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Comment by dorchadas | Hacker News Reader

I recently started a blog for a pet project of mine, via Wordpress, and I absolutely hate it. Their editor, Gutenberg, is the worst thing I've ever worked with. It's super laggy once the post even gets halfway long -- I'm talking multiple second delays in typing and it appearing on screen. It's so bad I've taken to editing my stuff in Pages/Word.

Which leads to another issue that it doesn't keep the formatting when I try to copy-paste. It's just such a mess and it's almost given me to give up on this project or move away from Wordpress entirely. The editor is so God-awful I don't see how anyone can use it and like it.

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Gutenberg is an absolute piece of crap, and is a UX nightmare. It exists solely for massaging Matt's ego.

Every single non-designer person I've created a Wordpress site for has yelled loud abuses at it and told me to disable it because they "just want to write a fucking blog post, not design a new web page each time". And each time I have to install a plugin to do that. Who the hell wants to create new blocks for each sub-heading and paragraph when they're writing regular articles? The old editor is much easier to use.

I'm also not a fan of Gutenberg, which is why I still use the classic editor... which they make harder and harder to find with each update.

Disable Gutenberg does much the same thing and, unsurprisingly, is a very popular plug-in! https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-gutenberg/

I prefer Gutenberg, but I will be stuck with this for years for the legacy sites from clients that demand them. I'm not installing it because I want to.

There is no guarantee that this will work for the next years, as the author itself states in the plugin page:

> “I can’t make any promises, but I intend to develop with WordPress for the long-haul. Who knows what the future holds, but the plan is to keep Disable Gutenberg going for many years to come.”

The only official way to use the classic editor is by installing the Classic Editor plugin and WordPress will stop supporting it by the end of 2021.

> Who the hell wants to create new blocks for each sub-heading and paragraph when they're writing regular articles? The old editor is much easier to use.

You add new paragraphs by just pressing enter, and you make it a heading by typing (part of) "/heading". It's less work than in the old editor, and it even produces reasonable markup (entirely unlike the old editor). If you don't want to design a new web page, just... don't? You don't need to press every button available.

> and you make it a heading by typing (part of) "/heading"

or markdown-style hashes! (+ a space after)

I was this 100% about... 6 months ago.

Then I got to understand how easy Gutenberg actually is.

You can just type and press enter. That's it. Click a block, switch it to a header. Or a paragraph. Easy.

I think one thing people don't realize is at the bottom of the editor there are breadcrumbs, and they allow you to select within the hierarchy of blocks you are working in - for things like columns for example. Before I noticed this, I hated Gutenberg, now I can just click the breadcrumb to select my block and a lot of frustration is resolved.

I know, unintuitive interfaces are bad, and this feels totally hacky, and I hope that it gets better, but knowing how to use this has made Gutenberg a joy for me to use over the old editor.

That's odd. I personally really like the Gutenberg editor for writing (and similar block-based editors like Notion). I have never experienced the lag on a dated 2015 laptop. Out of curiosity, which device you're experiencing the lag on?

Same, and its a better UX than the ACF cluster of fields while still getting the same end result to follow the design and branding of the site.

I’ve found that in themes that use WPBakery or ACF for layout is that there is definitely a happy path that involves swapping your text into one of their provided templates and calling it a day.

2015 MBP, running Firefox. I've also experienced the lag on Chrome.

Right now I'm transcribing old Irish-language stories and giving a commentary about various features. I notice if the story gets too long, or if I get too many bullets in the list block, it starts to get super laggy. I've noticed it across both browsers. And the sad part is the "long" really isn't that long, about a page of stuff in Pages/Word.

Do you have any plugins, maybe a SEO one, that may be active?

Core Gutenberg should be super fast, we test it with Wait But Why posts. But a plugin could be adding some sort of loop that's slowing things down.

Nope, no plug-ins.

I run WP both locally and on a $5/mo Digital Ocean droplet. On Firefox, on a 2014 MBP running Catalina I have no lag issues.

I do find Gutenberg's UX a bit clunky though. But I also recognise that it is the first step to a full WYSIWIG site editor approach that site builder plugins like Divi and Elementor have found success with.

You want to look into the Classic Editor, that was default up to WP 4.9: https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/

I despise the Gutenberg Editor, if only for reasons that it is not how people write. I don't want to interrupt my thinking by clicking to add blocks, I just want one big white sheet of virtual paper, to start writing untill the end.

Unfortunately, I'm using Wordpress.com, which only allows plugins if you pay. I haven't looked at porting over to wordpress.org, but perhaps I should. I do agree Gutenberg is absolutely awful. Why they ever thought it was a good idea, and why they keep doubling down on it, I'll never understand.

I find this whole discussion a bit off but if you don't have a stake in the WordPress ecosystem and don't want to self host why not try Ghost, substack, weebly, wix and others ?

