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I am putting a simple site together (services + case studies + blog + contact) and I was looking through themes to purchase. Last few times I worked with wp I usually purchased some premium theme and I would customize one of the prebuilt sites and things were ok. I did notice the sites were rather slow, but Elementor seemed like a useful tool for someone who doesn’t work with code often. Returning a few years later, many other page builders are offered as well as this Gutenberg thing.
What would you recommend as a starting point for a wp build these days?
Kadence? Oxygen?
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Unless you’re a developer with coding (javascript, CSS) tools and experience, the consensus seems to be that Gutenberg *still* isn’t ready for serious site building without either a pre-fabricated theme or a set of “builder” blocks like Kadence or Generate that can credibly handle responsive layout and design without those extra dev tools.
There are plenty of pre-rolled “Gutenberg-ready” themes in the free WordPress theme repository. And of course there are “premium” block themes too. As long as you stick with their guidelines and, possibly, the blocks they develop for the theme, then you should be fine.
As I say over and over, Gutenberg seems to have been developed by people who were tired of building custom fields, custom page templates, and widgets. And it really is a brilliant replacement for those. But those same developers assume even casual users who want to do more than the equivalent of playing with pre-made Lego blocks is going to be as fluent at CSS and media queries, and that they’ll have “learned Javascript deeply.” At some point it’ll dawn on them that, no matter how much nicer blocks are to build, most people want even the basic layout capabilities you could find in page builders back in 2015. Until then you’ll still need one of those block-based builders like Kadence.
Or, alternatively, real page builder vendors will figure out how to use blocks in their layouts. The latest Beaver Builder release lets you use Block Patterns in their page builder. And while Gutenberg’s design makes it extraordinarily difficult to use blocks outside of their own tailored environment, I’m sure other vendors (Elementor, Divi, even WPBakery and Aveda, etc.) are already figuring it out as well.
Everyone I have talked to and know that does WP hates Gutenberg. I also hate it. Page builders became popular and WP tried making a core page builder, but I build custom sits with bespoke templates and design so it’s just junk to me. I’d say if you like React + WP style stuff then check it out but I wouldn’t lose sleep over not getting cozy with Gutenberg. I sure ain’t.
I just moved from Elementor to Gutenberg and it’s not awful – a couple of little inconveniences that I have gotten round by improving my CSS skills and site is now better than before. I’ve gone from a 70-80 mobile PageScore to 99-100 too which is amazing!
Gutenberg is the future. It is the default editor of WordPress. I’ve used pretty much all the builders and prefer Gutenberg. I do agree that it’s not quite *there* yet but you can easily extend it with block plugins. Look into FSE block themes for the real future of themes. Block-based template parts are coming to Classic themes as well so we’ll have hybrid classic/block themes to play around with.
Highly recommend the WordPress Social Meetups for great 1 hour seminars on all this stuff. They all get posted to WordPress.tv so they can be rewatched. Check out [Nick Diego’s vids]) to see what you can do with Gutenberg.
I think the key question is “who is building the pages/posts?”. If it’s CSS capable designers and developers, or people just writing simple blog posts without design expectations, then Gutenberg can be good. If your page/post team is not technical, but wants the site to look like a contemporary marketing website, then it’s likely you are going to need Elementor, BeaverBuilder, or WPBakery. I think the only page builder that I would avoid is Divi, otherwise the others are not the greatest from a code perspective, but they give the end user a UI that is not terrible and write code that is manageable.