Page builders have been designed for amateurs playing around with their first and only blog design, full of useless animations and distracting flashy effects. Most of the time, they get ugly results by breaking the initial layout of the theme they are using and a bloated site that loads slowly and keeps visitors away.
The block editor, aka Gutenberg, has been launched with WordPress version 5 as part of the core structure, instead of remaining a plugin as it should, with the sole purpose to slow down the success of page builders such as Elementor and to lure clients of free website builders such as WIX or Squarespace.
Not only working with blocks for building a website is a nonsense but the experience returned terrible reviews from the beginning until to date. As Gutenberg is also still available as plugin, interesting comments can be accessed here:
At time of writing, September 2020, this plugin gets an average rating of 2 out of 5 stars, with over 3x the lowest review rating over the higher one!
This is one of the lowest rating one can find at the WP repo.
Most recent reviews, with few exceptions, are all negative and the titles are quite eloquent:
Despite that, the block editor is still part of WP’s core structure and the default editor a new user gets when setting up WordPress.
Fortunately, there are several ways for restoring the original Classic Editor and keep working in a professional manner for getting a fast and great looking website.
In most cases, all you need is the feee Classic Editor plugin. It is one of the most, if not THE most, popular plugin in WP’s repo history. We’ll never know how many installs are actually installed as the counter tops at 5 million.
When installing it, you simply get back the original WP Editor and get rid of the block nonsense. If you ever want to revert this and try the block editor as experiment, you can simply head to Settings > Writing and check the corresponding option:
Once you got Classic Editor up and running, the next plugin you’ll need in order to get all editing features is the excellent and very popular TinyMCE Advanced plugin that will add all needed formatting features on top if your editing screen:
An alternative to the above-mentioned Classic Editor plugin, the excellent and also free Disable Gutenberg plugin does the same job but gets a bit further by hiding ALL traces of Gutenberg and replacing with Classic Editor and restoring the original Edit Post screen (TinyMCE, meta boxes, etc.). Works same as Classic Editor plugin, but can do a LOT more!
Lightweight and super fast, built with the WP API and will never expire!
It offers a lot more options than the standard Classic Editor plugin:
- Disable Gutenberg completely (all post types)
- Disable Gutenberg for any post type
- Disable Gutenberg for any user role
- Disable Gutenberg for any theme template
- Disable Gutenberg for any post/page IDs
- Disable Gutenberg admin notice (nag)
- Option to hide the plugin menu item
- Option to hide the Gutenberg plugin menu item (settings link)
- Adds “Classic Editor” link to each post on the Posts screen
- Adds item to the WP sidebar menu: “Add New (Classic)”
- NEW! Option to enable Custom Fields Meta Box for ACF
- NEW! Choose which editor to use for each post
- NEW! Whitelist any post title, slug, or ID
- NEW! Option to disables frontend Gutenberg stylesheet
Whichever is your choice, start working professionally and just forget about blocks and builders! Those tools are simply money making machines designed to get you addicted to more and more paid addons that will not only bloat your website but also empty your bank account.
The other major issue with those tools is that they give users fake confidence in what they are doing, letting them think that designing a website is as easy as editing a MS Word document by allowing them to ignore all basic designing rules and obfuscating the real issues related to creating, editing and maintaining a website which require a substantial and sustained learning curve.
You can do lots of super duper things with builders and blocks. Problem is you’ll never really need such things and you’ll spend a considerable amount of time learning with videos and tutorials plenty of useless design “tricks” that will distract you away from the real challenges of website design. And you’ll end up with a broken, hacked or dysfunctional site trying to get help on social media and forums. But nobody will be available for help as they prefer selling you their tutorials, online courses and affiliate junk…