The Wayback Machine - https://webcf.waybackmachine.org/web/20211203064809/https://wptavern.com/ask-the-bartender-should-i-use-a-page-builder-or-wait-for-block-themes

18 Comments

  1. Lawrence
    · Reply

    Elementor are addressing DOM / performance issues.

    Their latest beta is a big improvement.

    It also introduces Flexbox Containers that give you much more flexibility when building layouts:

    https://forum.elementor.com/product-updates/20

    I’ve tested this on my site and it works well. The speed increase is noticeable too.

    For transparency, I’m an ex host of an Elementor Meetup but biased.

    I also use Bricks Builder, which is new but still not quite ready for production, and Oxygen, that was a pain to get a hang of.

    As a non-dev, and someone who still doesn’t quite ‘get’ Gutenberg, page builders remain the better option to be able to design and build quickly.

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  2. David Maillard
    · Reply

    Block themes seems such early on i would rather look for a good Gutemberg integrated…

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  3. Robert
    · Reply

    It might help to get away from the idea of a website being something permanent. Decisions you make about how to build your site today only affect today’s incarnation of your site. So don’t sweat it too much. Go with what works for you now and look forward to trying something different within a few years.

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  4. Tom
    · Reply

    I have found that the most powerful tool for getting exactly what I want on screen is CSS. I start with an old-fashioned theme that gives me a layout close to what I want, quickly take advantage of whatever settings it provides, and then take control via CSS. Inserting CSS either via the bottom of the Customizer sidebar or a CSS plugin. I usually start with one of the 20xx themes because they usually do a very good job of defining classes for every item on screen. The buggy, over-complicated, always-changing block editor is a waste of my time, time better spent developing content.

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    • Isabel
      · Reply

      This is actually also one of the options I’m considering. For themes to use as a base, what do you recommend?

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      • Robert
        · Reply

        GeneratePress is an excellent general-purpose theme. It has a companion GenerateBlocks plugin that significantly enhances layout possibilities in the block editor without adding dozens of unnecessary gadgets. If you find you like the theme, the Premium upgrade is great value too.

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      • Tom
        · Reply

        I’m conservative. I do not want no trouble. All too often in the past I found myself high and dry when a theme developer decided to stop maintaining their theme. So my go-to themes are the twenty series from the golden age of WP. “Twenty Ten” when WP3 made WP really good through “Twenty Seventeen,” the last one before WP went off the rails. These 7 themes represent much of the best of WP, provide a range of design choices, are mostly solid, are regularly updated (Twenty Ten was updated in July 2021), and in use by millions of websites.

        When I look at a theme I do not look at the colors, fonts, or graphics because all are easily changed using CSS. I look beneath that to find the “bones,” also called a “wireframe” diagram. You can use the bookmarklet Wirify to turn any web page into a wireframe. https://www.wirify.com Wirify’s is a good place to start, good because it hides the non-essential, but also too detailed and literal. Step two is to mark up what it produces to identify the major page elements: headers, footers, content area, sidebars, etc.

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  5. Sally G.
    · Reply

    I am in the same situation with an organization that is looking to move its site to WordPress (though I am more of an amateur); I was looking at Chaplin but the twenty-twenty-two theme looks really interesting, too. I am really not interested in using a page builder; seems to be just an added layer and more confusing than not, from my limited experience with Elementor. (For the site that uses Elementor, I have been creating posts with the standard block editor, only using Elementor for the pages that were created before I took over maintenance.)

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  6. Isabel
    · Reply

    Thanks so much for the well-thought-out response! I like your suggestion regarding forward-looking themes. I’ve tried Eksell before and loved it, but for my current project, it doesn’t really fit. I will look more into other themes.

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  7. YVE
    · Reply

    If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past decade, it’s this: purchased themes don’t work well in the end. Too much unnecessary code and it’s never quite what you want. Furthermore, a page builder can throw things upside down, looking at Elementor and WPBakery. Developing a template yourself in HTML5 and CSS3 and linking the necessary fields with ACF offers everything that is needed while maintaining your own beautiful theme.

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  8. Kathy
    · Reply

    I knew blocks were the future, and it wasn’t until I started playing with Kadence and Kadence Blocks that I really saw the sun rising up in that future. The big improvement I see is the ability to really customize each block with so many different settings.

    And, the page speed and accessibility results I got from my first few redesigns were impressive. I’m done with page builders and firmly in the Kadence Blocks w/Gutenberg world just for speed & accessibility alone.

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  9. Peter Müller
    · Reply

    On most sites I have been using GeneratePress as a theme for years now, writing posts with the standard block editor. For a bit more complex layouts on pages the plugin GenerateBlocks from the same team has substituted Elementor.

    This combination is fast, lean and stable, and I think I will keep using it at least until FSE and block themes are ready for prime time.

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  10. Ian
    · Reply

    Also, the Editor Block Outline plugin, recommended by Justin Tadlock last year, is a must-have. It stops the block editor being a cross between a guessing game and whack-a-mole.

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  11. Christian Zumbrunnen
    · Reply

    I wanted to go all in on Full Site Editing for a client project. But because of time constraints I ended using GeneratePress again. It’s a great theme. Before navigation areas, template parts and global styles are really stable, I feel it’s better to stay with a solid theme (like GeneratePress). But it will be January soon and I’m sure with WordPress 5.9 and TwentyTwentyTwo theme a big step will be done.

    Wpdraft, a theme and plugin also gives some insights as what’s a potential way to quickly design in WordPress.

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  12. Harry
    · Reply

    I’d suggest adding quotes or something for section by Isabel because until you read far enough, you don’t realize the author of the article is not the one who wrote those words. The entire time I was reading this is was weird because it didn’t sound like Justin at all.

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  13. Trishan Mehta
    · Reply

    Go with GeneratePress plus GenerateBlocks. That’s the best combination for building a block based website without slowing down page speed. You can achieve any result that you will get with your favourite page builder.

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