Part of the issue is I'm not sure if I'm going to stick with this project, so I'd rather not pay for it quite yet (especially as money is much tighter now that our third roommate moved out). WordPress I knew had a free plan without needing to host anything. I was hoping I'd like it/stick with the project and eventually pay and host it either through them or via a self-hosted instance. It was simply to get the project off the ground and started, but I wasn't willing to do that all yet.

> I don't want to interrupt my thinking by clicking to add blocks, I just want one big white sheet of virtual paper, to start writing untill the end.

There's a lot to criticize Gutenberg for, but this is not one of them. It's a big white sheet of virtual paper, and you can write your paragraphs without any clicking. Pressing enter opens a new paragraph, you can make it a heading by starting with (part of) "/heading" and pressing enter once more. It's easy to add more complicated blocks, but you don't have to.

And that's one of the things that is great about Gutenberg, being able to search for and activate different content types without touching a mouse is the last thing I thought I'd find in a blog/cms editor but there it is, and it's great.

Gutenberg is just one of the bad things about WordPress. I too recently built a website on WP because I wanted to buy a theme and move fast.

What a management nightmare that thing is! Especially the extensions and theme ecosystem. They makes upgrading WP basically impossible without breaking everything. And not upgrading means a potential security vulnerability waiting to be exploited.

I gave up and rewrote the entire thing with Jamstack.

It seems like there truly is a gap in the market between WordPress, Wix and vanilla everything, but sadly, I'm not sure it's a market worth pursuing, financially speaking.

I've had the same experience, but then I've had the same experience with every WYSIWYG html editor. Is there one that works reliably for you with copy-paste of arbitrary html?

I had more luck with Gutenberg if I first copy-pasted what I was working on into Google Docs, sadly. It kept the paragraph breaks and the bullets, though it did a second line of them in Wordpress's "list" block, but that was easily fixed. It's really annoying, as I like to keep it all in Pages since I'm working on a manuscript for a possible book, but if that's what I have to do I guess that's what I have to do. Sadly, I've not found any other way.

I started a blog too and felt the same way as you do. I tried WordPress because it's so popular, but I could not use it.

I like Go, so I thought I would try hugo and I absolutely love it. It's fast, secure and can be hosted for pennies per day. I wrote a blog post about it just yesterday ;)

https://www.go350.com/posts/learning-to-blog-in-2021/

Agreed Gutenberg was a huge mistake, from a software perspective this lacked direction. Re-inventing a wheel is never a good thing.

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

This gives more context: https://wptavern.com/what-is-full-site-editing-and-what-does...

I don't ? I have contributed to core, have used WP for a decade, created numerous plugins (wpgear, wordphing) and themes . I have an opinion about Gutenberg and am more familiar it's development cycle than most developers. How about you keep your opinion to yourself when it come to personal attacks.

Gutenberg is the EMACS of web content creation. Great for creating webpages, just lacks a decent text editor.

On a more serious note though, I have personally experienced the lags on Gutenberg. And I am not sure whether the issue is with some implementation issues or due to the fact that it is a 3 mb react based blob.

Yeah if anything is gonna kill WP it’s gonna be that fucking new editor, IMHO. It’s crap. I tried it for five minutes and installed the Classic Editor plugin to get it the fuck out of my life.

As someone who writes plugins for our Wordpress-based 'headless' CMS for our authors to use (the front-end is all Angular 9+), the biggest gripes I found with the Gutenberg blocks editor was the need to learn some React to build the admin UI elements.

For personal projects, I now build most of the 'admin' in Angular too.

The introduction of Wordpress JSON and the REST API changed everything for me (and the small team), to allow more separation of concerns between the front and back ends.

Given the 600k+ installations of the "Disable Gutenberg" plugin[1], this is not an uncommon opinion. It sounds like this would be a good option for you.

[1] https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-gutenberg/

I understand your disdain for their new editor, but it is not required. The great part about Wordpress is the ecosystem of plugins and customizability of the CMS. You can just add the Classic Editor plugin and you can use the old editor - it is that simple.

If the editor is laggy it is because of the server / infrastructure you are using, not the editor. I can guarantee this as a fact.

I wouldn't brush off Wordpress. I've used pretty much every CMS on the market with client work and Wordpress is the one that I prefer the most for websites, hands down. For custom applications, I prefer Contentful for the backend CMS. There is a reason that Wordpress is #1 and has the market share it does. It is not flawless, but it is the best once you get to know it. Especially when you know how to optimize and debug problems.

If you are just doing a pet project and simple blog and you don't want to spend a few minutes to figure things out, then it might not be for you. There are many options for a simple blog. Like any technology worth knowing, in order to maximize its features you need to learn how it works. Best of luck to you.

