{"id":3121641,"date":"2021-01-10T12:11:00","date_gmt":"2021-01-10T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-rocket.me\/?p=3121641"},"modified":"2023-11-23T16:45:53","modified_gmt":"2023-11-23T15:45:53","slug":"wp-rocket-chose-gutenberg-performance-improved","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp-rocket.me\/blog\/wp-rocket-chose-gutenberg-performance-improved\/","title":{"rendered":"Why WP Rocket Chose Gutenberg and How Performance Improved"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lately, there has been a lot of talk about Gutenberg and its performance vs. the easiness of its features. Is Gutenberg the right choice for your site? Do the pros outweigh the cons? If you\u2019re curious to find out more, keep reading! Our brand-new website is 100% Gutenberg, except for the header and footer. As WPMarmite said<\/a>, this makes our website unique. And we\u2019ll share our experience and results. We\u2019ll explain why we chose Gutenberg and what made this choice the right one for us. As a bonus, we\u2019ll give you some food for thought to understand if Gutenberg can be the right solution for you, too. We\u2019ll give you some insights about the back-end benefits that we\u2019re enjoying the most and explain why they could come in handy for you as well. We\u2019ll show you how we also improved the site performance thanks to Gutenberg. It\u2019s definitely something you\u2019ll enjoy reading!<\/p>

Why We Chose Gutenberg and How It Went<\/h2>

In January, we launched our new website<\/a> to better educate our readers on web performance and improve the user and customer experience. It was also time for another significant change: our WordPress editor. Until then, our website was mainly built by developers for developers. We used the Classic Editor. Anytime the marketing team needed to create a new landing page, update a piece of content, or even think about a new design for a specific page, well\u2026 It was a daunting challenge! Also, things can quickly become obsolete in a fast-changing environment like the WordPress industry. We needed a major change to be more responsive.<\/p>

First Things First: Our Needs<\/h3>

We first focused on our marketing, design, and development needs. We were looking for a lean and simple solution that would also guarantee the most accuracy and, of course, the best performance results. The other main requirement was for the marketing team to be independent when updating the content or creating new pages. We wanted to make it as easy as possible for them, without any coding required. As a result, the back-end needed to be manageable with every page type, thanks to specific and clear design rules. In other words, the design had to be clean and consistent across page types. Our team would then develop the same design rules. We tried to have the easiness of development in mind when approving the design. We wanted to keep the number of custom blocks as low as possible. For instance, if we created a specific section with a background, a picture, and a short description, we tried to reuse that same design on other pages where content could be displayed in the same way. At this point, we hadn\u2019t made up our mind about the editor yet.<\/p>

Next: How We Made Our Choice<\/h3>

Once we agreed on the design and development requirements, we started to explore how best to meet our independent-marketing needs. We ended up with two options: Gutenberg or the Advanced Custom Fields plugin. We had some concerns about Gutenberg. We didn\u2019t have any previous development experience with Gutenberg custom blocks, and some articles were very discouraging. It seemed to be quite challenging to use, and we had to balance its performance potential with its effectiveness on a daily basis. We overcame our concerns by talking to experts, asking questions, and doing some research. The turning point was speaking with our web agency, Whodunit<\/a>. They showed us how visual Gutenberg was. It was possible to see exactly how a page would look from the backend! As you already know, this was the kind of easy solution we were looking for. We liked the idea of Gutenberg being a pile of Lego blocks that we could put together as we wanted \u2014 you\u2019ll see what we mean in the next section. On top of it all, there was the performance benefit of using Gutenberg \u2014 another essential requirement for us. That\u2019s when our choice became a no-brainer.<\/p>

What Made Our Choice Unique<\/h3>

Now, you might be wondering if some of the concerns around Gutenberg were still valid. Let\u2019s start by explaining what made this choice unique for us. We won\u2019t lie: there was a lot of work behind the design process. And the development team was also highly involved. The first aspect that made our project one of a kind was the number of custom blocks. The design wasn\u2019t Gutenberg-focused. Remember? When we started to work on our new website, we didn\u2019t even know that we would end up using Gutenberg. At the same time, we had used many different templates and had many different ways to organize content. As a result, we needed to create 24 blocks, which is far from the average number. The number of blocks makes a big difference, and it can vary a lot. You could even have only a couple! On top, our performance expertise made the developers sweat a bit! Compared to the average client, our expectations in terms of performance were pretty high. We wanted the most performing website ever. After all, we sell performance optimization, don\u2019t we? Based on our experience, here are some takeaways for you:<\/p>