Gutenberg stopped being a contested novelty years ago. The block editor arrived with WordPress 5.0 on 6 December 2018 and has been the platform default ever since, so "should we switch?" is no longer the question. It has moved on: how much of your site's layout do you hand over to the editor, and where do the theme, a page builder or a developer still take over?
What follows is a status check on the tool as it stands — the content editor, the site editor introduced with WordPress 5.9, what versions 7.0 and 7.1 changed this year, and which recommendations from a few years ago have aged badly. Starting with the FAQ and How-to blocks that everyone once pushed for search visibility.
The audience here is the small organisation that maintains its own site: one or two people who publish pages and update prices. For them the editor is not an abstraction. It stands between an idea and a live page.
Where the WordPress editor stands today
Three dates shape the story. WordPress 5.0, in December 2018, made the block editor the default for posts and pages. WordPress 5.9, released on 25 January 2022, opened up full site editing: header, footer, templates and styles became editable in the same interface, provided you use a block theme (official 5.9 documentation). Then WordPress 6.3, in August 2023, renamed reusable blocks as "synced patterns" and folded their management in with ordinary patterns.
2026 brought two major releases. WordPress 7.0 "Armstrong" shipped on 20 May 2026 with a redesigned admin, a command palette and a first layer of artificial intelligence in core — an AI client and a hub for connectors, which assumes a paid account with an outside provider. WordPress 7.1 "Mary Lou", released on 19 August 2026, added responsive styles (setting a size or a spacing for the mobile view without writing CSS), hover and focus states adjustable from the interface, two new blocks (Tabs and Playlist) and a reworked image editor (official WordPress 7.1 announcement).
Adoption is following. On 11 September 2026, the public statistics on WordPress.org placed 53.4% of installations on 7.1 and 14.6% on 7.0 — close to seven in ten on the 7 branch — while 2.6% were still running WordPress 4.9 or earlier, that is, before the block editor (WordPress.org statistics; the scope is installations that check wordpress.org for updates, not a representative sample in the statistical sense). On the wider web, W3Techs measured the same day that WordPress powered 40.3% of all sites it analyses and 58.8% of those with an identified CMS (W3Techs, daily survey).
Content editor and site editor: two different things
This is where most of the confusion sits. The block editor is for writing a post or a page. The site editor changes the structure of the theme itself, and only appears under Appearance if your theme is a block theme. With a classic theme you keep the Customiser, widgets and menus, and you will never see the site editor. That is not a bug.
The shift is nowhere near finished. On 11 September 2026 the official theme directory listed 1,815 themes tagged "full site editing" out of 8,584 themes in total, roughly one in five (source: the public WordPress.org theme directory API, list available here). In other words, most available themes are still classic, and plenty of small business sites run perfectly well that way.
| Element | Classic theme | Block theme |
|---|---|---|
| Page and post content | Block editor | Block editor |
| Header and footer | Theme settings or code | Site editor |
| Templates (single, archive, 404) | Theme PHP files | Site editor |
| Colours and typography | Customiser | Styles panel |
| Navigation menus | Appearance > Menus | Navigation block |
What the block editor genuinely delivered
Three things have held up over time, and they matter to a small team updating its own site.
Layout without a plugin
Putting two pieces of content side by side used to require a shortcode plugin, with the familiar consequence: uninstall it and your pages fill up with unreadable square brackets. The Columns block settled that. Version 7.1 goes further by letting you set styles per screen size, which saves stacking approximate CSS rules for mobile.
Synced patterns
These are the successor to reusable blocks, renamed in WordPress 6.3 (official announcement). The textbook example at the time was a spacer saved once and reused everywhere. The useful case today is elsewhere: a contact box, a legal note at the end of an article, a call-to-action block. Edit it in one place and it changes everywhere. On a thirty-page site that prevents contradictions — an out-of-date phone number on two pages in three is still one of the most ordinary problems an audit turns up.
Control over document structure
The document overview panel shows the heading outline and flags inconsistent levels, an H4 following straight after an H2 for instance. That is real help with semantic hierarchy, and it costs nothing. Do not over-read it, though: a clean structure makes a document easier to read and to parse, but it does not replace the underlying work on search intent and topic coverage, which belongs to SEO content work rather than to the editor.
