After over a decade working as a web developer and designer, starting with custom coded sites and moving into WordPress, I’d like to take a moment to foretell the future of web design.
WordPress will see continued growth
With a market share of more than 40%, WordPress is by far the leader in content management systems (CMS), and for good reason. As an open source CMS, it has an ever-expanding library of free and advanced features. WordPress is the dream of development companies. It makes web design projects more seamless and simplified for development and end-user management. In the next few years, I bet WordPress will continue to grow and exceed the 50% market share threshold.
The rise and fall of premium page builders
In the past five years (longer time, but this is the time frame for real market acceleration) too many “page builders” and drag-and-drop theme designer software systems have gained a huge market in the WordPress world Share. Due to the accumulation of a user base of paying customers, some of the most popular software companies of this type may remain alive for many years to come. Once used, have a stronghold on their users as pages built with these builders would have to be completely re-built in order to transition to something different. For large websites, this will be a daunting task. Why bother about “different things”?
Speed. Speed. Future Proof.
Simply put, “something different” is WordPress’s introduction to Gutenberg. A system that turns WordPress into its own advanced, user-friendly page building machine. Previously, if you wanted to create a custom page design, you either needed to know how to write code, or you needed to use a page builder. Therefore, for companies like Divi, there is a huge market that provides an easy-to-design solution for non-coders who want to build very advanced and beautiful web pages.
How Gutenberg kills the competition
Gutenberg is developed by the same team that brought us WordPress, uses the core resources of WordPress, and is very fast in terms of development and front-end user experience. However, as a standalone option for page building, there are many disadvantages compared to the advanced features provided by Divi and Elementor. Of course, Gutenberg is still in its infancy and continues to upgrade its features in each new version.
Hosting factor
If you have ever built a WordPress website with an advanced page builder, you know how difficult it is to load a website quickly for users (and rankings). Of course, there are cache plugins that can help, as well as shrinking and lazy loading of images, but to really make these sites load quickly, you need a hosting solution that can handle these resource-heavy add-ons. In contrast, sites built with native Gutenberg, coupled with theme such as Kadence or Generatepress, will load fast with almost no help from performance plug-ins, even on shared hosting solutions. This opens up areas for small companies that can provide customers with free or extremely cheap hosting options.
Gutenberg adding Kadence is like adding a laser to a shark
Kadence seamlessly integrates with Gutenberg and adds a lot of much-needed design functions to the native system, thus realizing fair competition in design.
The WordPress developers assure us that Gutenberg will continue to exist. As a result, leading industry companies such as Kadence and Generate Blocks will slowly expand their market share until a turning point arrives, and novice web designers choose Gutenberg instead of advanced page builders. When this happens, we will also start to see long-term users of Divi and Elementor jumping to Gutenberg like ants running out of a burning mound.
“Future Proof” has become fashionable
Watching the unfolding of this transformation, more people will be completely afraid of being trapped in having to convert the website, page by page, article, div by div, line by line to a new platform. Therefore, the future proof will become a trend term in the field of WordPress web design.
Kadence Block> Generate Block
You may wonder why we barely mention Generate Blocks. This is why; I bet that based on my experience with Kadence and GeneratePress themes and their Blocks plugin, I think Kadence has a great advantage over Generate. The key reasoning here actually comes down to the subject, not the builder. The Kadence theme is much more advanced and provides users with features that GeneratePress does not even try to compete with. Even the free version of Kadence has more features than the premium (paid) GeneratePress theme.
Next comes the building blocks; Kadence provides more than ten custom blocks, while Generate Blocks only provides four. But don’t get me wrong, the four blocks provided are very powerful and can open Gutenberg’s functions far beyond its native functionality. However, Kadence does the same and then some more.. and then some more.
Generating blocks provide some functions that Kadence does not provide, but Kadence is still very young and continues to provide more and more functions in each new version.
When will Gutenberg take over?
This “fortune-telling web developer” believes that by March 2022, we will really begin to see a turning point in which platform field new designers choose. This will be Gutenberg.
From then on, by the winter of 2022, companies that provide help to redesign pages built with plugins such as Divi, Elementor, and Beaver Builder will begin to flood the market.
By the summer of 2023, we will begin to see those large premium page builders offering extremely low “lifetime” discounts as they scramble to squeeze the last few dollars for the market.
Are you ready to solve Gutenberg with Kadence?