Block themes, one year in
A year ago we made a deliberate bet: new builds would lean on WordPress’s native block system — block themes, site editor, core blocks — instead of reaching for a heavyweight page builder by default. Twelve months and a stack of shipped client sites later, here’s the honest scorecard, including the bruises.
What got genuinely better
Speed, with no effort. The wins our performance tooling shows aren’t subtle. Builder-based sites ship the builder’s rendering framework to every visitor on every page; block-based sites ship markup. We stopped fighting for Core Web Vitals and started getting them by default — the kind of LCP numbers that used to take an optimization pass now show up on day one.
Durability. This one matters more than speed. Core blocks are maintained by the WordPress project itself, on WordPress’s release schedule, with WordPress’s backward-compatibility obsession. A site built on them has no third-party rendering engine to be abandoned, acquired, or re-licensed out from under it. After fifteen years of inheriting sites stranded on dead builders — and we have inherited many — “the foundation is core” is the strongest durability statement you can make about a WordPress site.
Client editing that survives contact with clients. Block editing constrains people in roughly the right ways. Owners update content, swap images, add sections from patterns we’ve built — and the design system holds, because the design system is enforced in the theme, not in the hope that nobody touches the wrong slider.
What still bites
Honesty section. The site editor’s UX remains rough for non-technical users in places — revisions, template hierarchy, and the occasional “where did my header go” moment. We mostly keep clients in the content layer and out of template editing, which works, but it’s a workaround with a UX smell.
Complex layouts still take real frontend skill. The promise that blocks eliminate custom development is marketing; sophisticated designs need custom blocks, patterns, and CSS craft, same as ever — the skill just moved closer to web standards, which we count as a win, but it didn’t evaporate. And the ecosystem’s block-plugin quality varies wildly; “block-based” on a plugin’s label tells you nothing about whether it ships 200KB of framework with it.
Where builders still earn their seat
We haven’t gone absolutist. The modern crop of builders — Bricks and its peers — are good tools, and for teams already productive in them, or sites whose editors live in a builder workflow daily, they remain a defensible choice with eyes open about the dependency. The difference from five years ago is the default: blocks first, builder when there’s a reason, instead of the reverse.
What the year changed about how we work
The less obvious effects showed up in our own process. We now maintain a pattern library — sections, layouts, and components built once as native blocks and reused across projects — which has quietly become the most valuable asset in the shop: every build starts further from zero, and every client inherits patterns that have already survived contact with real content. Builder-based work never accumulated this way, because patterns were trapped inside each site’s builder instance.
Client training also shrank from a session to a conversation. The block editor is the same editor they already use for posts, so “how do I edit the homepage” stopped being a support category. And handoffs — to in-house teams, even to other agencies — got cleaner, because we’re handing over standard WordPress rather than a proprietary configuration. We expected performance wins from this bet. The workflow wins are what made it permanent.
The verdict, one year in
- New business sites: block themes, no hesitation. Faster, more durable, easier to hand off.
- Content-heavy and long-lived platforms: blocks, emphatically — longevity is the whole game there.
- Existing builder sites that work: don’t migrate for fashion. Migrate when the builder becomes a liability — abandoned, slow, or blocking what’s next.
- Teams with builder muscle memory: carry on, deliberately.
The meta-lesson from the year: bet on the platform, not the accessories. WordPress’s gravity pulls everything toward core eventually, and sites aligned with that pull age gracefully while sites fighting it accumulate the kind of fragility we get called to rescue. This site — the one you’re reading — runs the way we’re describing, which is the only endorsement that doesn’t cost us anything to fake.
Weighing a rebuild and unsure whether blocks, a builder, or “leave it alone” is the right call? That’s a free systems review conversation — we’ll give you the recommendation we’d give ourselves, builder licenses be damned. More on how we build: our WordPress practice.