While WordPress has long been seen as a way for non-coders to create highly functional and professional websites, the launch of full site editing in version 5.9 has changed the playing field completely. Today, users have an almost open-ended ability to change their site’s design and layout in a way that’s as easy as using a page builder. Here we look in detail at the Full Site Editor and discuss how it benefits non-coders with WordPress customisation.
What is full site editing?
The origins of full site editing began with the introduction of the WordPress Block Editor in 2018. This new feature enabled users to create separate blocks for the different parts of web pages, such as for paragraphs, images and headings, and these could be customised, rearranged and have content added to them using a WYSIWYG feature.
However, while the Block Editor was designed to create individual pages, the Full Site Editor, takes this ability an important step further, allowing you to edit and modify the design of the entire website. Before Full Site Editor, anyone modifying a website design in this way would have needed coding skills to create a child theme; today, however, nearly every aspect of the design can be adapted using features like drag-and-drop, making it far simpler for those with limited technical know-how.
Essentially, the Full Site Editor enables you to use blocks right across your WordPress website, giving you complete freedom to design your websites as you like, including customising themes and creating your own widgets, headers, footers and sidebars – features that appear on multiple pages. Some of the main elements of the full site editor are:
Template editor
The Template Editor is one of the most useful elements of the Full Site Editor. Essentially, it enables users to create page layouts using blocks and save them as templates that can be used wherever you need them on-site. For instance, you can create different page templates for product and category pages or blog posts. The benefit here is that by using templates, you can create entire websites and maintain a consistent design across them to make them look more professional.
Traditionally, WordPress users have installed themes to create the overall style for their website, usually choosing one that meets the needs of their brand identity. Over the years, WordPress has developed features that enable users to customise these themes, letting them change fonts, colours and to some extent, layouts. For users who prefer this approach, Full Site Editor enables you to do this with greater scope provided you are using the newer block themes, also known as full site editing themes (e.g., WordPress’s own Twenty Twenty-Two, Twenty Twenty-Three and Twenty Twenty-Four).
These block themes are also the starting point for building fully customised sites with Full Site Editor. The editor’s template system lets you modify the pre-built page structures of these newer themes, giving you greater freedom to change the style to fit your brand. What’s more, you can even create different versions of your theme templates, enabling you to use them on different parts of the website without having to start from scratch. Simply take an existing template, save it under a different name and make your changes. This flexibility is also ideal for websites that want to change their look and feel quickly, for instance, you can create seasonal templates that can be utilised over the short term and then taken down swiftly when not needed, such as for Christmas, Black Friday or summer sales.
If you are a developer, another benefit of the template system is that customised templates can be exported, enabling you to use them on other projects or even sell them independently.
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Global styling
Aside from creating templates using blocks, another benefit of full site editing is that it makes it much easier to implement site-wide changes. The global styles feature, for instance, allows you to make changes to fonts, colours and spacing on a template and apply it globally, making it far less complicated to maintain design consistency everywhere on your site. This level of customisation is also simpler to carry out, as it all happens on the same interface. There is no longer any need to keep switching between tools like the WordPress Customiser or the Widget Editor.
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Dynamic blocks
One of the more advanced features of full site editing and ideal for dynamic websites is dynamic blocks. These special types of blocks automatically update their content when a page or post is loaded on a user’s browser. Rather than displaying the same content all the time, they retrieve data or content from different sources, such as your database or external APIs, for display on your site. For example, they can be used to display dynamic lists, such as your latest news or blog articles or your most popular products, ensuring that your visitors are always kept up to date without you having to make manual changes at the back end of your website. Essentially, they make this type of WordPress customisation completely automatic.
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Conclusion
Full site editing has truly transformed the way that people can build and customise websites with WordPress. While perhaps it is not as easy as installing a pre-built theme and making small customisations to it (you can still use this approach if you want to), what it does do is give you far greater freedom to build the sites you need. Pre-built themes are great, but the scope for true customisation is limited. Full site editing overcomes these limitations, giving you features like block-based design, intuitive layout adjustments, global styles and pre-built templates with which to create genuinely unique sites that are completely in line with the needs of your business. For non-coders, crucially, full site editing brings you much closer to the realm of the developer without having to learn how to write code.
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