Essential Blocks – it’s essential!

When I started with my current workplace, their website had been made by someone with little to no experience using mostly what WordPress recommended and advertised to him. When I arrived with the task of fixing it due to being the most “techy” person there and having experience with maintenance of a well built WordPress site at my old job, there was an unbelievable amount of plugin bloat, poor construction choices, incomprehensible block layouts, and overload of blocks that was causing almost 10 secs of delay when loading the homepage alone.

All of this is to say that when I cracked under the frustration of using Gutentor (which was installed with the theme the previous employee chose, from what I understand) and sought out other block plugins, Essential Blocks almost felt too easy to be true.

Is there a learning curve? Yes. There’s a learning curve to every facet of WordPress if you aren’t familiar with all of its discrete and often deceptively complex parts. However, the curve is FAR more gentle than with Gutentor, Ultimate Blocks, or Elementor. Not to dump on them too much, but Essential is just simpler and it seems WAY better optimised even just within the page editor.

It’s easy to understand what each block is for, offers more accessible explanations when you aren’t sure, doesn’t instantly lag the editor to hell when you add a new block or the block is more complex than just simple text, doesn’t have multiple blocks with the same or almost the same name that all function differently – no more wasting your time trying to figure out which of 5 different ‘columns’ blocks is the one that’s actually just a couple of columns! – and the editor overall has a far simpler, more stable, and more intuitive layout.

Another HUGE sell for me? When you click to edit a block’s settings for mobile or tablet, the editor will change to display the tablet/mobile page so you can see what you’re doing in realtime. That’s so simple and logical that I truly do not understand how other block plugins DON’T do it.

Essential Blocks is likely going to be the best decision you make for your website and for your own sanity. Really, it’s essential.