Configure Breakdance Settings

Breakdance Page Builder offers extensive settings to help authors create professional, fast, and secure websites. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to configure Breakdance’s key settings, from performance optimisation to user access and API integration. These adjustments are tailored to meet the unique needs of authors, ensuring your website is streamlined, secure, and ready to promote your books and brand.

To access the settings on Breakdance go to the WordPress admin side bar and click on Breakdance then settings.

Licence

At the top of the list is License. We already covered how to apply the Breakdance licence in the previous lesson so I’ll move on.

I don’t recommend using Beta updates on production sites. Stick with stable releases.

Global Styles

I’m going to be honest. I don’t know why this is in the settings section. Global styles are where we configure the branding and overall look of the site. We cover Global Styles in a dedicated module later in the course.

Theme

Remember when in an earlier lesson I shared that Breakdance comes with features you normally have to pay for with some page builders?

Well one of those features is YOU DON’T NEED A THEME WITH BREAKDANCE. Breakdance is the theme!

It is possible to use Breakdance with other themes but I encourage you to keep your life simple and disable themes and take full control with Breakdance.

WooCommerce

Breakdance can also control the styles on WooCommerce but I’ll cover that in another course.

User Access

If you’re a single author and solo admin of this website the Breakdance access settings are easy. Leave user access to the Administrator Role only. Outside of that I’d still recommend leaving these as your default access settings. 

If you reach the stage you need someone to aid you with your website take a look at exactly what you need them to do. If they are running ads, adding content, managing your on-page SEO they most likely do not need admin access and these Breakdance access settings do not need to change.

There are too many different scenarios to cover but if you’re getting pushback from a freelancer or agency about admin access to your website and you’re not comfortable come into the Writers Building Websites Group and ask for guidance.

Maintenance Mode

Another built in feature that saves having to install a plugin. Maintenance mode is a way to hide your website from the public while you build away in the background or carry out essential maintenance.

If I switched the mode from disabled to ‘503 Maintenance’ and select the premade page I use for this situation the website will stop visitors from accessing pages and show them the maintenance screen instead.

By default logged in users, like us, can still see the website to work on it.

Performance

Another plug in save here. WordPress comes with a lot of abilities but you don’t need all of them for your author website. Breakdance performance settings enables us to switch off what we don’t need without using code or installing another plugin.

Performance settings

• Gutenberg Blocks CSS – Tick to remove as we are building the entire site using Breakdance.
• XML-RPC Pingbacks – A pingback is a method for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. It’s become a major source of spam so I’ll tick to remove.
• WP Emoji – Modern browsers can render EMOJI’s on their own and don’t need extra code from our website to understand them. I’ll tick to disable this.
• Dashicons – If you look on the navigation bar of the main dashboard you’ll see icons beside each item. Those are Dashicons (geddit?) By default these load for everyone, even if they are not logged in so I’ll tick to stop that happening.
• OEmbed – I am not using any embedded items in this website so I can tick this. You may have some cool book trailer videos, an external sign up form, or survey you want to embed in your site. If that’s the case leave this unticked. Or if you’re not sure leave it unticked.
• RSD Links – Really Simple Discovery feature – Unless you are using a dedicated desktop service to publish your posts instead of through your browser tick to disable this.
• WLW Link – Tick. Windows Live Writer is no longer supported and shouldn’t be on your website.
• REST API – disable this. The REST API service still functions it’s just not advertised in the header.
• WP Generator – tick to disable. This stops your website telling the rest of the world which version of wordpress you are running. That’s one less piece of info for hackers.
• Remove Shortlink – We don’t need WordPress to insert a tag into the head if the current page has a shortlink. Tick to disable.
• Relational Links – If you are going to blog as part of an ongoing content marketing /SEO strategy then leave this blank. Other wise tick to disable.
• RSS Feed – Same as above.
• Save changes

API Keys

Breakdance has built in API connectors for email marketing services including MailChimp, ConvertKit, MailerLite and more. Don’t worry if your email marketing service is not included as I’ll show you how to set up with any service in the Forms Module.

Post Types

We’ll set this for page only. This may not make a lot of sense right now but we are going to use templates to manage how almost every page, post, and product on this website looks. We will use Breakdance to build our templates and a few essential pages but nothing else.

Advanced

Leave this all at default except for limiting revisions which I enable and set at 3. As you’ll see when we build pages WordPress can store previous saved versions in case we want to go back to a older save of the page. This is a great tool but it takes up space. Because I’m using templates on an established build I limit the amount of revision to save space and resources.

Privacy

Unless you have decided NOT to use any tracking cookies on your site, including Google Analytics or Meta Pixels, leave Privacy at the default of unticked.

Design Set

The design set feature is used when you want to use the site you build to create a template for others. That’s outside the scope of this course. Leave all options unticked.

Custom Code

Services including Google’s Tag Manager can be added to a Breakdance website by adding custom code to the header or footer. We don’t have any custom code to add at this time so I’ll leave this blank.

Summary

In this lesson we took an overview of the settings for Breakdance and I recommended what to use for a single author website.

Next Lesson

In the next lesson we will look at the Breakdance tools, what they do and when to use them.