The Gutenberg Editor reminds me of the times when Joomla was even better and more popular than WordPress. Joomla 1.5 was a great CMS but somehow Joomla itself decided to kill everything with changes to their CMS. At one point they even released Joomla 2.5. It was not possible to upgrade from previous versions. This caused anyone who had a Joomla website to rebuild it. Many people, myself included, thought it was better to switch to WordPress at that point. Let’s continue this Gutenberg Review.
Gutenberg Editor Ratings
In my opinion, integrating the Gutenberg Editor into WordPress has also been a very big mistake. We now have an editor in it that most people don’t do anything with. You would say that the old WordPress editor was good enough and if you want something better, you install the DiviBuilder or the Elementor page builder. Well, that is still the case today because there are just few people who like to work with Gutenberg, what can be read from its rating.
An average rating of 2.1 out of 5 is of course incredibly bad. Well-rated themes and plugins on WordPress.org have averages above 4.5/5. Shockingly, so many people are commenting that it’s the biggest mess they’ve ever seen. The WP Classic Editor has a 4.9/5 rating as can be seen below.
WYSIWIG front-end pagebuilder
In principle, Gutenberg is a WYSIWYG frontend page builder, but in reality it is not impressive at all. The most striking thing about the Gutenberg editor for me is that if you paste a piece of text in it that also contains titles, the editor itself neatly divides it into separate blocks. Which in itself should be fast-acting and handy, but in practice people always want it slightly different than Gutenberg does and it takes a lot of time to get it “right” again.
Backend Editor
Frontend Editor
Using special plug-ins
There are a number of special plugins that make the Gutenberg editor a kind of page builder that works a bit better than with the original. One of the best of these is Kadence Blocks, pictured below. The question is why don’t we immediately install Elementor if we don’t want anything to do with the original Gutenberg Editor.
Advice: Don't use Gutenberg
My advice from this Gutenberg Review is not to use the editor. When I build a website, I want everything to work perfectly and to have total control over everything. I therefore strongly advise against building websites with Gutenberg because later you are stuck with it. It is better to work with a good page builder from the start. I think the free version of Elementor is the most suitable for this, but I also like to work with the DiviBuilder, Thrive and ZionBuilder. What Elementor has that the other page builders don’t is the ability to extend it with a sea of plugins available for it. Many premium themes also already have tuned versions of Elementor in them.
Use the Classic WP Editor
Instead of acting as a Gutenberg guinea pig do the following. If you were used to working with the Classic WP Editor, you can just make Gutenberg disappear with one of the plugins for it, the best being Disable Gutenberg. Then simply install the Classic WordPress Editor and you will have the old familiar situation back.
Gutenberg Review Conclusion
Apart from the fact that the editor doesn’t work well and is practically still in beta after years, the editor has nothing to offer of course. A handful of widgets just isn’t enough these days to write decently attractive pages. Just ignore Gutenberg and work with a good page builder is what I do myself.