Why we are learning to love Gutenberg Block Editor for WordPress

Okay, so we’re learning to love it, it certainly wasn’t love at first sight!  It’s not the easiest to learn, it’s not the easiest to implement  and the ‘post coding’ counselling needed by our development team to recover from the experience was an unexpected additional cost. But like a formula one car or a temperamental thorough-bred horse, put in the effort and the rewards are enormous. When it comes to Search Engine Optimization a Gutenberg built website leaves the likes of Squarespace, Wix, and WordPress Elementor disappearing in a cloud of dust. 

Our clients love Gutenberg (it’s easy for them to use)

When Gutenberg was first released in 2018, it really didn’t meet the needs of either our development team or our clients. After many updates from the WordPress team, it has finally passed muster, still difficult to develop with, but critically has proved itself to be an accessible and easy editor for our clients to use. Once we built custom templates in Gutenberg, our clients were able to easily edit their web pages using Gutenberg’s intuitive block layout. Even our clients with little digital experience we able to take control of their website using Gutenberg.

Core Web Vitals

In comparison to other editors like Elementor, Gutenberg websites have had a performance boost of 45-50% on Mobile and 10-20% on Desktop. Google favours websites with good performance and high speeds, which means Gutenberg can help your website rank higher in research results.

Reduce code bloating and improve performance

Gutenberg is a block editor which allows the user to drag and drop multimedia types onto the screen and organise content in blocks. The styling code sheets for these blocks are relatively small and by using a caching plugin, CSS and JavaScript can be minimised. Simplifying your source code helps to improve your website’s overall performance and web vitals meaning that Google will favour your website.

Gutenberg is the future of WordPress

Overall, Gutenberg is a more complex editor than web building plugins such as Elementor. Our team has realised that it’s worth the hard work we put into developing with Gutenberg if it means we can create bespoke easy-to-edit websites for our clients with competitive SEO scores.

To find out more about or experiences with WordPress’s Gutenberg editor, get in touch.