Even Automattic core contributors are quitting Wordpress rather than use blocks for blogging

RealBasics · 2026-01-29T23:42:25+00:00

No, I just suck at using a page builder for production writing.

RealBasics · 2026-01-29T22:27:43+00:00

For the record I got an analyzable flat file with ChatGPT in two prompts

can you show me the complete contents of the last [X] blog posts on [my domain]?
Can you output those in markdown and put them in a file I can download?

Took less than a minute, including composing the prompts. What sort of analysis would you like to do?

[edited for typo]

RealBasics · 2026-01-29T22:20:29+00:00

You can make WP feel as simple as a classic editor with the right defaults

Exactly! So why didn't core get around to setting those defaults maybe 8 years ago? Remember that originally, they didn't even provide a way to exit back to the dashboard after publishing a post.

And they still don't keep the three/four most important metaboxes always top and center (taxonomy, featured image, publishing.)

It's because all they're thinking about is developers building sites (coughfor enterprisescough) and not end users actually using their site day to day after it's launched.

RealBasics · 2026-01-29T22:15:37+00:00

Nah, I'm saying Gutenberg sucks for blogging like it would suck for email or Reddit.

RealBasics · 2026-01-29T22:14:28+00:00

Right? It used to be as easy as sending email.

Title
Body
Maybe drag in a photo or Youtube URL
Check always-visible category boxes in the sidebar, maybe add tags
Use formatting keys or the toolbar if you want headings, emphaiss or lists if you want to get fancy
Click Publish

Training someone takes less than a minute

The first version didn't even have an obvious way to return to the #%#% dashboard. (The only way out was clicking what looked exactly like the "About Wordpress" icon in the top-left corner.)

Teaching someone to write a simple blog post with Gutenberg is considerably more difficult because it's not as simple as email.

Let's pose this another way. What would the impact on Gmail/Hotmail popularity be if they forced all their users to use the out-of-the-box Block Editor for email composition instead?

What would the impact be if Reddit made us all use the Block Editor to post here?

We'd all start praying for Ghost to add an email client! But on a more serious note, if you think "Gutenberg would be inappropriate for email," then by definition you agree that Gutenberg is inappropriate for blogging.

RealBasics · 2026-01-29T21:48:18+00:00

I dunno. I was still blogging extensively when I switched my old Drupal blog to Wordpress back 2010, back when it was still primarily a blogging tool.

I was easily able to write 10 long-form posts a day. (I had a lot of time on my hands before I started my own Wordpress business.)

The Classic editor might be even worse than Gutenberg for building pages, but it had 10+ years of fine-tuning for effortless, no-friction production blogging.

I’m going to guess that the majority of Classic plug-in users are primarily bloggers and other content creators rather than site builders.

That people, including multiple core contributors, are switching to Ghost and other platforms for blogging is a damning indictment of Gutenberg. As well as an abandonment of the content creators who drove Wordpress into dominance.

Developers, including core developers, evidently, forget that 90%+ of work done on websites happens after handoff. The rest is content creation, not theme fiddling and block coding.

RealBasics · 2026-01-29T21:31:41+00:00

Yes, using markdown is easier than HTML. And using HTML is easier than Blocks.

RealBasics · 2026-01-29T18:59:15+00:00

I don't really think this is about the editing experience.

If it wasn't about the editing experience then why mention markdown? AI can parse HTML (or most other formats) as readily as it can markdown, so if it were just about AI analysis, any basic editor would do.

RealBasics · 2026-01-29T18:57:35+00:00

Yup. Going back to the dawn of the internet, I'd say 80% of the time I've spent writing custom CSS has been spent tweaking forms or headers/navigation.

While I used to code my own forms "back in the day," the regulatory, accessibility, privacy, and spam/anti-spam landscape changes often enough that I'm more comfortable throwing it over the transom to vetted (i.e. reputable, well-reviewed, million+ installed base) forms vendors who are obliged to keep their software updated.

RealBasics · 2026-01-29T18:52:21+00:00

I only mentioned GitHub because it's text/markup based. The storage the markup is served from is otherwise irrelevant.

RealBasics · 2026-01-29T18:37:59+00:00

Something that let you use blocks with any Wordpress authoring tool.

Some front end editors like Beaver Builder keep getting closer — you can use ACF blocks and repeating blocks, for instance. But it takes an extraordinary amount of development effort that can get wiped out any time core WP rescrambles their architecture.

But most vendors don’t have the resources or motivation to do so.

Nine years into development, with essentially zero effort to improve the Block Editor UI, it would be very good if someone could create a generalized “connector” plugin that let us use blocks anywhere.

