To hire a good Bricks Builder developer, check five things before you look at price. Do they style with global classes and components? Do they pull repeating content from ACF fields through query loops? Will they agree a written performance budget, set up safe editing for your team at handover, and buy the Bricks licence in your name? Market rates for WordPress developers run from about $15–$28 an hour on Upwork up to $75–$120+ an hour for senior WordPress developers on Codeable, and the Bricks licence starts at $79 a year on top. Get those five checks right and the hourly rate matters a lot less.
I've built in Bricks Builder for over four years. That includes the Ravens Ait venue site, the Taxocity tax services site, the Aura Clips agency site and my own Bricks plugin on WordPress.org, Geo Targeting for Bricks Builder. What follows is the list I'd use if I were the one hiring.
Is Bricks the right builder before you hire for it?
Bricks Builder is a good pick when page speed matters and someone technical sets up the site structure that your marketing team then edits. Decide this before you hire anyone. If you're still weighing up builders, I've compared them in Bricks vs Elementor vs Oxygen, so I won't go over it again here. Already on Bricks, or settled on it? Read on.
How much does it cost to hire a Bricks Builder developer?
A Bricks Builder developer typically costs $15–$28 an hour at the low end of the market and $75–$120+ an hour at senior level. Bricks work gets priced like general WordPress development, and hardly anyone publishes Bricks-only rates. Here's what the public sources show:
| Source | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Upwork WordPress developer rates | Typical range $15–$28 an hour, median $20 |
| Codeable salary breakdown | Entry $25–$40, mid-level $45–$70, senior $75–$120+ an hour |
| Codeable, by region | Offshore $20–$100 an hour, US-based $70–$200 an hour |
Budget for the licence as well, because Bricks Builder is a paid WordPress theme. The official Bricks pricing page lists four plans:
- Starter: $79 a year for one site
- Business: $149 a year for three sites
- Agency: $249 a year for unlimited sites
- Ultimate Lifetime: $599 once for unlimited sites
Local and staging installs don't count towards the site limit.
Put the Bricks licence in your name
If a developer activates their agency licence on your site and you part ways, you lose updates. Running outdated software is a security risk you don't need.
The price of a Bricks build moves for the same reasons as any WordPress build:
- how many unique templates you need
- how much of the content is dynamic
- integrations such as Stripe or HubSpot
- whether a design already exists
Do they build with global classes and components?
A good Bricks Builder developer styles the site with global classes and builds repeating blocks as components. This decides how cheap the site is to change later, so it's the first thing I'd ask about.
A global class is a reusable style, such as .card or .btn-primary. You define it once and apply it everywhere, and one change updates every card on the site. The Bricks Academy also notes that Bricks only outputs CSS for the classes used on the page being shown, so a tidy class system doesn't drag the whole stylesheet onto every page.
A component is a reusable block of elements, like a pricing card or an event teaser, with properties your editor fills in. The Bricks 2.0 changelog confirms you can't create new global elements any more; components replace them. If a developer still talks about building with global elements, they haven't kept up.
Here's what bad looks like. Every heading styled by hand, 40 slightly different shades of blue, a button you have to fix in 30 places. That site is fine on launch day. By day 90 every small change costs you an afternoon of developer time.
On Aura Clips I rebuilt a Framer site in Bricks with service templates and a blog. Once templates like that exist, adding a service page is a writing job, not a design job. Ask a candidate to show you how they set up the classes on a past site. A good developer can open their class manager and walk you through their naming in two minutes.
Can they wire ACF dynamic data and query loops?
They should. Repeating content in a Bricks site belongs in custom post types with ACF fields, shown through Bricks query loops, not typed straight into each page. Most business sites have plenty of it: events, services, team members, case studies, locations.
Bricks reads ACF fields through its dynamic data picker, and a query loop repeats one design for every matching post. Your team adds an event in a simple form and it shows up on the events page, in the homepage teaser and on its own detail page. Nobody opens the builder.
Ravens Ait is a venue on a Thames island, and I built 20+ event pages for it with Stripe bookings and HubSpot forms. At that size the pages have to share one structure that staff can update. Twenty one-off designs would fall apart within a season.
Ask a candidate: "If we add a new event type next year, what do we have to change?" You want to hear "add a field group or a taxonomy term". If the answer is "I'll build a new page", keep looking.
Will they commit to a performance budget?
Your Bricks Builder developer should agree a written performance budget before the build starts, ideally Google's Core Web Vitals targets on mobile, and check it before launch. Bricks starts out fast. A heavy hero video, uncompressed images, five font families and a chat widget will still make it slow.
