The new WordPress theme editor
Theme editors are popular among many users to differentiate their WordPress website from others and give it a special layout or style. But who is the new editor introduced with the latest update intended for? This is what we want to discuss and explore in this blog post.
WordPress is known for allowing you to create a website with little experience, and that is still the case. Anyone can create a website with WordPress if they do a little homework. However, it depends on the extent to which you want to do this. Once you want more from your theme or want more complex things in it, this is often solved with add ons themes or extended with a plug-in. This makes WordPress versatile and vulnerable. For this reason, many plug-ins are installed that can cause problems if updated regularly. And these plug-ins can be a security risk if not kept up to date.
Traditional design of a WordPress website
The traditional design of a WordPress website is done through a theme, this is still the case, but with a select number of themes you can now also use the new theme editor. This allows you to customize your website in ways that were not possible before, or you had to have a theme editor installed or be familiar with programming languages.
A default theme installed and ready to use is sufficient for a large number of WordPress users. For a blog, a portfolio for freelancers or a normal online business card, you don't need much more. With one of the default WordPress themes or one that you can download for free or buy for about 50 euros, you have everything you need. So for a small investment of time or money, you can create a website that looks clean and tidy. However, it's not unique, and the more popular the theme is, the more websites will look just like yours. This, of course, can be seen as annoying. And something unique is often desirable. For this reason, third-party theme editors have been developed for this purpose. The next section will cover the theme editors that already exist.
Existing theme editors
There are already a number of options for making a theme more customized within WordPress. One of the most popular is Elementor, which allows you to customize your website in a visual way. You can then use a third-party theme or one of Elementor's predecessors to put together your website. However, this often resulted in a disjointed situation, which meant you might have to load 10 additional resources for one block on your website. Or spaghetti code, as it's called. When it works, it works, but when it goes wrong, it's always a lengthy process of recovery. Also, the speed and reliability of your website goes down, because external resources and a lot of code for little functionality always means a slower website.
For this reason, we have always advised either opting for a pre-built theme or finding a web design agency that can set this up for you. This is often the next step you take once your business or vision is online. And this often leaves more budget available to fine tune and facelift your website.
Who is it for.
So who is this theme editor for? Is it going to be used by the internet marketing agencies that currently work with Elementor? Or is the average user really going to spend weeks designing the layout of the website now? I personally don't think so, and although the theme editor will probably be used occasionally by many users. I don't think it's suitable for many different use cases. If you have a ready-made WordPress theme or one of the available themes, you don't need to spend much time on it. And get to work quickly on what the average webmaster puts more emphasis on: Content.
Because that's the reality for many different users: as long as the theme looks good, the colors can be adjusted to match the branding and the logo can be put down. Much more than that is often not necessary. That's partly why WordPress is so popular, because what it's really good at is writing text and blog posts, is what it does. And I don't see that translating to the front end in a theme editor anytime soon.
But of course, time will tell. In any case, we're curious to see how heavily the Theme Editor will be used and to what extent it will be a direct competitor to Elementor and DIVI. And whether it will be able to take market share from vendors like WIX and SquareSpace.
Personal preferences and working methods will play the biggest role
Ultimately, how you work and what new users will use will be the deciding factor. As a web host, we'll keep an eye on that, of course. And see what we see mostly. Not surprisingly, WordPress is still the most popular method customers use to create websites at MijnHostingPartner.nl.
What is your personal preference? Do you continue to use your favorite theme? Theme Editor or do you switch to another method? Of course, we would love to hear about social media!
MijnHostingPartner.nl, your hosting partner.
