Is a site builder plugin suitable for your government or third sector WordPress site?

Govpress team including Sarah

Every content team is different, but a page builder will make it very difficult to constrain authors and editors at all

Recently, we’ve been seeing a trend towards government and third sector WordPress sites being built with a “site builder” plugin, a very minimal theme and a large number of third-party plugins (sometimes over 50) to provide functionality. This style of WordPress development is cost-effective for the WordPress supplier, but we feel that it lacks the focus on security and maintenance that government clients require and the ease of use that small content teams need. This blog post explains why.

A little bit of history

In the 2000s a number of apps became available that allowed end-users to design and build a whole website with a drag and drop interface. Sites like Wix and Squarespace promised a new way of developing websites without a professional designer or developer and these understandably became very popular – both with the hobbyist market and small businesses.

At this time, WordPress still had a relatively inflexible editing experience and adding new features to a WordPress site either required end-users to hire a developer to write bespoke code or to use an existing third-party plugin.

WordPress has responded to this challenge in two ways:

Both approaches allow end-users a considerable amount of design flexibility, both provide a “point and click” experience and both make a promise to authors that the page in the editor looks much as it will on the live site.

The same, but also different

Although page builder plugins and Gutenberg have much the same purpose, they also differ in a number of ways.

Many page builders come with extensive template libraries for complete pages, not just individual blocks. The same effect can be achieved in Gutenberg with patterns, but as with custom blocks, the theme author needs to develop these to make them available to the user, or find a plugin that provides the same functionality.

Likewise, page builders often come with specialised elements, such as carousels, countdown timers, pricing tables and so on. These may or may not be useful to you, but in a Gutenberg site they would need to be written bespoke by the theme developer or provided by a small plugin which adds one or more custom blocks to your site.

Gutenberg’s block system is quite structured, so although it is in some senses a drag and drop interface, it does pose constraints on users. This also means that there’s a reasonably steep learning curve with Gutenberg compared to the old-style “classic” WordPress editor, although the flexibility of page builders often means they take even longer to learn thoroughly.

Performance is another point of difference, although a more difficult one to quantify. Any plugin you add to your site will add some performance impact, but how much depends not just on the plugin but also the context of your whole site and its hosting environment. Because Gutenberg is built into WordPress Core, and so “comes for free” in performance terms, we would generally expect a Gutenberg site to be faster than a site designed with a page builder. However, that may not be the case if, for example, you are comparing a Gutenberg based site with many, many other plugins to a page builder site with very few. 

Context, context, context…

What sort of site is right for you? Of course that depends on your context, but clients we work tend to prioritise security, accessibility and ease of use. 

Limiting the number of plugins you use to a small number of plugins from reputable suppliers and updating them regularly will go a long way to helping you to keep your site secure. As will finding a provider with a well maintained, security-hardened hosting platform.

Plugins need to be updated regularly to apply security patches, but those updates should ideally be checked to ensure they don’t break your site. When you have a large number of plugins and a page builder, you raise the risk of introducing incompatibilities in functionality between plugins or between plugins and WordPress Core, which may cause bugs on your site. You also raise the risk of some of those plugins not producing fully accessible site elements. 

WordPress also needs to be updated, so using Gutenberg rather than a builder plugin doesn’t prevent you from having to apply security updates. But because Gutenberg is part of WordPress Core you can have some confidence that it will continue to be supported and to work in concert with the rest of WordPress for many years to come.

All of this can result in a site that’s cluttered, difficult to maintain and costly to run in the long term. This can also make it more complex and costly to refresh the design of your site if you update your branding, which we would expect to be straightforward in a Gutenberg site.

How consistent do you want to be today?

To “security, accessibility and ease of use” we would often add design consistency. This is not always something that users talk to us about, but we find that the more content creators a site has the more important it becomes. 

With both Gutenberg and site builders there is a risk that the freedom given to authors can also result in inconsistency in the way that the branding and design is applied over the site. In time that inconsistency can result in a site that’s difficult to navigate for users. 

With a Gutenberg based site a developer can make the blocks available to authors more or less constrained and can provide patterns and templates that prevent some free-form edits on the site. We find that some of our clients are very keen to have as much flexibility as possible, whereas others want to ensure that every page and post conforms strictly to a design system. 

Every content team is different, but a page builder will make it very difficult to constrain authors and editors at all.

Our offer

In GovPress, the dxw unit that builds and maintains WordPress sites, we do not use page builders and we limit the number of plugins our sites use to ones that have had a thorough security review from our expert developers. We have our own WordPress platform which we have security-hardened over more than a decade and we manage updates to plugins and WordPress Core by testing them on staging sites before they are applied to production sites. For developing new site themes we use Gutenberg and our clients have a range of appetites for design flexibility. Custom build sites like this are not easy to produce, they require a partnership between the developers and the customer to really understand the needs of each unique team.

If that sounds like something you need, please get in touch.