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The WordPress update to version 4.9.8 brought major changes visible in the system's cockpit - a new WP editor offering, Gutenberg, was unveiled. The plugin was downloaded more than 100,000 times in just a few days, and it quickly became clear that the new WordPress editor was not to everyone's liking.
Gutenberg is a new editor pre-installed in WordPress, which significantly changes the way sites based on this extremely popular CMS are created. The plugin allows for a more visual creation of subpages and posts, allowing for easier and more intuitive (at least in concept) organization of graphics, headers, text or embedding multimedia.
The creator of the new editor - Matt Mullenveg - wanted to make WordPress website design easy and intuitive, and to make adding content other than plain text (rich content) as simple as possible. In addition, thanks to modules and blocks, users can simply add any video content, quotes, tables, images, links and social media widgets.
In this, in a way, we can also trace the genesis of the editor's name. Just as 551 years ago (in the 15th century) Johannes Gutenberg revolutionized printing and changed the way books were produced for good, so now the authors of a new editor for WordPress aimed to revolutionize building websites and saturating them with content.
The editor in the new version of WordPress works quite smoothly. If you want to start testing it, just create a new entry. The program will present you with a field where you can add the title of the entry, and below it an interactive window where you can place content on the basis of nesting successive blocks. You can define the type of block yourself - whether it will be: a paragraph, an image, a link, a quote or yet another type of content, and parameterize it.
Blocks are created by pressing the Enter key or by clicking the mouse in the area below the last block.
Among the blocks that can be added in content, Gutenberg offers:
In addition to the ability to create and parameterize blocks, Gutenberg allows you to, among other things: automatically create a table of contents for an entry based on the hierarchy of the headings it contains, switch the editor from visual mode to text mode.
Reviewing the feedback from Gutenberg users, it can be concluded that the integration of this editor in the new WordPress update was counterproductive. Users have not left a dry eye on the new editor.
Among the comments, there are claims that Gutenberg has completely missed any audience using WordPress - both bloggers, who don't need to use extensive editing features, and semi-professional and fully professional WP users, who instead of Gutenberg, use ready-made themes and extensive page builders.
There is also a widely held belief that Gutenberg introduces massive chaos and poses a mass of communication problems between agencies and their clients. After the update introducing the new editor, many clients don't know how to edit their pages - whether through the implemented page builders or from within Gutenberg.
The editor was designed in a completely ill-conceived way. As a result, the solution is fraught with a number of flaws that are difficult to forgive. In the first place should be mentioned the huge compatibility problems with plug-ins, widgets and themes compatible with the previously used TinyMCE, which now need to be rebuilt, smoothed and adjusted to the new editor.
Besides, Gutenberg, despite its theoretical transparency and extensive functionality, does not allow advanced compositions, forcing more demanding users to look for other page builders.
Gutenberg is also poorly optimized. It lowers the speed of editing and page loading, and exhibits considerable stability problems, making life difficult for its users.
See Wordpress webdesign service at our digital agency, and if you want to learn the system see our Wordpress administration training.
Fortunately, the use of Gutenberg is not mandatory and you can successfully revert to the classic editor. To do this, just use a dedicated plugin that will automatically restore the previous editor or manually paste the PHP code in the appropriate place. Note: before applying any changes, we recommend making a backup of your website.
Way #1: using the Classic Editor plugin.
The fastest, easiest and our recommended way to restore the old editor is to use the plugin: Classic Editor. After installing and activating it, all you have to do is go to the plugin's menu, going to Settings and then Writing, and check the "Use only the classic editor" option. That's it.
Way #2: using the Disable Gutenberg plugin
The second plugin that works similarly is the Disable Gutenberg plugin. All you need to do is install the plugin, go to the settings in the cockpit, then to the plugin menu, and check the "Disable Gutenberg everywhere" option.
Way #3: paste PHP code into functions.php file
The third way is dedicated to more advanced WordPress users. It involves pasting PHP code into the functions.php file, which is located in the folder with the uploaded theme.
You can find the desired file in the wp-content/wp-themes folder and open it with any text editor - such as Notepad.
Code: add_filter(‘gutenberg_can_edit_post_type’, ‘__return_false’);
You should paste at the very top of the file, directly after the <?php tag.
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(Divi and Elementor): website speed and optimization
We have to start this paragraph with a statement: All page builders add a lot of unnecessary code to a website, which slows down the site and works against loading speed, and thus SEO optimization.
In line with this reason, many industry experts do not recommend the use of page builders. However, this does not mean that in some cases it is not worth using them.
Adding so-called "short code" by page builders increases resource consumption and requires servers to use a bit more processing power, thus indirectly affecting the PageSpeed Insights score.
