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Hello. I’ve been a GP user for a long time. Once GB came out, I got rid of Elementor and fully embraced building my site with GB. I don’t remember the exact speed improvement, but it was something like 4-5 second load times to 2 second loan times. It was so awesome and super easy to use.
Over the years I’ve felt like GB is getting more and more technical and difficult to use. While I was super excited by the wire frame additions, I was bummed to see the styled blocks go. But I was hopefully simplicity would return to help people like me; some knowledge of how website work and usually only work on my site, maybe help a friend build theirs.
With 2.0 I feel like GB is getting deeper into the technical hole that I don’t have time for, no the brainer power to even understand. Even before the update, I found myself increasingly having to watch YT vids and read documentation when updating the look of my site. One example was when I just wanted three words with an incon check mark on the left side to line up in the middle of page, it took me 20-30 mins to figure that out.
In Tom’s article about the launch of GB 2 this line (among others) really stood out to me “Even with zero coding knowledge, you are building professional-grade code.” For me, I don’t want to build proffesional grade code, I want to build a lightning fast proffessional grade website. And I don’t feel like I can do that anymore without spending a LOT of time figuring out whats going on in GB.
There are FSE block editors that may not be as fast as GB however they offer a lot more fuctionality (icons, mega menus, animation, tons of header and footer options etc). And if I want the same fuctionality on GB I need to either jump in that technical hole (and find hours and hours of time) or get 3-5 additional plugins. So for me getting those additional plugins means losing the speed advantage GB has over other block builders and then I start to have compatibility issues. While I’ve never been one to want to animate every letter, image and container on a webpage, as a business owner I do think some eye candy is good for getting customers to engage.
So just reaching out to the best wordpress support team to have someone tell me I’m wrong, that I just need a refresher and the simplicity of using GB is actually there. Second, what is the roadmap for GB, short term (1-3 months) and long term (6-12 months)? Are we going to see some user friendly things, better UI so we can update/build quicker and templates or is the focus going to continue to be on people who have more technical ability than I have. Thanks!
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Hi there,
thanks so much for taking the time to share your thoughts — we really appreciate it.
First off, I’m not here to say you’re wrong. Everyone’s experience is valid, and we’ve heard similar feedback from other users too. We’re not dismissing that some of the newer features might feel more technical or need better explanation — but we also feel a lot of the friction is coming from the UI changes. Most of the controls and options are the same, just in different places. Let me know if it feels different to you.
Jonathan Jernigan released a good video explaining the UI differences which you may find useful.
Over the next few months, we’ve got a bunch of improvements lined up, focusing on both UI and UX — plus, there’s a new block on the way.
We’re also working on new site templates and layout patterns to help speed up the build process. This is already rolling out with the new GP One sites, where each one is built using Pro patterns and includes its own styled set of Local patterns.
UX reviews are ongoing, and we’re adding (and re-adding) shortcut controls to make common actions quicker. In GB 2.1 (alpha drops next week), we’re bringing back device visibility controls for GB Pro (hide on device) and have refined the style indicators and selector controls.
For feature requests and roadmap – you can drop any requests here:
https://feedback.generatepress.com/And if you’re open to sharing more details — like the icon + text centering issue or anything else — it would be a big help. Real-world examples go a long way in shaping our improvements.
Thanks again — and let us know if theres anything we can do in the short term to help you with GB 2.0.
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Thanks for the follow up, much appreciate and I’ll check out the video. It does feel different and maybe my biggest gripe is the update didn’t include things that are most important to me, a lot more patterns that I can just drop in and style.
I appreciate the new sites that have come out in the last year (I’m building my next site using one). It would be a HUGE help for people like me to really expand on the pattern library. For me Hero, Feature Section and CTA are three areas I’d like to see sigfnificantly grow in size.
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Thanks for the feedback and request. More Patterns are coming!
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