We enter 2024, and the WordPress block editor, aka Gutenberg, has been with us for no less than 5 years. The evolution has been spectacular in all aspects, there is NOTHING that cannot already be done with it, faster and better than with any other visual builder.
Image by master1305 on Freepik
As is usually normal and understandable, many professional web development and design people resist changing tools, when the ones they use regularly and fluently offer good results. Whoever writes these lines, without going any further, was always a great enemy of any type of visual tool, to the point of writing the posts directly in HTML, ignoring WYSWYG. For pure control. And there are not a few people like me.
Automattic and the community that develops and maintains WordPress knew of the growing problem of the invasion of "visual composers" and have not stopped and do not stop working to correct this serious error.
In fact, for the profile of developers, they have always tried to sell us the issue of productivity, but we knew that this was not real if the simple act of loading or saving a page or post in the site administrator took us longer. 5 minutes due to the enormous amount of resources consumed by the builder on duty.
For the user "no coder", the one who only wants to put "a text on the left and a photo on the right in two small columns" visual editors like the well-known Elementor, are the maximum expression of the term "fake friend": Ease of visual control of the blocks and elements on the pages, at the expense of overloading the CMS to the point of making it burst everything and making the website absolutely unmanageable.
Automattic and the community that develops and maintains WordPress were aware of this growing problem and have not stopped and have not stopped working to avoid this serious error.
And Google, as always, also does everything possible to make us realize what is happening: That is why they give us more and more tools and resources, and ways to understand what is happening with websites «overengineered» (Core Web Vitals).
For this reason, before going into listing the essential reasons, I am going to explain 2 very important ones at an extra important level:
First, the memory and resources in your backend
Unlike the other visual editors, with all their panels, their little boxes, its block browser and hierarchy… which often cause our web browser to crash, the WordPress block editor is implemented using react, a front end technology based on virtual dom and created by FacebookWell, for Meta, to be able to load many elements (and microchanges) on the page without, let's say, sacrificing memory in each "repaint" of the page.
Broadly speaking, it is easy to use, it does not slow down nor will it take you the 5 minutes or more that it can take to save a post using Elementor or any of its cousins.
Also, but not least: The native WordPress block editor, save everything in the post, leaving the tables intact infinite post meta that the other constructors use. Database always healthy, clean and STRONG.
Second: The optimization of your frontend
We have been making the mistake for years of making For each url of our projects, all the CSS and JS of absolutely the entire site must be loaded, the theme, the extra css loaded !importants shoehorned in that comes later, the CSS and JS of the plugins, responsive framework, effects and animations framework and for each extra plugin of social media icons, the complete collection of icons to then use the same library twice, etc. .
Google alerts us every time we use its performance measurement tools: Optimize your website's resource loading. Too much.
Many developers already separated the files by the type of views (css and js exclusive to pages, posts, woocommerce) but we have always continued using a massive common load of resources.
It cannot be that, today, the critical CSS to display our photo, and the four paragraphs that a simple single post takes, involves loading 1MB of CSS, no matter how much minification and compression we apply.
The WordPress block editor technology allows our theme to detect the CSS and JS resources required by a given block, and these are integrated and required from the page or post only if the block is present.
This practice is a game-changer so big (and at a technical level, obviously) at a technological level I would say that as obvious as it is, it is applied little more due to a problem of poor implementation of the applications than due to knowledge of its need.
But let's get to the essentials, as we said:
Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Switch to the Native WordPress Block Editor in 2024
- Because it is absolutely free. Neither freemium nor milk: The WordPress block editor is free and open source, which means you don't have to pay for it and you can customize it to your needs.
- It is -increasingly- easy to use: The WordPress block editor is easy to use and does not require advanced technical knowledge.
- It is super flexible and customizable: The WordPress block editor is highly customizable and allows you to create unique layouts for your pages and posts. With block patterns and additional blocks created by the community there is nothing that cannot be built.
- It is compatible with most themes: The WordPress block editor is compatible with most WordPress themes, which means you don't have to worry about compatibility issues.
- It's super safe: The WordPress block editor is secure and is regularly updated to fix any security vulnerabilities.
- It is the fastest and most efficient: The WordPress block editor is fast and optimized for fast page loading. Both on your back end and on your front end. AND IT DOES NOT mess up your database, like everyone else does.
- It is the most SEO-friendly: The WordPress block editor is SEO-friendly and allows you to optimize your pages and posts for search engines.
- It is the most accessible: The WordPress block editor is accessible and meets web accessibility standards.
- It is the most scalable and maintainable: Working on an existing and long-standing project, prepared with the native WordPress block editor, will save nightmares for developers and web maintenance technicians who inherit such projects. And this will be reflected in work hours and economic costs.
- Optimization and loading of the necessary CSS only for the blocks used on each page: The WordPress block editor optimizes the loading of the necessary CSS only for the blocks used on each page, meaning your pages load faster and load time is reduced.
We could reach 100 in the technical and practical reasons of the list, but the year is running out and we have to publish this post, or this would be the wikipedia of the block editor... a year 2024 is coming in which, the content manager The most used website on the entire Internet, it will finally achieve what has always been sought: An Internet that is more accessible and easier to use for everyone, and for all uses.
I wish you all a happy 2024 full of ready-made sites «as god commands» (or as the community «begs») 😉
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