What do you by “beautiful”? I mean, Twenty Twenty-two is a nice looking theme.
Hey, I have dozens of advanced websites that run in less than 0.25 seconds using Elementor and a dozen of other plugins. WordPress optimization is an skill as important as building your site.
I will send you a link on how to optimize WordPress when I finish my article. It is very detailed.
Yep. That’s all we do at the agency I work for. That’s all I’ve custom built, prior to that.
Yes. It is 100% possible to make a “beautiful” site with Gutenberg blocks. And yes, your Gutenberg pages will load faster. The only issue I face with Gutenberg is that most of my clients are used to the classic editor for publishing blogs – I really wish we get an option to disable blocks just for posts (maybe there is a way and I dunno of it).
I use Divi and WP Rocket which works great together.
[https://flemmingss.com/])
I think it looks okay, but super simple.
It depends what’s beautiful to you. I have created one and it’s beautiful to me
Yes, that’s all I do. But the added CSS I add to the basic blocks as well as custom Gutenberg Blocks are very important. I do not design my sites just develop the front and back-end, but the clients and the designers loved them. Here are a few recent ones.
You can check my portfolio as example and also all featured sites are custom gutenberg themes
is made with Gutenberg and also all templates at are made with Gutenberg and Qi Blocks only
Yes, I’ve made several. In the process of phasing out other page builders. That said, you *can* make Elementor performant…but it’s a lot of work and fragile, in my experience. Building with just blocks is “ok” but has it’s own set of challenges.
First, layout grids are way more convoluted than they should be and you have little to no control with the core blocks alone. I end up with stacks nested inside rows, inside groups, inside columns, etc. It’s a bit of a mess. We ended up creating a lot of one-off custom container blocks at work to deal with the more complex layouts.
Second, there’s still a massive disconnect between core and 3rd party tools. Lots of 3rd party packages don’t honor the settings in theme.json, so you have to make the same settings in a bunch of different places. For instance, Kadence blocks doesn’t use the font sizes and other items from your theme.json. So you have to manually override the Kadence specific css vars.
3rd, WP seems to have little to no interest in providing universal controls natively, leaving developers to roll their own solutions. This is the root cause of problem number 2 listed above. You can enable typography controls in a custom block that works out of the box…but you can’t make it responsive, with different values for each preview size. That’s just an example, the same is true of a dozen different common settings that should be universal to any block.
If they could get those items addressed it wouldn’t be a bad editor. The UX takes some getting used to, but it’s improving.
The answer is simple: 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 — yes, of course, set sail and build it, “weed are flowers too”, but a shame they equal the historical person’s name to a rubbish d1rty p1ece of shhh..poor programming, imo
No. But as others have mentioned, you *can* make a beautiful site with Gutenberg and a great deal of expert-level custom CSS, and possibly expert-level Javascript, JSON, and other programming skills.
Meanwhile I just helped someone launch an entirely DIY LearnDash/WooCommerce site they built with Elementor. They have zero concept of CSS or HTML, they’d never heard of FTP or SFTP, and they couldn’t find functions.php with both hands and a flashlight. Also, they’d never checked anything for responsiveness. It was just a plain, out of the box Elementor site, using whatever responsive defaults that came with WordPress, Elementor, LearnDash, and WooCommerce.
This ought to sound like a horror story but after just a couple hours optimizing images and straightening out some (obviously amateur) responsiveness errors, and even before I added caching it got a GTMetrix 99% performance, 98% structure, and .8second LCP. Now that the site is launched I’m sure I can get those scores even higher with cache tuning.
And no, I couldn’t believe it either, but it’s a very pretty site.)
It’s also pretty. They cared *a lot* that the site was beautiful. Weird but true, they almost all their time picking exactly the right fonts, images, and (laptop screen) layouts instead of things any dev (including me) would have made sure of first.
They did start out trying to make it work with Gutenberg but, again, not knowing any CSS or Javascript at all they failed almost immediately. They couldn’t make it beautiful so they grabbed the free version of Elementor.
And just to repeat: I. Don’t. Even. Like. Elementor!
Yes, but I also create my own themes to help them look nice. I’ve never touched elementor before though so can’t speak to that.
Yes of course, I have moved to Gutenberg FSE as the building tool for client sites with custom blocks for more complex layouts/functions. You can get sites like:
[surgegum.com.au])
What do you by “beautiful”? I mean, Twenty Twenty-two is a nice looking theme.
Hey, I have dozens of advanced websites that run in less than 0.25 seconds using Elementor and a dozen of other plugins. WordPress optimization is an skill as important as building your site.