What has aged: the FAQ and How-to blocks
This was the number one SEO argument for Gutenberg: add an FAQ or How-to block (through Yoast SEO, for example) to generate structured data and win a rich result in Google. That argument no longer holds.
Google announced a drastic reduction of both displays as early as August 2023, then deprecated the FAQ rich result outright. According to the change log of its own documentation, the feature stopped being shown from 7 May 2026 and the corresponding documentation was removed on 15 May 2026. Neither FAQ nor How-to appears today in the official search gallery of rich results.
Should you delete your FAQs? No. A well-written FAQ answers real questions and serves the reader, and the markup is still readable by search engines and by the assistants that crawl your pages. What changes is the expectation: stop hoping for an accordion in the results page, and stop bending content into artificial question-and-answer shapes to chase a display that no longer exists.
Is the classic editor still a reasonable choice?
The Classic Editor plugin is still available, claims more than 8 million active installations and is declared compatible up to WordPress 7.0.4 on its official page. Its description promises support "until 2024, or as long as is necessary" — wording that has not changed in years and says exactly what it says: maintenance continues, with no guaranteed end date.
The decision rule is simple. If you use the classic editor out of personal comfort on a stable site, there is no urgency. If you use it because an old theme or an abandoned plugin breaks the display as soon as you switch back to blocks, you are not managing an editor problem. You are managing technical debt. The subject to put on the table is then a WordPress redesign, not a checkbox in the settings — scoped properly first, which is what the website redesign guide is for.
Where things go wrong
Two patterns come up again and again. The first is stacking block plugins. Every library adds its own stylesheets and scripts, often loaded on every page including those that use none of its blocks. The result shows up directly in loading times, and therefore in the mobile experience; it is one of the first items examined during website speed work.
The second concerns the AI features that arrived with WordPress 7.0. They suggest titles, alternative text or rewordings, and they rely on an account with an outside provider, billed by usage. That is production support, not an editorial line. A text generated without review or knowledge of the trade is still a text nobody wants to read.
In practice the decision comes down to three questions. Who updates the site day to day, and is that person comfortable with blocks? Is your current theme a block theme, a maintained classic theme, or an orphan? And does switching buy you real autonomy, or simply move your dependency from a supplier to a tool? The answers vary from one site to the next. The editor is a means, not an objective.
Common questions
Is Gutenberg compulsory on WordPress?
The block editor has been the WordPress default since version 5.0, released on 6 December 2018. It is not compulsory in the strict sense: the official Classic Editor plugin restores the old interface and is still distributed and updated. New core features, however, are built for the block editor.
What is the difference between the block editor and the site editor?
The block editor composes the content of a post or a page. The site editor, introduced with WordPress 5.9 in January 2022, lets you change the header, the footer, the templates and the global styles of the site. It is only available if the installed theme is a block theme; with a classic theme you keep the Customiser and the menus.
Do FAQ and How-to blocks still help search visibility?
They no longer produce a rich result in Google. The FAQ rich result stopped being displayed on 7 May 2026 and its documentation was removed on 15 May 2026; the How-to format had already been heavily restricted in 2023. The markup remains structured information that engines can read, but you should no longer expect a visibility gain on the results page from it.
What is a synced pattern?
It is the new name for reusable blocks, adopted in WordPress 6.3 in August 2023. You save a set of blocks — a contact box, a call to action, an end-of-article note — and insert it on several pages. Any change to the synced pattern is reflected automatically everywhere it is used.
Do I have to change theme to use full site editing?
Yes: full site editing requires a block theme. Changing theme alters the appearance and sometimes the template structure, so it needs a testing phase on a copy of the site before going live. If your classic theme is maintained and meets your needs, nothing forces the switch now.
Are the AI features in WordPress 7.0 free?
WordPress core provides the plumbing — an AI client and a connector area in the admin — but not the model. You connect an account with an outside provider, billed according to its own pricing. The features stay optional: a WordPress 7.0 or 7.1 site runs normally with no connector configured.