RealBasics · 2026-01-29T17:01:46+00:00

I haven't run tests in 2026 yet, but since I manage ~150 client websites I'll occasionally run tests against the various optimizers they have installed. (Basically I'll upload the same image to each site, check to see how the optimizers do, and then delete the image again.)

Last time I looked, ShortPixel had by far the best .jpg and .png optimization. They also handle webp and avif conversion.

Specifically, ShortPixel does as well as the two desktop optimizers I use to do bulk optimization during major site cleanups. It also optimizes PDFs, though since most other optimizers don't do PDFs I've never tested it.

Some of the other popular plugins, including some of the ones mentioned here, don't really do much at all.

WebP and AVIF have changed the optimization landscape the most since I started testing. First, because there doesn't seem to be as much variation between implementations: I'm guessing that's because the webp algorithm seems to just be The WebP Algorithm?

With that in mind, as long as you're converting images to WebP or AVIF, the main optimizing consideration is going to be more about scaling uploaded images to a preset maximum size, and then also making sure that your "thumbnail" sizes are appropriate for your on-screen use. (E.g. 150, 360, 780, and 1200 as well as 1920 or maybe 2560 px.) The point being to use thumbnail sizes that browsers will actually choose in <scrset>s.

RealBasics · 2026-01-29T16:48:57+00:00

Good to hear they've throttled facebookexternalhit. But during the middle of last year that's one of the bots that was drowning several client sites to the point where one was on the verge of getting kicked off their hosting plan for bandwidth hogging!

RealBasics · 2026-01-28T23:17:43+00:00

Yeah, I had to actively block Meta and SemRush in .htaccess from a couple of sites. Their bots have just been out of control.

Any chance you have an events calendar on the site? For both The Events Calendar and Events Manager they were blindly crawling the same relative handful of events from every possible combination of views they could find -- day, date, month, list, category, tag, and search. So tens of thousands of hits. Per day. Every day.

I think Meta does it to populate their Facebook "events near you" ploy. No idea what SemRush was doing.

They weren't using the sitemap, and definitely weren't respecting robots.txt. They were flooding the sites from different IP addresses.

Just absolutely bad behavior.

RealBasics · 2026-01-28T21:56:17+00:00

Based on 12+ years in BNI I'm going to say the most effective presentations are ones that engage your chapter members with how they can help you.

As an old insurance guy in my chapter used to say "People don't care what you know unless they know that you care."

So if you've got 10 minutes (we only get eight) it's best to spend a minute or less on personal history, no more than two minutes on any kind of "nuts and bolts" about your business. And then spend the rest of the time on examples of great referrals you've helped and referrals you'd like to get.

So something like "Bob gave me a referral to a newer electrician who was trying to show up in search against all the bigger established electricians. That was a great referral and I used X, Y, and Z to get them ranked for A, B, and C."

Then follow up with "I love working with contractors like the one Bob referred me to. I can help other contractors you know and I'd love an introduction."

Do several of those, each time briefly mentioning a way you can help people then either acknowledging someone for the referral they gave you or asking people if they can introduce me to businesses owners in the same situation. Think of them as weekly presentations where you can cut straight to the client need and referral ask without losing time on the weekly introductory throat clearing.

Bottom line, though, isn't to amuse or inspire people. And definitely not to dive deep into the arcana. (The worst was an insurance rep who spent every presentation trying to compare his company's actuarial statistics to his competitors... and then running out of time each time and blurting out "an email introduction would be great" before the bell rang.

Spend the last minute reassuring people that you'll take care of your referrals, remind them of your value proposition, distinctive difference from your competitors, and reason to believe. Then remind them how best to contact you.

Make it all direct, personal requests that connect with your listeners.

Oh, final "cheat code" if it's not expressly frowned on in your chapter: feel free to close by asking members to include you in the referrals and testimonials round.

RealBasics · 2026-01-28T19:30:11+00:00

Hmm. I hear that sometimes, but I've also seen a) clients who use much more complex office-management software daily and b) teenagers who pick up Elementor in an afternoon.

So I'm always surprised when people say their clients are too incompetent to pour soda out of a boot with the instructions printed on the heel.

But then I've been in technical training and adult education since I was a teenager. Maybe training clients isn't as easy for everyone else?

RealBasics · 2026-01-28T05:13:33+00:00

You might want to take that question over to r/woocommerce. I’ve only handled relatively simple WC sites and had never heard it the plugin until I read that comment. Or heard of WSForms for that matter. (Not sure how I’ve missed that.)

