A strong foundation starts with the right building blocks.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re building a house or building a website. You want to leverage whatever technology you can to make the job as simple as possible. That’s why smart web designers use WordPress Gutenberg blocks.
Before Gutenberg blocks, web designers only had a limited amount of tools at their disposal. Page Builder was the most common platform previously. But, using Page Builder has its own set of problems.
Gutenberg blocks are easier to use and they allow you to do more. The result is a stunning website that’s easy to build and can compete with any website designed by a large company.
Today, we’re going to take a deep dive into Gutenberg blocks. We’ll discuss why they’re the premier web design tool for WordPress. We’ll also compare them to their competition, Page Builder.
So, read along with us and find out the 7 reasons why you should be using Gutenberg blocks.
1. WordPress Gutenberg Blocks Are Reusable
One of the things that set Gutenberg apart from standard WordPress page builders is its reusable blocks. This feature allows you to create one block of features at a time. Then, you can reuse that block in various places across your website.
This is great for certain types of sites like e-commerce and landing pages. These types of websites have call-to-action (CTA) buttons that need to be repeatedly placed throughout the website. Gutenberg’s reusable blocks allow you to easily install multiple CTA buttons on your site while still keeping a uniform look.
2. Easy to Use
Using Gutenberg blocks makes WordPress easy to use. It doesn’t matter what type of site you’re building. Gutenberg blocks can handle the simplest or most complex site design.
Users will lose some of the drag-and-drop functionality they’re used to with page builders like Elementor and WP Bakery. But, the overall experience using blocks will be easier in the long run. It just might take some getting used to.
Once you get the hang of using Gutenberg, you’ll be able to group website components together, easily move content around your webpages, and create more complex layouts. This makes Gutenberg the best possible choice for web design clients, bloggers, and non-developers.
3. Low Code Design
Because Gutenberg revolves around the block structure, it involves much less code than traditional page builders. Plugins like WP Bakery and Elementor can “bloat” the backend of your website with code. This could end up hurting your site’s performance.
Google’s newest algorithm puts a huge emphasis on the user experience. Your content and SEO could be great but if your site is bloated with code you may slip down the Google SERP rankings.
This is because too much code will significantly affect your site’s speed. And speed is one of Google’s main determining factors in a positive user experience.
Having too much code can also hurt your Google results a second way. Google has something known as a “recommended DOM size” for websites. This is basically a measure of your website’s HTML code to content ratio.
Too much code in the back end of your site could alter your site’s HTML to content ratio and push you further down the Google rankings.
4. Support From WordPress Core
The fact that Gutenberg is part of the WordPress core features gives Gutenberg users a lot of benefits. As a core feature, Gutenberg will continue to get a lot of support from the entire WordPress community. This means Gutenberg will be receiving frequent security and feature updates.
And, since Gutenberg is part of WP core, all of these updates are free. You don’t have to pay for additional features and functionality like you would with other WordPress plugins.
5. Blocks Are Better for Global Elements
Global elements are your more complex website elements. These are things like image carousels, sliders, testimonials widgets, and hero content blocks. Since these website elements are a little more complex than static images or text, they tend to slow down your website.
But, Gutenberg blocks are built to handle more complex elements like these. You don’t have to use a large, awkward slider plugin that ends up slowing down your site. You can group images together in a Gutenberg block. Then, simply add a .slick-track class to turn these images into a slider.
What makes Gutenberg even more powerful is that blocks like this can then be added to your reusable library. Now you have a slider you can place anywhere on your website. All you need to do is replace the images and make them more appropriate for a particular page.
6. Gutenberg Can Do More With Hooked Blocks
This is a more complex feature of Gutenberg but it can be very useful when designing websites. The fact that blocks can integrate with WordPress hooks allows them to create some pretty advanced website features. They can be used anywhere your WordPress theme has WP hooks available.
Developers can use Gutenberg together with WordPress hooks to create things like “Pop-Up Blocks”. These are great for CTA buttons on your website. They’re also a useful feature for highlighting important announces you want to display on your site.
Another way these hooked blocks can be used is to add blocks before or after a header or footer. Many times, developers need to display announcements just above or just below the header for their clients. These can be tricky to include in your website design.
But, using a hooked block makes the process easy.
7. Create Custom Blocks
Gutenberg blocks are customizable for whatever you need. A developer can use JavaScript to code any necessary features directly into a Gutenberg block. A lot of plugin developers are already using this feature to create custom blocks.
Gravity Forms, a popular WordPress plugin, already has a custom Gutenberg block that helps extend the plugin’s functionality. WooCommerce and other e-commerce plugins have also used this feature.
Custom blocks make it easy to display product inventory, sales products, and much more.
Take Gutenberg to the Next Level
WordPress Gutenberg blocks are a great tool for any website. Whether your business is big or small, you can use this tool to help make your website stand out.
Working with a development team that knows their way around Gutenberg blocks can really take your project to the next level. Contact the team at AJS Web Designs and let us show you what we can do for your next project.
