Firstly, I am finding it quite useful to explore the innovations of WordPress because I use the dashboard within WordPress almost on a daily basis for my business. Secondly, it strengthened my skill set in learning what REST API is, which I wrote about in my last post. However, I decided to study the introduction of the Block Editor in this posting.
What factors might have affected the WordPress’s strategy for the timing of the introduction of the Gutenberg Editor?
Page builders like Elementor, Divi, and Beaver Builder had grown enormously popular precisely because the classic editor was so limited for modern web design. These third-party tools were becoming the de facto way people built WordPress sites, which was a threat to WordPress. Thus, the introduction of the Gutenberg Editor would be a fast-follower.
The editor was shipped before it was ready.-WordPress 5.0 with Gutenberg was launched in early December 2018, just before WordCamp US, and according to a Smashing Magazine postmortem, launching then was the wrong decision for a simple reason: Gutenberg was not yet ready. In particular, the accessibility situation was very dire, with Gutenberg being almost useless through screen readers, effectively making anyone depending on such devices unable to use the editor (Losoviz, 2019). This process innovation was also radical versus incremental.
Business rationale likely overrode community consensus.- Matt Mullenweg, who was leading the release process, may have had good reasons to be adamant about launching on that date, which could have made sense from a business perspective. However, it certainly did not make sense from a community perspective (Losoviz, 2019). Mullenweg later acknowledged this publicly — at WordCamp US, he acknowledged that mistakes were made during the launch of Gutenberg and that he had learned the lesson so that these mistakes would hopefully not be repeated (Losoviz, 2019).
Competitive threat from Wix and others was a real driver.- A community issue raised on GitHub at the time flagged this explicitly — attrition was identified as a real risk, with threats including loss of WordPress users to Wix and others, and concerns that the rollout needed to manage expectations, educate, and give people time to learn (Gidgey, 2017). WordPress needed to ensure the learning curve of the install base from the use of the legacy editor titled the Classic Editor increased its network externality. Eventually, the Block Editor could be seen as competence-enhancing in that the UI and the drop-and-drag components made it easier to make websites.
The development burden on the ecosystem was significant.- The new Gutenberg experience put a large-scale burden on plugin and theme developers in a short, four-month period, and agencies with year-long client contracts had to ensure their clients’ sites either remained on the older WordPress 4.9.x or were fully compatible with Gutenberg (Gidgey, 2017). The first point is indicative of enabling technologies in that plugins and themes made by various developers would have to be compatible with the new editor. I frequently get a warning with each new update of WordPress to backup the files to mitigate errors.
Also, the modularity of the editor can be argued to be heterogeneous in the platform’s ecosystem. In that when a new plugin is installed any page-building components in that plugin will now be available in the editor.
Gidgey. (2017, December 11). The economic impact of the timeline of the Gutenberg rollout · issue #3926 · WordPress/Gutenberg. GitHub. https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/3926
Losoviz, L. (2019, October 17). Postmortem of Gutenberg the launch, so we can embrace Gutenberg the product. Smashing Magazine. https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/10/postmortem-gutenberg-launch-product/
Ogarrio, G. (2026c, January 30). 4 benefits of the WordPress gutenberg editor: WordPress VIP. The Leading Enterprise Content Platform | WordPress VIP. https://wpvip.com/blog/reasons-love-wordpress-gutenberg-editor/