I'd put Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds in the contract, measured on mobile:
- Largest Contentful Paint (how fast the main content shows) within 2.5 seconds
- Interaction to Next Paint (how fast the page responds to a tap or click) of 200 milliseconds or less
- Cumulative Layout Shift (how much the layout jumps while loading) of 0.1 or less
Add limits for page weight, fonts and third-party scripts, and agree what happens if a page misses them.
≤ 2.5 s
Largest Contentful Paint, good
≤ 200 ms
Interaction to Next Paint, good
≤ 0.1
Cumulative Layout Shift, good
Ask how they'll handle tracking scripts too. On Aura Clips I set up GA4 and Google Tag Manager as part of the build. Analytics, chat and pixel scripts are usually what slows a fast site down over time, so they belong in the budget. Want to check a candidate's past work yourself? Run their live sites through PageSpeed Insights, then paste the report into my free Page Speed Fix Planner.
Can your team edit the site after handover?
Your team should be able to edit a Bricks site safely after handover, using Bricks 2.0 Builder Capabilities and ACF forms. If they're scared to touch it, the site isn't finished. A lot of builds go wrong right here.
Bricks 2.0 introduced Builder Capabilities. According to the Bricks 2.0 changelog, you can set 50+ individual permissions for a user or role under Bricks > Settings > Builder Access. What that means day to day: your marketing team can change text and images, but can't delete a section or mess with site-wide styles.
A proper Bricks handover should include:
- Editor roles set up with sensible Builder Capabilities
- Content in ACF fields wherever it repeats, so most edits happen in forms, not on the canvas
- A short written or recorded guide for the tasks your team actually does
- Admin access, the hosting login, and the Bricks licence in your name
- A list of every plugin and why it's there
Taxocity is a custom Bricks build for a tax and compliance firm, and every lead it gets goes into a Google Sheet. The handover is where details like that get written down: where leads go, who gets notified, and what to check if they stop coming in.
Can they extend Bricks with code when it runs out?
A strong Bricks Builder developer writes a small, clean bit of PHP when Bricks hits a limit, rather than piling on plugins. Every builder runs out somewhere. How your developer handles that point is the real question.
I built and maintain Geo Targeting for Bricks Builder, a WordPress.org plugin that shows or hides Bricks elements by visitor country using IPinfo Lite. I've written up how to show different content by country in Bricks Builder.
Your developer doesn't need a published plugin. Do ask if they write PHP, if they've built a custom Bricks element or condition, and how they'd handle a feature Bricks doesn't have. If every answer comes back as "there's a plugin for that", expect a slower site and more things that can break at each update.
How do you test a Bricks developer before hiring?
The best test is a small paid task: one section from your design, built as a component with content from ACF fields. Anyone can borrow a portfolio. A paid test shows you how they actually work.
- 1
Check live sites
Ask for two or three live Bricks sites and run them through PageSpeed Insights on mobile.
- 2
Ask for a screen share
Have them open the class manager and one query loop on a past project and explain it.
- 3
Set a paid task
One section from your design, built as a component with content from ACF fields. Pay for it.
- 4
Review the handover
Log in as an editor and try to change the content. If you can't, neither can your team.
What should you ask a Bricks developer on the first call?
On the first call, ask about styles, repeating content, performance targets, editor permissions, licence ownership and custom code. Ten minutes of answers will show you if this is a build that lasts or one you'll be paying to fix next year.
| Question | Good answer | Red flag |
|---|---|---|
| How do you structure styles? | Global classes, variables, a naming system | "I style each element" |
| How do you handle repeating content? | Custom post types, ACF, query loops | Duplicating pages |
| What performance target will you hit? | Named Core Web Vitals targets on mobile | "Bricks is fast anyway" |
| What can my editors change? | Builder Capabilities set per role | Full admin for everyone |
| Whose licence is it? | Yours, bought in your name | Their agency licence |
| What if Bricks can't do something? | Small custom code, explained | Another plugin, every time |
If you have a Figma file, ask how they make the build match it exactly. Here's how I get pixel-perfect Figma to WordPress builds for comparison. No written brief yet? My free Project Scope Generator turns a two-line idea into a page list and feature list you can send to candidates.
Next step
Planning a Bricks build, or need someone to take over an existing one? Send me the site or the design and tell me what your team needs to edit. I'll tell you what I'd set up as classes, components and query loops, and what I'd look at first. See my WordPress on Bricks, Elementor and Oxygen service, or book a 20-minute call.