> I understand your disdain for their new editor, but it is not required. The great part about Wordpress is the ecosystem of plugins and customizability of the CMS. You can just add the Classic Editor plugin and you can use the old editor - it is that simple.

You can do this if you pay for hosting or an account on wordpress.com. As this was meant to be a pet project, I really didn't want to pay for it, so went with the wordpress.com free account.

> If the editor is laggy it is because of the server / infrastructure you are using, not the editor. I can guarantee this as a fact.

I mean, you'd think that Wordpress's own editor wouldn't lag on their free account/hosting, especially if they're wanting people to upgrade and not leave?

> If you are just doing a pet project and simple blog and you don't want to spend a few minutes to figure things out, then it might not be for you.

I've spent the time trying to figure it out. The bigger issue is I don't want to pay currently, until I'm certain I'm going to stick with this project. Sadly, the only way to fix the problems is by paying.

> You can do this if you pay for hosting or an account on wordpress.com. As this was meant to be a pet project, I really didn't want to pay for it, so went with the wordpress.com free account.

A payment is actually not needed in order to use the Classic Editor with a Free site.

You can use the Classic block in the Block editor, which you can learn more about here - https://wordpress.com/support/wordpress-editor/blocks/classi...

There is also a possibility to edit or create any post or page in WP Admin, which will allow you to use the Classic Editor. Navigate to yoursite.WordPress.com/wp-admin and then click on Posts or Pages in the left sidebar.

Next you can hover over any post or page title and choose the "Classic Editor" link below the title. If you wish to create a new post or page within Classic Editor, then please click the down arrow next to the Add New button at the top and choose Classic Editor.

We are also happy to answer any of your questions and try to understand why the editor is laggy for you if you send us an email via help@WordPress.com. Thank you!

If you want to create a blog without knowledge of code and/or hosting servers then I wouldn't use Wordpress. Something like Wix or Squarespace would be more up your alley. I understand not everyone is in the position to pay money on certain things, but if you don't want to pay then don't expect things to work amazingly well. Hosting servers isn't cheap.

dorchadas, we haven't been able to track down your account, but if you get in touch with help@WordPress.com and link to this thread, would love to debug the slowness with you, and also happy to comp you a 300/year business account which supports plugins and themes for 3 years.

> If the editor is laggy it is because of the server / infrastructure you are using, not the editor. I can guarantee this as a fact.

I would expect that once the editor loads, unless you trigger an option that requires something from the backend, it would just work. Does it actually send data back and forth during the writing process?

> You can just add the Classic Editor plugin and you can use the old editor - it is that simple.

This is a terrible take from an ops perspective. "Just install plugins" ignores the fact that you're adding arbitrary executable code to your server, hoping whoever maintains it actually maintains it, actually secures it, and actually doesn't sell the plugin to a nefarious party at a later date.

Which is to say nothing of how many orgs allow management and marketing to choose which plugins to install. Try prying those access rights from their cold dead hands...

You are in a wrong comments thread. This is a post about how popular with is WordPress and it is popular because you install plugins there and have site without completely any programming language. There are no ops (or at least they are not a part of wordpress success), there are people who know how to buy shared hosting and that's it.

Wordpress owns and maintains the plugin. Hardly "arbitrary". Please do some research before ranting next time.

> If the editor is laggy it is because of the server / infrastructure you are using, not the editor. I can guarantee this as a fact.

Gutenberg is react based client side thing. The lags while typing in Gutenberg cannot be due to the server.

I said server or infrastructure, meaning server or client-side machine / browser. Essentially, their hosting or local environment. The code loading in their browser which is causing the lag is the same code for everyone else, and this is not a reproducible issue in the WP community. If this person's account of things is accurate, then any lags in Wordpress would be a local environment issue.

If you just want to type with no(ok, less) pain the classic editor plugin is a good starting point.

I think Gutenberg has a chance to get good but it’s main problem is that no one is using it because no one is using it, because they are already used to plugins like WP Bakery and Elementor.

Perhaps. But wordpress.com only allows plugins on paid accounts. Guess it's time to figure out how to migrate to wordpress.org

Even ~10 years ago the shitty shared hosting I used had a one-click WP install, so if they still do that, that’s an an option. Otherwise Bedrock+Trellis is fairly straightforward to setup on a VPS if you have time to do that.

Gutenberg Is horrible for blogging. It's great to design pages though.

Gutenberg is not made for somebody that knows html. Install a raw html post plugin for admins and it’s more or less usable.

Wordpress makes a Classic Editor plugin that will allow you to use the old editor, which is much much better.

Unfortunately, WordPress will stop supporting it by the end of 2021.

Until at least 2022 (end of 2021) but I would be willing to bet they end up having to support it much longer given the install base is now absolutely massive and people, even the most Wordpress diehards, hate Gutenberg.

This is probably what is going to happen, indeed.

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