The attractiveness of using Divi and other page builders is most diminished by the overwhelming amount of CSS styles generated. The culprit for this is Gravity Forms, which overwrites huge amounts of unnecessary code that takes care of the responsiveness of the site. The page builders' CSS overrides and short codes used make it difficult to edit websites made in them, and generate several times more unnecessary code relative to the default WordPress editor.
Once Divi is deactivated, you can see how much it generates short codes and how drastically they burden the site.
https://i1.wp.com/wpshout.com/media/2018/04/divi_deactivate_fallback-gap.jpg?resize=1589%2C753&ssl=1
In addition, there are corresponding plugins that clean the page of shortcodes should we, however, abandon the use of Divi after using it : https://wordpress.org/plugins/shortcode-cleaner-lite/
Nevertheless, as long as we handle the page builder in a reasonable way, the SEO of the site should not suffer significantly. Nevertheless, it happens many times that our clients create their own pages with page builders in such a way that the redundant code even obscures the core of the entire system.
Comparing page builders such as Divi, Elementor and Gutenberg based on our experience, the following conclusions can be made,
In summary, the cleanest code will be obtained using Gutenberg or Elementor.
Fortunately, you can find plugins on the market that allow you to deal with the meta data of individual pages, and thus clean up the code a bit and optimize SEO. These plugins are the well-known All-In-One SEO Pack and Yoast SEO.
See how to improve speed by optimizing the database and optimizing images accordingly
Wordpress optimization basics for greenies
The loading speed of a page made with Gutengerg, Divi and Elementor can be compared based on the test presented on the site: Winningwp. The creator performed a test in which he created an identical page in WordPress using the default builder and the Divi and Elementor page builders.
The site made with Gutenberg scored 88 points in the speed rating, its size was 1.5 MB, and the number of queries settled at 21.
The same web page made in Elementor also scored 88 points, but its loading speed was 28% faster than the page made with Gutenberg. The page size was 1.7 MB and the number of queries was 37.
The site created in Divi also scored 88 points. Its loading speed increased by 27% relative to the site made in the default editor. Its size was 1.7 MB, and the number of queries was 29.
As you can see, you can't find too many differences between the three page builders.
Here are some tips to help you lighten the load a bit on sites built on Divi, Gutenberg, Elementor or any other page builder.
It's also worth learning how hosting affects site optimization. See how to choose wordpress hosting for your website.
In our opinion, the Gutenberg editor is still a misguided idea at the moment. On the one hand, it provides much more extensive functionality relative to the previous editor, but on the other hand, it is extremely limited, so it will not meet the requirements of more advanced users. Less experienced users, on the other hand, will not benefit from the provided functionality anyway. Thus, Gutenberg turns out to be a plug-in that does not reach every target group.
Visually assessing the work in Gutenberg we give a good+ grade, the interface is pleasant and positively surprises after the standard WordPress 4.n editor's window. The multitude and freedom of solutions for on-the-fly editing of text, columns, images are certainly future-oriented elements which will be developed with each Gutenberg update, which in turn will pose a threat to pagebuilders already available on the market, such as the mentioned Divi or Elementor. Everything really in the hands of the creators of the solution how much they will improve it and how far it will be satisfactory for the average and more advanced wordpress user (not familiar with advanced methods of web programming) because we have the impression that this is the target audience of this solution.
Currently, there are many other noteworthy page builders on the market free of the mistakes made in Gutenberg. Moreover, due to the plugin's early age and the many technical problems it faces, we don't see any great point in using Gutenberg beyond possibly learning more about its current capabilities.
Pagebuilders are good for beginners who use wordpress to allow the administration of the website by employees of a particular company. As long as we want to give them access to the panel and content management, but in fact most websites nowadays are based on bootstrap as far as advanced developers are concerned, at least that's what it seems to me from observation.
Besides, page builders take up a lot of space and page cache so Page Speed insights does not tolerate pages based on plugins and components that are off-the-shelf. Unless someone can enlighten me on how to get around this beyond autoptomize or other similar guidelines which are also not solutions... Gutenberg is supportive when it comes to a simple editor and may work a bit better, but I haven't researched this so I'm not commenting. I do know, however, that it is still better to write a website from scratch starting from html knowledge to knowledge extended by other programming languages than to use ready-made ones... And this is not taken into account by the client, but certainly by Googling support, etc. so it is better to educate yourself.
In my opinion, every pagebuilder is a total tragedy ( I haven't tested all of them because I don't have the need either - but I've seen a few unintentionally ), and the gutenberg wordpress editor is the first thing I turn off definitively - in summary - it's the worst tragedy
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