I will send you a link on how to optimize WordPress when I finish my article. It is very detailed.
Yep. That’s all we do at the agency I work for. That’s all I’ve custom built, prior to that.
Yes. It is 100% possible to make a “beautiful” site with Gutenberg blocks. And yes, your Gutenberg pages will load faster. The only issue I face with Gutenberg is that most of my clients are used to the classic editor for publishing blogs – I really wish we get an option to disable blocks just for posts (maybe there is a way and I dunno of it).
I use Divi and WP Rocket which works great together.
[https://flemmingss.com/])
I think it looks okay, but super simple.
It depends what’s beautiful to you. I have created one and it’s beautiful to me
Yes, that’s all I do. But the added CSS I add to the basic blocks as well as custom Gutenberg Blocks are very important. I do not design my sites just develop the front and back-end, but the clients and the designers loved them. Here are a few recent ones.
You can check my portfolio as example and also all featured sites are custom gutenberg themes
is made with Gutenberg and also all templates at are made with Gutenberg and Qi Blocks only
Yes, I’ve made several. In the process of phasing out other page builders. That said, you *can* make Elementor performant…but it’s a lot of work and fragile, in my experience. Building with just blocks is “ok” but has it’s own set of challenges.
First, layout grids are way more convoluted than they should be and you have little to no control with the core blocks alone. I end up with stacks nested inside rows, inside groups, inside columns, etc. It’s a bit of a mess. We ended up creating a lot of one-off custom container blocks at work to deal with the more complex layouts.
Second, there’s still a massive disconnect between core and 3rd party tools. Lots of 3rd party packages don’t honor the settings in theme.json, so you have to make the same settings in a bunch of different places. For instance, Kadence blocks doesn’t use the font sizes and other items from your theme.json. So you have to manually override the Kadence specific css vars.
3rd, WP seems to have little to no interest in providing universal controls natively, leaving developers to roll their own solutions. This is the root cause of problem number 2 listed above. You can enable typography controls in a custom block that works out of the box…but you can’t make it responsive, with different values for each preview size. That’s just an example, the same is true of a dozen different common settings that should be universal to any block.
If they could get those items addressed it wouldn’t be a bad editor. The UX takes some getting used to, but it’s improving.
The answer is simple: 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 — yes, of course, set sail and build it, “weed are flowers too”, but a shame they equal the historical person’s name to a rubbish d1rty p1ece of shhh..poor programming, imo
No. But as others have mentioned, you *can* make a beautiful site with Gutenberg and a great deal of expert-level custom CSS, and possibly expert-level Javascript, JSON, and other programming skills.
Meanwhile I just helped someone launch an entirely DIY LearnDash/WooCommerce site they built with Elementor. They have zero concept of CSS or HTML, they’d never heard of FTP or SFTP, and they couldn’t find functions.php with both hands and a flashlight. Also, they’d never checked anything for responsiveness. It was just a plain, out of the box Elementor site, using whatever responsive defaults that came with WordPress, Elementor, LearnDash, and WooCommerce.
This ought to sound like a horror story but after just a couple hours optimizing images and straightening out some (obviously amateur) responsiveness errors, and even before I added caching it got a GTMetrix 99% performance, 98% structure, and .8second LCP. Now that the site is launched I’m sure I can get those scores even higher with cache tuning.
And no, I couldn’t believe it either, but it’s a very pretty site.)
It’s also pretty. They cared *a lot* that the site was beautiful. Weird but true, they almost all their time picking exactly the right fonts, images, and (laptop screen) layouts instead of things any dev (including me) would have made sure of first.
They did start out trying to make it work with Gutenberg but, again, not knowing any CSS or Javascript at all they failed almost immediately. They couldn’t make it beautiful so they grabbed the free version of Elementor.
And just to repeat: I. Don’t. Even. Like. Elementor!
Yes, but I also create my own themes to help them look nice. I’ve never touched elementor before though so can’t speak to that.
Yes of course, I have moved to Gutenberg FSE as the building tool for client sites with custom blocks for more complex layouts/functions. You can get sites like:
[surgegum.com.au])
Some plugins I use with the Gutenberg Plugin:
* [https://wordpress.org/plugins/attributes-for-blocks/])
* [https://wordpress.org/plugins/block-visibility/])
* [https://wordpress.org/plugins/blocks-animation/])
But I also am heavy on the cache and optimisation using OpenLiteSpeed hosting.
Yep! 100% on the Gutenberg train, but if I need help sometimes I use generatePress but that’s using Gutenberg so I’m thinking it still counts.