#PBSUpdate: 200% Performance Increase & New Elements
Only a few weeks ago, we released PBS Version 4.1. This update included tweaks on the formatting bar and some text formatting updates, among others. For Version 2.0 though, while we made additional features, we decided to focus more on PBS’ overall performance.
200% Performance Increase & A Little Help from CodeInWP
What prompted this change was an article about page builder expectations from CodeInWP. It featured a short list of their favorites, reviewing them each under a specific criteria. While Page Builder Sandwich didn’t make it on the list itself, we were also briefly mentioned in the article:
With Page Builder Sandwich you won’t also lose your content and will be able to continue updating the page easily via a default WordPress editor.
Reading this is what pushed our team to improve on PBS even further. And, seeing as we weren’t included in the list, we were also curious at the same time as to what our specific shortcomings were. A little later we contacted CodeInWP to ask for a short review of PBS, and guest author Ann Taylor from gave us a very constructive and helpful reply:
“…I played around with a free version a bit. It shows a lot of promise: lots of modules, pretty intuitive UI, great WYSIWYG experience, everything is dragged around easily. However, when I had around 10 modules on the page, it became hard to continue working with it because of low editing speed…”
This great feedback prompted us further to investigate PBS’ speed and performance. We tested a lot of different scenarios and found huge speed bottlenecks. The root cause of the performance issues were the various calculations the plugin performed in order to display outlines, toolbars, and other visual editing cues. Below is a graph of the performance of PBS version 4.1 in Chrome:
Here are the important points of the graph in a nutshell:
- Tall purple areas are bad
- Wide purple areas are worse
- We’ve sped things a lot, and now our graph for version 4.2 looks like this:
If you compare the tall and wide purple areas from the two graphs, that means that we have achieved a 200% performance increase!
4 New Elements
Our favorite thing about these 4 new elements is that they have the ability to create full webpage sections quickly and efficiently, without the need to drag elements onto the PBS workspace one by one. We’ll also give you the opportunity to choose from different styles so you have more space to customize these three new elements to fit your design needs.
Spacer Element
It’s easy to adjust element margins to get the space that you need. The spacer element can be used as an alternative to this. This is especially useful if you want certain rows to not shrink down too small in mobile screens.
Featurette Element
The featurette element can be used to create sections of your page at a faster rate. These sections can include hero headers, carousel testimonials, and other things you can use to enhance your page’s functionality.
Since all of the Featurette Elements are pre-designed, all you’ll have to do is simply drag the “Featurette” button from the Elements Tab, and choose what you want to add on your workspace from there.
Team Members Element
The team member element is perfect for showcasing your team members to your site visitors. Typically, a section like this includes a photo of a team member, as well as a short description at the bottom.
Gallery Element
This element is used to make photo galleries. Previously, you’d have to drag separate elements (such as buttons, frames, etc) to the PBS workspace one bye one in order to create a gallery. This new element does that for you though, so the process becomes hassle-free.
A Huge Thank You
Version 4.2 is one of our most important updates yet. Performance and functionality are crucial to any great plugin, after all. We’d like to thank @Ann Taylor and CodeInWP for giving us constructive feedback and wishing us luck in our journey. And for all of the PBS users, a huge thank you from us as well for your continued support.
We’ll be releasing even more updates soon (including our promised Google Fonts feature, among others), so be on the lookout for that!
Until then, happy site building from Team PBS!