How it started.

Three years ago I began developing all of our WordPress websites using a page builder called Oxygen. In the 10 years prior, I had developed and maintained websites with other builders - Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, WPBakery - to name a few. I was always jumping from builder to builder, feeling like something was missing. Each builder shined in a few areas, but felt limiting in others. Then I found Oxygen… and I haven’t looked back since.

An introduction to Oxygen.

Oxygen Builder is a special breed of WordPress plugin. It’s a tool with extremely powerful functionalities, miles ahead when compared to what other page builders can do. Oxygen’s code output is clean, lean, and free of bloat. This is why pages built with Oxygen load lightning fast and get excellent Google PageSpeed and Lighthouse scores. This, in turn, keeps visitors and search engine bots happy. There are so many reasons we rely on Oxygen for our client’s websites, but here are the three most important ones:

Reason #1 - It’s fast.

The undeniable truth is that website loading speeds are one of the most important factors in visitor retention, customer satisfaction, bounce rates, conversion rates, search engine rankings, etc. This needs its own blog post, honestly. The benefits to your business from fast page load speeds are vast. If you don’t have a fast-loading website, you're losing out on potential business, period.

In comes Oxygen. As the leanest page builder on the market (up to 50x leaner than most popular page builders) there is less code that needs to be loaded on each page, resulting in ultra-fast load times. Oxygen also deactivates your WordPress theme. That’s right, it doesn’t need a theme. For those of you who know, you know. WordPress themes are difficult to maintain, get outdated easily, and ultimately limit what you are capable of in WordPress.

Want more proof? Check out these videos:

2X as fast as Elementor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cH4htVcPrs

Divi vs Elementor vs Beaver Builder vs Oxygen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmIrqJ9Wd0U

There is simply no compromise when it comes to page load speeds. Your website either loads fast, or it doesn’t. With the sheer number of benefits that come with fast-loading websites, we can’t rely on anything slower to build our client’s websites.

Reason #2 - It’s customizable.

Remember how I mentioned themes earlier? With Oxygen, you can forget about themes. The first thing that happens when you install Oxygen is your current theme gets deactivated. When we build with Oxygen, you’re getting a 100% custom website from scratch. No reliance on an existing theme or framework means no limitations when it comes to what we can do. Every site we build on Oxygen is 100% different from any other site we’ve built. No cookie-cutter templates here.

Reason #3 - Anyone can learn it.

As a visual page builder with drag-and-drop functionality, anyone can learn how to build with it. We have clients who’ve had to learn how to program HTML in order to update their previous websites. So frustrating. It is ultra-important to us, and to me personally, that when we build websites, ease-of-use for the client is of paramount importance. 

How easy will this website be to maintain once we pass it off? Can the client easily make updates on their own? How can we build this in an elegant way so our clients can manage the most important parts of their website from day one? These are the questions we ask with each of the websites we build, and Oxygen allows us to build our websites in a way that makes it easy for clients to manage and maintain. A win-win for everyone.

Conclusion

At IFC, we make decisions based on what is best for our customers. After 12+ years of building WordPress websites with all the builders on the market (trust me, all of them) we simply haven’t found a faster or more customizable builder than Oxygen. Hands down, it wins in every category against the competition. All these things result in more business for our customers, and that’s why we build our websites with Oxygen.