WP Builders FightClub: Visual Composer Case Study

The first rule of Fight Club states that you don't talk about Fight Club. The good news is that WordPress Builder Fight Club is a different breed. It is easy to join, you can talk about it, and there is no Brad Pitt to hold (kick) you back.

At WP Builders Fight Club, all major page builders and website builders compete in a fair game to show their performance and abilities.

What is WP Builders Fight Club?

WP Builders Fight Club is a community-driven project for page builders and website builders to compete in terms of performance, design, and other capabilities.

The idea is simple, you need to create a WordPress page. But not any kind of page - the page needs to follow the Fight Club guidelines and requirements. The requirements include technical specifications and design accuracy.

WP Builder Fight Club page design with Visual Composer

All pages created with different builders are then stored in a similar environment. This helps to measure the performance and receive unbiased results. The results include reports from GTMetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights.

The goal of the project is simple - have an honest and transparent comparison of all major WordPress builders in one place.

As of today, there are all major page builders and website builders presented, including Elementor, Builderius, Beaver Builder, and Visual Composer.

WP Builders Fight Club and Visual Composer

We decided to join WP Builder Fight Club with Visual Composer. Visual Composer Website Builder is a complete solution that allows you to build WordPress sites without using the styling of any WordPress themes.

Our goal was to complete the challenge to showcase the capabilities of our visual site builder while not compromising on performance.

Our solution consisted of Visual Composer, Advanced Custom Fields, and SVG Support. We also had Twenty Twenty-Three theme installed (per WordPress guidelines) but did not use it. What makes Visual Composer stand out is that we will not load any theme files if you are using Theme Builder to avoid theme footprints on performance.
The page layout was built using Visual Composer Theme Builder where you can design headers and footers. In the layout, we used Advanced Custom Fields for dynamic content and custom CSS for additional styling.

Since Visual Composer is a low-code solution, web developers and agencies can easily tweak the look and feel of their sites using custom CSS and JavaScript. In the Fight Club challenge, we used custom CSS to introduce pixel-perfect image overlap.

For the content part, we used Visual Composer free and premium elements from the Visual Composer Hub (cloud element library). The library consists of hundreds of content elements and integrations which reduces the need for additional plugins and add-ons.

Results

With Visual Composer, we managed to score 98 performance points in GTMetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights. The score on mobile was a bit lower (88 points) which means there is room for improvement.

We also reached 100 points in the structure and high scores for accessibility and SEO. To be fair, we did not work on the SEO score as a part of the Fight Club challenge. Jumping into Visual Composer Insights and data attributes can easily help you to get 100 points in SEO.

If we compare Visual Composer with other major builders on the market, we see that we have scored higher than some well-known players and are among the top solutions among builders when it comes to performance.

If you’re curious, you can learn more details about how exactly the page was replicated, what challenges we faced, and how we overcame them.