WP Bakery Page Builder – formerly called Visual Composer – is installed on millions of WordPress sites. It shipped bundled with premium ThemeForest themes for years, meaning countless site owners are running it without ever having deliberately chosen it.

If your WordPress site was built by an agency or developer between 2013 and 2021, and it uses a premium theme like Avada, Salient, BeTheme, or Enfold, WP Bakery is almost certainly running under the hood. Possibly alongside several other bundled plugins that came with the same theme.

Here’s the problem: WP Bakery was not built for the performance standards that define competitive websites in 2025.

What the Data Shows

The Admin Bar conducted a real-world Lighthouse audit of over 150 agency websites in March 2025, recording performance scores by builder. The ranking, by median Lighthouse score:

Builder	Median Lighthouse Score
GenerateBlocks	90
Oxygen	82
Bricks	77
Kadence	76
Beaver Builder	70
Gutenberg	69
Elementor	66
Divi	62

Source: theadminbar.com/wordpress-page-builder-performance-in-the-real-world/ (March 2025)

WP Bakery wasn’t included in this study because too few agencies in the directory were using it – which itself reflects how the professional WordPress community has moved away from it. What’s notable is that even Elementor and Divi, which are significantly better-maintained than WP Bakery, rank at the bottom. WP Bakery’s architecture is older and less optimized than either.

WP Rocket’s controlled test of Divi (a comparable builder-era product) found a mobile PageSpeed score of 64 and an LCP of 5.8 seconds – both in the “Poor” range – on a simple test page with no real-world content complexity.

Source: wp-rocket.me/blog/divi-vs-elementor-performance-speed/ (December 2025)

WP Bakery sites on production hosting with real content and premium themes routinely perform at or below these levels.

Why WP Bakery Is Heavy

Global Asset Loading

WP Bakery loads its CSS and JavaScript on every page – regardless of which elements that page uses. A contact page with only a paragraph of text still loads the JavaScript for WP Bakery’s sliders, accordion menus, and animation libraries because WP Bakery can’t conditionally exclude modules it might need.

This is architecturally opposite to how modern block-based builders like Kadence Blocks and GenerateBlocks work – those only load CSS for blocks actually present on the page.

The Shortcode Lock-In

WP Bakery stores all layout data as shortcodes in the WordPress database. A simple text section looks like this in the database:

` [vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Your content[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row] `

A complex page might have thousands of lines of nested shortcodes. Every page load, WordPress has to parse all of those shortcodes server-side before anything is sent to the browser – adding server response overhead on top of the frontend asset bloat.

More importantly: if you deactivate WP Bakery, your pages display raw shortcode strings instead of content. The plugin must stay active for your site to function. This is what makes WP Bakery migration genuinely costly – there is no automated conversion tool that reliably translates shortcodes to standard blocks.

The Premium Theme Multiplier

WP Bakery was bundled with premium themes that added their own substantial overhead. Themes like Avada, BeTheme, and Salient each load their own CSS frameworks, JavaScript libraries, and custom WP Bakery modules.

A site running Avada + WP Bakery on shared hosting can have HTTP request counts above 120 and page weights above 3 MB on a standard page. Getting these into acceptable range through optimization plugins requires fighting against two overlapping bloated systems simultaneously – and the ceiling you can reach is still limited by what both systems require at minimum.

What You Can Do Right Now (Without Migrating)

If you’re not ready for a full rebuild, these steps reduce WP Bakery’s performance impact:

Disable WP Bakery scripts on pages that don’t use it. WP Bakery loads its assets globally by default. A script management plugin like Perfmatters lets you disable specific scripts on specific pages or post types. If your blog posts don’t use WP Bakery, there’s no reason to load it there.

Aggregate and minify with WP Rocket. Combining multiple CSS and JS files into fewer, larger files reduces HTTP request count. This is meaningful on a WP Bakery site where request counts can be high.

Update WP Bakery to the latest version. WP Bakery has made performance improvements in recent releases. If you’re running a version from 2019 or earlier, updating alone can help.

Disable unused WP Bakery elements. In WP Bakery settings, you can disable elements you’re not using. Fewer registered elements means fewer asset registrations.

Realistic outcome with full optimization on a WP Bakery + premium theme site: meaningful improvement, but still unlikely to reach 80+ on mobile Lighthouse given the combined overhead of two heavy systems.

The Migration Question

If organic search traffic, Google Ads performance, or conversion rate matter to your business, optimization has a ceiling that the data suggests is insufficient for competitive performance in 2025.

A full rebuild on a modern lightweight stack – GeneratePress + GenerateBlocks or Kadence + Kadence Blocks – is the only path to the performance levels that today’s standards require.

Real-world outcome of a comparable builder migration (Elementor to GenerateBlocks, from the WP Bullet case study): PageSpeed score went from 49 to 88 just by changing the builder on the same server. After optimization: 95-99. Page size dropped 35%. First Paint dropped 64%.

Source: wp-bullet.com/wordpress-page-builder-performance-case-study-elementor-vs-generateblocks-benchmarks

For WP Bakery sites with premium theme overhead, the starting point is worse – but so is the potential improvement.

Bottom Line

WP Bakery’s performance problems are structural. The architecture is over a decade old and reflects a time when Core Web Vitals didn’t exist, mobile-first indexing wasn’t standard, and a 3-second mobile load time was considered acceptable.

Optimization plugins help. They don’t change what WP Bakery fundamentally is or eliminate the shortcode processing overhead that affects every page load.

If your site depends on performance for competitive search, paid ads, or conversion, WP Bakery is a ceiling you’re working against – not a foundation you’re building on.

WP Boosters rebuilds WP Bakery sites on clean, fast stacks using GeneratePress, GenerateBlocks, Kadence, and Kadence Blocks – guaranteed 90+ Lighthouse score, 5-15 business day delivery. Projects start at $2,500. Get a free quote