Since the inception of the WordPress block editor, building beautiful layouts and customized web designs without extensive coding has become possible. The more you understand it, the easier it becomes to create great websites. In this post, we’ll explore how you can use the native WordPress block editor, along with Nectarblocks — a plugin designed to supercharge the editor — to create outstanding websites.
Getting Started with WordPress Blocks
Gutenberg, the WordPress block editor, becomes simple to use once familiar. It enables you to add different types of elements and content by using blocks. This system organizes everything from paragraphs and headings to images, buttons, dividers, galleries, and blockquotes as individual blocks.
You can easily rearrange and reposition any block element by supporting drag and drop. You can also customize blocks to meet your design preferences.
Essential WordPress Blocks for Building a Website
Essential blocks in web design are fundamental elements that play a crucial role in developing websites. They are blocks integral to having a solid structure. These basic blocks include:
- Heading Block: In web design and content development, there are different levels of headings and subheadings, ranging from h1 to h5. Headings are used for structured titles, title hierarchy, and breaking pages into separate sections. They are also used to name or quickly describe page sections.
- Paragraph Block: As the name implies, paragraph blocks help to add basic written content, such as paragraphs.
- Image Block: The image block allows you to insert images directly into your page. These images can be customized in terms of resolution, styling, and placement to match the design and functionality of your website.
- Gallery Block: The gallery block is valid when multiple images must be displayed and customized in an attractive format.
- Button Block: Buttons are attractive website elements that can be clicked to another location on the same page or a different page. Buttons are typically used with a call to action as an access point to the specific page for describing the action.
- Containers: Containers can be covers, columns, groups, etc., and pages can be divided into distinct sections. They are highly customizable and flexible and are used for designing hero sections, calls to action, etc.
- Divider: A divider is simply a line that maps out the boundaries between two block elements. It can be adjusted in height, width, and color.
Benefits of Using WordPress Blocks for Layout and Design
Gutenberg is a simple, lightweight, flexible, and easy-to-customize page editor. Even a non-technical person can use the Gutenberg block editor to build modern, professional, responsive, and speed-optimized websites. You can easily:
- Build simple and responsive layouts without the need for complex coding.
- Rearrange, duplicate, or eliminate page sections.
- Make use of block-compatible third-party themes and plugins to add more block types and custom designs.
- Reuse blocks and templates across multiple pages, thereby saving time.
Building your site with the core WordPress block editor guarantees optimal compatibility with the vast ecosystem of WordPress plugins. Unlike third-party builders that require specific integrations for plugins, the core editor seamlessly supports them out of the box. In today’s WordPress landscape, leveraging the core editor is the smartest and most future-proof choice.
Building Block-Based WordPress Sites in a Staging Environment
During site development, you need to test the designs and functionality of your site. This is where a staging environment comes into play.
A WordPress staging site gives you a platform to develop WordPress sites, test the site, and make changes where necessary, ensuring everything works without any issues.
There are different ways to create staging environments, including local host, subdomain staging, and remote staging.
The use of a local host for site development has some limitations. For instance, some plugins and themes may not work properly on a local machine due to a lack of the infrastructure or framework necessary for some functionalities to deploy seamlessly.
Online staging, on the other hand, mimics a hosting environment and allows you to provide all the necessary infrastructure and framework for the smooth running of all plugins and themes. Tools like InstaWP let you create WordPress staging sites quickly and efficiently without hosting.
Designing with Nectarblocks WordPress Page Builder in Staging
The Gutenberg Block editor, while offering a great foundation, still has its limitations for professional design capabilities. One way to enhance your block design capabilities is to use block-based WordPress page builders like Nectarblocks.
Nectarblocks is a versatile and feature-rich block-based WordPress page builder offering more visual design options to transform simple block designs into stunning and interactive designs.
You can install the Nectarblocks plugin on your WordPress staging site and use it to build beautiful block-based pages.
Key Features of Nectarblocks WordPress Page Builder
1. Block Collection
Nectarblocks offers an extensive range of customizable building blocks and elements, providing numerous options for personalization and enabling the creation of impressive and visually stunning designs.
2. Responsive Editing
With Nectarblocks, you can seamlessly switch between different screen sizes and adjust block settings directly within the page builder. This intuitive responsive editing ensures your website looks great on every device with ease.
3. Design Library
Nectarblocks includes a rich library of section templates and presets, allowing you to build beautiful, professional pages more efficiently and faster.
4. Pre-built Websites Templates
Nectarblocks provides a variety of pre-built website templates that can be imported with a single click, simplifying the process of starting a new website.
5. Animations and 3D Transforms
While the default Gutenberg editor lacks advanced animation features, Nectarblocks fills the gap by enabling the creation of dynamic animations and 3D transforms.
6. Unsplash Integration
Nectarblocks integrates seamlessly with Unsplash, giving you direct access to millions of royalty-free images within the editor, streamlining the process of enhancing your content with high-quality visuals.
7. Color Palettes and Typography
Nectarblocks offers a curated selection of color palettes and typography options, ensuring consistent branding and design throughout your website.
8. Performance and SEO Optimization
Nectarblocks is optimized for speed and SEO, ensuring fast performance and helping your website rank higher on search engines due to its clean, minimalistic code.
Using Nectarblocks to Enhance Your Site’s Design
The array of features provided by Nectarblocks make it simple to create visually pleasing, interactive, and responsive WordPress websites.
You can create eye-catching sections, animate content, use stunning backgrounds with royalty-free images from Unsplash without leaving your editor, and much more without compromising your website speed.
