Gutenberg banner image on WordPress plugin directory

For anyone dealing with textual content on the internet, WordPress is probably a known platform for publishing content and web pages on the web. The CMS market share for WP is about 60.4% which is equal to about 33.5% of all websites. I believe this is feasible thanks to WordPress’s ease of use and its simple and modern environment.

In 2017, the WordPress team announced WordPress’s new editor called “Gutenberg”. In the beginning, it released as a plugin and then later with came as a core part of it.

The first time I installed it, I felt a bit odd about it. It reminded me of popular page builders out there which are used by all-purpose or widely-used thems. I have not had a great experience with those page builders especially because they generate piles of HTML and CSS codes on every page as well as increased demand for processing power. But contrary to those page builders, I didn’t see a messy or slow output with Gutenberg. Besides, I was happy to use a “modern” editor rather than something “classic”.

The content department in our company had some issues with the usage of the new editor. But it took no more than a few days for us to see them fixed in the next updates.

With all those said, It freaks me out when I see the reviews on Gutenberg’s page on WordPress plugins directory: by the time I’m writing this article, there are 588 reviews with a rating of 5 stars and 2056 reviews with a rating of one star. I read some of the 1-star reviews. Some argue that it’s just a bad thing without any explanation. and most of them (among those I read) was suggesting to keep it as a plugin instead of integrating it to the Wordpress core. for me, the former seems to mostly be an effect of replacing a new thing (even good) with something that has been working for years. About the latter, I believe they are wrong and Wordpress is doing a good job putting Gutenberg as the primary editor with the option of using “classic editor” as a plugin.

People nowadays are looking for the easiest and fastest way to achieve the things they want (e.g a website) in a way that they can have control over them by themselves and in my opinion, that’s the key to rapid growth for platforms like Shopify and Wix in recent years.

Official Gutenberg demo gif

Ultimately, What I think is that making the Gutenberg the default is the way WordPress should be. That is because it makes it more “modern” and “easier to use”, two factors that I mentioned before as key reasons for WordPress’s popularity and success. If they hadn’t done this, it would look like an old-school and just-developer friendly editor. Besides, there is still flexibility to use the classic editor as a plugin.