Essential Breakdance Tools for Building Author Websites

Introduction

Breakdance Page Builder includes powerful tools to simplify the management and optimisation of your author website. In this lesson, you’ll learn about features like URL replacement, CSS cache regeneration, and reset options, which streamline site maintenance and ensure your website runs smoothly. By understanding these tools, you’ll be able to handle upgrades, migrations, and troubleshooting with confidence.

Tools

It’s useful to know about the available tools in the Breakdance settings.

• Migrate Meta. You’ll only see this for some version upgrades of Breakdance. Always and I mean ALWAYS carry out a complete backup before upgrading Breakdance or have a daily backup schedule to ensure you always have a know working version of your website.
• Undo Migrate Meta & Downgrade. Again you’ll only see this for some version upgrades.
• Regenerate CSS Cache. After making major or numerous changes to a Breakdance website it’s a good idea to regenerate the builders CSS cache. This is also useful if the site ever doesn’t look the way you expect it to.
• Soft Reset. Don’t do this unless you have a full working backup and mean to do it or Breakdance support has asked you to.
• Total Reset. Don’t do this on a live site without a clear plan and a fully tested backup.
• Create Directories – We clicked this button right away when we installed the plugin.
• Replace URL – This is a quietly brilliant feature. Most websites are built in temporary domains like sitebuild.yourwebhosttemp.com or similar obscure name. When the site is done it’s moved / copied over to the live domain but not all pages, posts, and media get the message. We use Replace URL to enter the temporary URL, add the new domain URL and Breakdance will make sure the data base is completely updated. No need for yet another plugin to carry out this task. Further notes https://breakdance.com/documentation/other/deployment/url-replacement/

Summary

In this lesson, we explored Breakdance’s essential tools, including URL replacement, CSS cache regeneration, and reset options. These features simplify website maintenance, ensure smooth migrations, and save you time when managing your author platform. Armed with this knowledge, you’re equipped to optimise your site for performance and reliability. In the next lesson, we’ll cover exporting and importing Breakdance settings to make setup even easier.

Next Lesson

In the next lesson I’ll show you how to export and import your Breakdance settings. There is also a link to an import of the settings I recommend for you author website so you don’t have to manually set them.