Gutenberg & Page Builder – What’s in store for WordPress agencies?

Gutenberg is currently developing rapidly in the direction of full site editing. What does this development mean for the future of page builders? What should WordPress agencies and freelancers prepare for? Which tools can support you? A guest post from GREYD.

When WordPress introduced the Gutenberg editor in 2018, the project was (rightly) ridiculed for its lack of features. “At some point, Gutenberg will surely become even better or perhaps the new standard”, we were assured by enthusiastic early adopters. This has actually turned out to be true, because that time is now.

If you’ve slept through the development of Gutenberg and WordPress plays a central role for your company or agency, then you should read on carefully now. To understand why the development of Gutenberg seriously threatens the existence of page builder plugins, let’s take a quick look at the history of the new WordPress editor.

The development of WordPress Gutenberg

In the beginning, the Gutenberg Editor was still very cumbersome to use, to put it kindly. At least if you compare it with the possibilities of well-known WordPress page builders such as Elementor or WPBakery. In direct comparison to the classic WordPress editor (TinyMCE), which was more suitable for writing blog articles than for designing beautiful websites, Gutenberg was a real quantum leap.

With the introduction of the Gutenberg editor, WordPress has clearly shown that blocks will be the future of web design in the content management system. However, as the roadmap of the Gutenberg project shows, the editor in the backend was only the beginning. Phase 1 of a total of 4 phases, which will extend over several years.

Where Gutenberg stands today & why it’s getting tight for WordPress Page Builder

We are currently in phase 2, which focuses on full site editing, block patterns (templates for Gutenberg blocks), the block directory and block-based themes. This phase alone deprives some half-baked page builder plugins of their raison d’être, which basically only consisted of customising the various elements of a website (such as buttons, images or contact forms) in detail.

With the Full Site Editing function, which is currently being introduced, Gutenberg is going one better. This makes it possible to customise the entire website – including the header and footer – directly in the editor. By comparison, some popular page builders require a paid premium version. WordPress provides us with this option free of charge.

The aforementioned block patterns also seriously compete with the template libraries from Elementor and co. The idea behind the ready-to-use design templates was particularly well received by the target group that is not too well versed in modern web design. A few quick clicks and you have an almost finished website that only needs some fine-tuning and the right content.

With the Block Patterns Directory, WordPress itself is now entering the field of ready-made templates. With the block patterns, however, you don’t have to directly adopt the design of an entire page, but can choose from a large number of individual sections. Once you have found what you are looking for, simply click on “Copy” in the directory so that you can insert and customise the design in your Gutenberg editor.

Page Builder, PageSpeed & WordPress Hosting

Apart from that, there are also custom plugins – such as Gutenberg Template Library & Redux Framework – which offer you a large selection of complete templates for Gutenberg. “But why should I rely on Gutenberg when I can get even more templates with other page builder plugins?” The magic word is PageSpeed.

I don’t know how you feel about that. But if I have to wait too long for a website to load completely, I quickly forget my manners. It’s no longer a secret that page builder plugins drive website load times to infinity (and beyond). This is largely due to the bloated code added by the plugins.

This review by a frustrated Elementor user sums it up pretty well:

Somehow the page builders don’t really seem to be getting any better in terms of page speed. You constantly have to find workarounds to display the website a little faster. With the Gutenberg Editor, you are spared the problem of unnecessarily bloated code. As Gutenberg is the in-house product of WordPress, you inevitably have the minimum amount of code.

Incidentally, this is also one of the main reasons why we focussed so strongly on the native integration of Gutenberg when developing our own GREYD.SUITE. It can also be due to WordPress hosting if the loading times of your WordPress website are in the basement – despite lean code and 100 per cent use of Gutenberg. In this case, you should definitely opt for strong managed WordPress hosting to avoid this.

Tools: GREYD, Gutentor, Stackable & Co.

Although Gutenberg is already so strongly positioned (and although the editor is getting better and better), it has not yet reached the status of “perfection”. There are still some weaknesses and shortcomings that require external solutions.

External solutions in this case refer to tools such as premium themes that are based on Gutenberg. Some of these themes are unfortunately more similar to page builder plugins, as they completely ignore the Gutenberg editor, iron their own functions over the existing WordPress core and thus also unnecessarily bloat the code.

We wanted to avoid this at all costs when developing our own suite. That’s why we developed the first software that has Gutenberg fully integrated and not only offers the option to switch back and forth between Gutenberg and Page Builder. This also ensures particularly low loading times for the WordPress website.

Other practical extensions for Gutenberg, if you don’t necessarily need a comprehensive all-in-one tool for professional WordPress agencies, are plugins that extend the existing editor. Good examples of this include

• Gutenberg Blocks – Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg
• Theme Kit for Twenty Twenty-One by Twentig
• Gutentor – Page Builder for Gutenberg Editor
• Gutenberg Blocks and Template Library by Otter
• Stackable – Page Builder Gutenberg Blocks

Admittedly, these solutions are not necessarily perfect, but they are better than typical page builders that introduce their own editors.

One disadvantage of Gutenberg, which is why many agencies do without the editor from the outset, is that no attention is currently being paid to responsive web design. However, as we believe that responsive websites are essential, we have incorporated easy-to-use controls in numerous places in our suite. These can also be used to easily create mobile responsive websites with Gutenberg.

What does this mean for WordPress agencies?

WordPress won’t be leaving the stage as the most popular content management system any time soon – although WordPress will have to keep up with the headless CMS trend. By specialising in WordPress, you have already made a very good choice with your agency (or as a freelancer if you work alone).

However, if you make your business dependent on page builder plugins that don’t rely on Gutenberg, you’re missing out on one of the most important trends in WordPress history. Now this poses a dilemma for some professional WordPress agencies: on the one hand, we know that Gutenberg will pull away from external solutions in the long term. And on the other hand, the Gutenberg editor (as briefly mentioned above) cannot be used for world-class web design in 100 per cent of cases.

You could cling to the outdated solutions for too long, accept poor pagespeed and later fail to catch up with Gutenberg. Or you could immediately switch to WordPress Gutenberg and accept some weaknesses in terms of detailed design. Both sound like a rather suboptimal solution in my opinion.

This is exactly the problem we faced with our own design agency, with which we build WordPress websites for major clients. That’s why we know that it’s never a pleasant situation to always have to choose the “lesser of two evils” (performance, functionality or appealing design).

But would you rather switch to a different CMS?

That’s not a good idea! As a statistic from W3Techs shows, WordPress websites already make up over 40 per cent of all websites on the Internet (let that melt in your mouth for a moment). And the trend doesn’t really seem to be levelling off. On the contrary, user statistics suggest that WordPress will be used on even more websites in the future.

Of course, this is not to say that you are making a bad choice with TYPO3, Joomla!, Squarespace or any other CMS. It’s simply to emphasise that WordPress will continue to provide you with a secure foundation for your website and work with your agency in the future. And that, in this context, you are also using the best solution (=Gutenberg) within WordPress when building websites.

Foresight is always good

If you continue to ignore the development of WordPress Gutenberg for working with your WordPress agency, you will soon be an endangered species! However, since an immediate switch is often a problem due to the lack of options and intuitiveness of Gutenberg, it is advisable to use external solutions that specialise in the Gutenberg editor.

You can either rely on special themes (let’s not forget that block-based themes play a central role in the current Gutenberg phase) or on extension plugins for Gutenberg. I have introduced you to a few of them in this article.

In any case, you should not just passively observe the development of the WordPress Gutenberg project, but actively be at the forefront. Then you will benefit from it for a long time to come as a professional WordPress service provider.