How WordPress Revolutionises Full Site Customisation

December 12, 2024 / WordPress

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While WordPress makes it easy to create highly functional and professional-looking websites, those who want their sites to be completely unique and a perfect match for their brand have been held back by the platform’s reliance on themes. Yes, there are over 13,000 free themes in the repository, and you can customise some aspects of them, but this does not offer full site customisation. Thankfully, new developments in WordPress mean full site customisation is finally possible. In this post, we’ll look at how this can be achieved.

The evolution of WordPress full site editing

The first real hint that full site editing was on the WordPress agenda came in 2018, with the launch of Block Editor. Here, blocks were introduced for the different elements of a page, e.g., text, headings, images, etc., and users could create pages by arranging the blocks as required, adding their content and customising how they look. Importantly, you could also see what pages would look like as you created them.

Though Block Editor was a step in the right direction, it was only useful for customising individual pages. Replicating a page design over the entire website was still a laborious task unless you had the coding know-how to create a child theme.

The big change came with the launch of WordPress v5.9 in 2022. This saw the introduction of the Full Site Editor which finally gave users the ability to edit and modify the design of the entire website. With drag-and-drop simplicity, virtually all elements of the design can be modified, enabling anyone to build unique websites. Instead of building customised blocks for use on single pages, they can now be utilised right across the site, including those for headers, footers, sidebars and widgets.

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Full site editing features

To enable full site editing to take place, WordPress has introduced a range of new features that bring site-wide customisation to life. One of the most important is the Template Editor, which perhaps could be better named as the template creator. Besides being able to edit templates, this feature also lets you use your own arrangement of blocks to create customised page layouts which you can then use throughout your site. Essentially, it gives you the potential to create customised themes with a range of different page templates to choose from, ensuring that the design is consistent across the website. You can create templates for every type of page you need, whether that’s for single use, like the home, about us and contact us pages, or those you may use numerous times, like landing pages and product pages. Once the template is created, all you will need to do is populate individual instances with their content.

As you can use Template Editor to create website templates from scratch, this frees WordPress users from having to rely on the standard approach of using a pre-made theme. While there are tens of thousands of free and premium themes available, some of them exceptionally well-designed, finding the right one for your brand and business needs is never easy. And while these do offer some degree of customisation, it is often limited to features like colours and fonts. For those with an existing pre-made theme, one of the drawbacks is that you cannot use Full Site Editor to modify it unless it is one of the newer block themes like Twenty Twenty-Two, Twenty Twenty-Three or Twenty Twenty-Four.

For those who do use a block theme, the Template Editor gives you far more scope to create fully customised websites without having to start from scratch. Not only can you change pre-made pages to suit your needs; you can also build various adaptations of your templates for use on different parts of your site or at different times. For instance, by saving an existing template under a new name and then making changes, you can quickly make alternative homepages for sales periods or events, like Christmas, without having to make changes to your primary homepage. You can even export these templates for use on other websites, which is ideal for developers.

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Another helpful feature of full site editing is global styling. This gives users the ability to make site-wide styling changes by simply modifying attributes like colours, fonts and spacing on a template. Once you have applied your changes, they will then appear everywhere on the site where that template has been used, saving you the need to make manual changes page by page and ensuring consistency is achieved.

As more websites are making use of dynamic content, the introduction of dynamic blocks is another much-welcomed customisation feature of full site editing. The benefit of these blocks is that they update their content automatically when pages are loaded, retrieving it from your database or external sources, as required. This means you can customise content for users depending on factors like time, location, user preferences, whether the user is logged in or out and so forth. This provides a far more personalised customer experience that can increase engagement and improve conversion rates.

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Conclusion

The introduction of full site editing offers a completely new way to create and customise WordPress websites. Whether you’re a DIY website builder or developer, using block-based designs, template editing, global styling and dynamic blocks offers the flexibility to build websites that are an ideal match for your brand, and which have the functionality your business needs – all without needing to code.

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  • pooja

    I'm experienced SEO specialist. With a focus on the technical aspects of SEO, I work to enhance website's visibility and overall performance seamlessly.

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