Testing and Iterating Your Designs in InstaWP
We already mentioned the relevance of using a staging environment in WordPress site development.
Using Nectarblocks within a staging environment allows you the room to test and preview various design combinations and settings before making them live.
InstaWP is a platform that has the best staging environment and built-in tools and features for WordPress site development and testing.
If you are working on an existing site, changes made to the staging site will never affect the live site. You are free to experiment and push a well-refined and optimized version to the live site when it’s ready.
Optimizing the Development Workflow
Building a site from the ground up can be very time-consuming. When put in a workflow, it entails installing WordPress, followed by installing the necessary theme and plugins. Then, you have to painstakingly build each page and configure each plugin.
Furthermore, you must test the site’s functionality and make adjustments where necessary. Finally, you must move the website to a live hosting space and point a custom domain name to it.
Integrating tools and systems to optimize and speed up the development process into workflows is beneficial, so websites are developed and deployed to live faster.
InstaWP’s Role in Streamlining WordPress Site Building
InstaWP streamlines the WordPress site-building process efficiently in several ways, including:
- Creating staging sites in seconds.
- Installing Nectarblocks and other necessary plugins faster with a one-click selection during website setup.
- Building pages with Nectarblocks faster by importing pre-built templates and layouts.
- Test plugins, new settings, configurations, etc., without affecting the live website.
- Making changes and site edits in real-time.
- Collaboration with team members and clients.
- Swift website migration to hosting provider via URLs.
- Restoration of backups and debugging tools to resolve issues swiftly.
Integrating Nectarblocks with Other Block Editors
Unlike other drag-and-drop WordPress site builders with their own separate page builder, Nectarblocks is built to use the Gutenberg editor canvas. This means you can use Nectarblocks with other WordPress block toolkits that are built on the Gutenberg Block framework.
This approach allows you to incorporate additional designs using specialized blocks or layouts from other plugins while keeping Nectarblocks as the foundation for your core design.
Building and Refining Your Site in a Safe Staging Environment
Let’s quickly explore utilizing a safe staging environment to build, test, and refine your WordPress website more efficiently.
Using InstaWP’s staging environment as a reference tool, you can log in to your dashboard.
Go to Staging > Add New.
Follow the prompts, and a WordPress staging site with all your preselected plugins will be created for you instantly.
Log into the WordPress dashboard with the Magic Login button and build your website from the ground up.
Want to speed up the site-building process with Nectarblocks? Install and activate it. Then, select a group of section designs or a premade template and import it. Make your edits, and voila — your website is ready!
Creating Custom Blocks and Templates
If you are a professional developer, you want to create custom blocks for unique features. To save time, you may also want to design reusable templates when using similar layouts across multiple pages. Here’s how to create custom blocks and templates with Nectarblocks:
Designing Reusable Templates for Faster Site Building
Nectarblocks allows you to create or modify imported designs and save them as templates to reuse them in the future on any page on the WordPress website. Reusable templates allow you to maintain consistency in design and branding across multiple pages in WordPress. This can save you time that you would have otherwise wasted starting from scratch every time.
How to Test Custom Blocks in InstaWP Before Going Live
After creating custom blocks, endeavor to test them on your InstaWP staging site for responsiveness across various screens and compatibility with other plugins and your theme before going live. If there’s an error, you can use the InstaWP error log to identify, debug, resolve, and improve your custom blocks.
Performance Optimization of Block-Based Sites
WordPress block-based page builders are typically fast when clean code is used. However, some may use bloated code, or the plugins you use on your site may cause slow loading time, negatively affecting user experience and SEO. So, checking and optimizing your staging site performance is imperative before making it live.
Using InstaWP to Test Performance and Usability
InstaWP is integrated with Google PageSpeed Insights, allowing you to check your site performance from the dashboard.
Simply click on the staging site, go to Performance > Page Insight, and click Analyze. You can also use the alternative Page Insight (New) scanner.
Tips for Optimizing Your Site in Staging Before Launch
Here are a few ways you can optimize your WordPress site on the staging environment before launching it:
- Minimize the active plugins on your staging site.
- Optimize images by compressing and lazy-loading images.
- Enable caching using a reliable cache plugin.
- Test your site on multiple devices and browsers for optimal responsiveness.
Finalizing and Launching Your Website
After building, testing, and optimizing your block-based WordPress website, the next step is to launch it. If you used the InstaWP staging environment to build the site, you can use the InstaWP migration tool to push the website to a live hosting provider seamlessly. InstaWP also provides managed WordPress hosting (InstaWP Live), so consider that as well.
Troubleshooting and Continuous Improvement
WordPress websites are dynamic and never truly “complete,” even after launch. They require ongoing updates, testing, and troubleshooting to ensure continuous improvement and long-term success. You can always import live websites to staging environments for troubleshooting and continuous improvement and then implement the changes to the live website for better user experiences.
Conclusion
Nectarblocks enhances your website design capabilities and speeds up the site development process with more highly customizable blocks and ready-made designs.
FAQs
1. What are WordPress blocks?
These are modular components or elements in the WordPress editor for building pages.
2. Why should I use a staging environment for building block sites?
A staging environment allows you to safely build websites and test changes before making them live, typically to catch errors and minimize risks.
3. What is Nectarblocks?
Nectarblocks is a plugin that supercharges the WordPress Block Editor, functioning as an additional layer that enhances the editor with a powerful block set, deep customization controls, pre-built templates, and nearly everything needed for professional web design.