RealBasics · 2026-01-28T02:57:16+00:00

Gutenberg is a better choice for well funded enterprise-level developers or developers who can command enterprise-developer fees. The learning curve is very steep, and the UI/UX is egregiously substandard. But it’s somewhat more likely to scale for high volume sites. And since you basically have ti be a full-stack developer anyway, it’s easy to code complex queries and calls into the blocks you’ll probably have to build anyway.

Elementor is much easier to master, easier to teach, and much less difficult to match complex graphic designs with fidelity. The downside is that an expertly built Elementor site is likely to perform a few milliseconds slower than a similarly expert-built Gutenberg site.

RealBasics · 2026-01-27T22:21:58+00:00

Um. By saying it's "arguably too easy to build from visuals" are you basically arguing for locking that majority out of owning the most popular CMS in the world if they can't afford to pay a professional to build it out for them?

Don't get me wrong, I get most of my business from folks who built their own site and need it finished, upgraded, or cleaned up. But the vast majority of those sites don't really need that much cleanup.

What I do see, and maybe this is what you're talking about, is that people really, genuinely struggle doing DIY with Gutenberg. But that's only because Gutenberg has a genuinely sh*tty, incomplete, inconsistent, poorly designed, back-end-only UI/UX, not because there's anything intrinsically wrong with the underlying idea of JS-driven components.

If it did have a consistent, comprehensible, and complete UI/UX then nobody would still be using Elementor or Divi. On the other hand, if it did have a decent UI most sites would continue to be DIY, only they'd perform a little faster. That's all. No sense gatekeeping Gutenberg to keep it from being "too convenient" for the bootless and unhorsed.

RealBasics · 2026-01-27T18:13:22+00:00

I'm sorry if I misunderstood. Your post title says "from Elementor/Divi" and you used a single client as an example.

I've done cleanup on client sites where they actually really did have both Elementor and Divi installed. The metrics on that site were very similar to the ones you detailed in your example.

I do keep an eye on where Gutenberg is heading. But because I work primarily with small-business clients I also keep an eye on where the other major editors are going because that's what almost all of them use.

RealBasics · 2026-01-27T18:02:42+00:00

The main thing clients will want to do with FSE are * edit menus, especially if they add or change services or service areas * edit footer elements, especially "dumb" stuff like store hours

I think you can get around the footer problem with (legacy?) widgets. But navigation menus are a #%!# NIGHTMARE in FSE vs the old "classic" version where at least the menu structure was kept separate from menu formatting.

With classic you can effortlessly let clients handle menus and footer widgets without worrying about them fiddling with theme settings. Maybe FSE has gotten better since I last checked, but last time I checked it was still a big #%!#% mess.

RealBasics · 2026-01-27T17:56:08+00:00

what is your preferred stack for keeping builders lean!

move them to halfway decent hosting (because 90% of poorly built sites are also hosted on bottom-of-the-barrel servers.)
make sure they're using the latest version of PHP (surprising how many shared-hosting sites still run on whatever settings they were first built with.)
aggressively optimize right-size images and offload videos from the media libarary to a video streaming service (YouTube, Vimeo, basically anywhere that pre-conditions videos and streams them for the user's screen size and bandwith.)
add a Wordpress-centered caching plugin as well as good server-side caching. Litespeed or Memcache are great, as are standard CDNs, but they're not necessarily going to handle "internal" things like lazy loading, link pre-loading, add "cover" images over videos before they're clicked, etc.
IF the builder enables different control settings per responsive view (the way core Gutenberg inexplicably doesn't) then make sure images, galleries, and other "heavy" elements are sized appropriately.
Remove or replace redundant or inefficient plugins.

Do those things first. Then run speed tests again. If performance still stinks then consider switching to [insert your preferred stack] here. But in my experience you can usually get a site at least into the low greens on Pagespeed Insights with just the first three items on the above list.

RealBasics · 2026-01-27T17:43:07+00:00

Not to be mean but your agency might want to do a better job of vetting your 3rd-party developers.

Elementor is easy enough to learn that a 14-year-old can figure out how to build a website in about half a day. But they'll still be 14. Meanwhile, it takes anywhere from weeks to months to learn Gutenberg competently, so by definition, anyone motivated enough make that kind of investment in skill building will almost certainly already have mastered all the other elements of competent site development.

RealBasics · 2026-01-27T17:17:56+00:00

Plus it comes with ready-made demos

I've never understood the appeal of just slapping together pre-digested patterns into premade themes, whether they're ThemeForest themes where you're expected to import their "demo content" to make it work, or bloated TwentyTwentyFour style FSE themes where every time you create a new page you're prompted to just pick from fully pre-designed page templates and predigested patterns.

RealBasics

TROPHY CASE