over 100+ elements. You'll find we provided the same elements you are used to seeing in other builders, such as pricing boxes, icon boxes, lists, image galleries, FAQs, etc. But in many instances, our elements look better, are more flexible, have better options, and are easier to use. Ultimately, you can do more with our elements, and it will be easier for you and take you less time. See some elements in action.

• WooCommerce Integration - You'll build beautiful stores in minutes. Breakdance provides defaults that make WooCommerce look fantastic right out of the box, and with our Global Styles feature so you can get your whole storefront on brand in a few clicks. There's no need to build out all the pages manually. 24 WooCommerce element are included so you can customize everything on a per-page basis, but in most cases, you'll never need them. Say goodbye to long WooCo build times that ultimately result in an ugly or visually inconsistent store. Say hello to Breakdance. Learn more.

• Drag & Drop Dropdown Menu Builder - build dropdown menus visually inside Breakdance. Put elements you want inside a menu dropdown. Menus are modern, responsive, and accessible with keyboard navigation. Learn more.

• No Bloat - when we built Oxygen 6 years ago, it was the first visual builder that wasn't plagued by bloat and frontend performance problems. After other builders around at the time recognized the effect frontend page load times can have on conversion rate and SEO, they updated their marketing materials and made various improvements - some slight, and some significant. However, due to their older architectures, in most cases there's no way they can clean up all the bloat they are plagued with. Obviously, with some work, you can build a fast-loading website with just about any visual builder. But it's certainly easier with Breakdance, and you're less likely to need 3rd party optimization plugins.

• Dynamic Data with Element Display Conditions - link your design elements to database data, and show or hide elements dynamically. For example, you can show certain content to logged in users, hide an image if no Featured Image is set, etc. Learn more.

We also have other features that you will love, such as:

• Full Site Editing - build headers, footers, and theme templates with Breakdance

• Form Builder - learn more.

• Design features such as multi-stop gradients, flexbox layout engine, gradient icons and buttons, video backgrounds, and much more.

• Great UI with keyboard shortcuts, a right click menu, cross-page copy/paste, dark mode, searchable properties panel, indicator lights for set element properties, and other features to help you optimize your workflow.

• Power user features such as the ability to write PHP code directly in Breakdance.

It really is true. With Breakdance, you'll be able to build beautiful, high-converting, visually consistent WooCommerce stores in a fraction of the time it would take with other builders. Here's how:

• Global Styles - you can get your entire storefront on brand in just a few clicks. Options for buttons, forms, spacing, typography, sale badges, border radiuses, and everything else you need to get the storefront to match your brand are available in one place, and you can edit them while browsing your site live.

• Our Custom WooCommerce stylesheet - WooCommerce's frontend was designed more than 10 years ago, and it shows. So we scraped the default WooCommerce stylesheet and replaced it with a modern one that makes the frontend look fantastic right out of the box. We also made various small optimizations to the frontend for better conversions - such as an AJAX cart by default, a two column cart and checkout, better responsive styles, etc.

• Perfect Defaults - there's no need to manually build out all the WooCommerce pages and then tweak each element's settings to get the design right. By default, Breakdance already makes all of WooCommerce look good. Sure, you can build out the pages manually if you want to for advanced customization, but most of the time, you won't want to.

• 26 WooCommerce elements - for users with advanced customization needs, you can build out WooCommerce pages manually using our powerful WooCommerce elements. By default, all the elements will inherit their styles from the Global Styles you set, so you'll always achieve a consistent look across your entire store. And if you want to customize the design and layout on a per-element basis, powerful options are available for each element.

Yes. You can create contact forms, register forms, login forms, email subscribe forms, and custom forms.

Custom forms can be created from 16 different field types including text, email, radio, checkbox, select, and much more.

Integrations for MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, Discord, GetResponse, Drip, MailerLite, and Slack are included, and Webhooks are supported so you can send form data into Zapier or anywhere else.

A developer API is also available.

Menu Builder makes it easy to build modern, responsive, accessible dropdown menus using drag & drop.

The menu on this website was built with Menu Builder entirely inside Breakdance, with absolutely zero coding.

Breakdance is a plugin.

But you can design your entire site with Breakdance - no theme is necessary.

You can also use Breakdance with a theme - it's your choice.

With Breakdance, themes are optional.

Breakdance will work with any theme. You can install Breakdance on an existing site and it won't affect your existing design.

You can also use Breakdance in "themeless" mode and design your entire site in Breakdance - headers, footers, templates, etc. No theme is required. This gives the best performance and maximum design flexibility.

Yes.

You can use functions.php and you can use a child theme to override theme/plugin templates.

We recommend using the Breakdance Zero Theme for this purpose.

There is no divception or bloat in Breakdance. Scripts and styles are only loaded where they are used.

Yes. Breakdance is designed with compatibility and best practices in mind. It is compatible with pretty much any plugin you want to use.

If you need to override plugin templates using a theme or hook into plugin functionality using functions.php, you can do so using the Breakdance Zero theme.

We highly recommend Weglot. It's fully compatible with Breakdance and far better than any of the other translation plugins we've tried.

We suspect that when Breakdance gains popularity the developers of plugins like WPML, Polylang, etc. will create integrations for Breakdance. This is up to them, so if it's something you want, contact them and suggest it.

That said, we still recommend Weglot.

It's easy. Just go to Dashboard > Settings > General in your WP admin and choose your Site Language. The WooCommerce frontend and all of Breakdance's WooCommerce elements will automatically use the selected language.

Not yet, but we plan to make it translatable soon.

You are supposed to be able to, but Breakdance is currently in alpha, so it's likely there are a couple strings we forgot to make translatable. If you find an element in it with a label or string you can't edit in the Breakdance UI, it's a bug - please report it.

Yes. You can use Breakdance for projects you build for clients. Your clients do not need to buy their own license.

Yes. The UI is designed to be simple, even for non-techies.

If you want your client to be able to edit content but not touch your design, you can change their access level from "full access" to "edit content" at Breakdance > Settings > Role Manager in the WP admin.

Yes, you can use both Breakdance and the WordPress Block Editor (commonly referred to as Gutenberg) on the same site.

You can embed Breakdance content in Gutenberg using the Breakdance Gutenberg block.

Yes. You can use the Code Block element to write PHP code live inside of Breakdance.

There is no absolutely no lock-in.

If you want to stop using Breakdance on a page or remove it entirely, you can do so without losing your content.

It's easy - just click the "use default editor" link on the "Edit" WP admin screen for any page or post, and your content will be converted to text and simple HTML and placed in the WordPress default editor.