Is your WordPress website Gutenberg ready?

What is Gutenberg?

Gutenberg is WordPress’s block editor, an upgrade to the classic editor everyone knows and loves. Launched in December 2018, Gutenberg wasn’t adopted straight away including by ourselves, it was clunky and very buggy but things have changed over the last few years, it’s stable and much easier to build with and use.

WordPress powers over 43% of the web yet only just over half of those websites are on the latest version 6.0. The classic editor has been removed from the core code of WordPress and turned into a plugin, it has over 5 billion instals on websites across the web. Yet another plugin to keep updated on your website, no one wants that!

WordPress announced that they were going to stop supporting the classic editor at the end of 2021 but this got pushed back to the end 2022. So with 4 months ‘till the deadline, is your website Gutenberg ready?

Upgrading is now essential in order to keep your website secure. WordPress is regularly targeted by security exploits, and failing to upgrade could leave you in a bad situation.

Here’s a few things to check before starting the Gutenberg upgrade

• Is your server up to date?
• Does your server have enough memory to do this upgrade?
• Do you have enough disk space on your server to upgrade your website?
• Do you have a compatible version of PHP? 7.4+ is required
• Do you have a compatible database version? MySQL 5.7 or greater, or MariaDB 10.3 or greater is required
• Is your theme Gutenberg compatible? Older themes may require modification or updates
• Are all your plugins up to date?
• Have you done a backup of your website and database?
• Do you know what to do if something goes wrong?

It is never as easy as just a click of a button to upgrade, like WordPress leads us to think. Every website is built differently to cater for the user’s of the website, so each upgrade is very different and has a very different outcome.

Get in touch if you need help upgrading your website to Gutenberg.