Why we rebuilt our WordPress templates

It’s been a busy few months behind the scenes at Snug Designs. We’ve been rebuilding all six of our beloved WordPress themes to make them even easier to use and more flexible.

A little bit of background…

From day one we’ve focused on creating WordPress templates that are easy to customise without requiring any third-party page builders like Elementor or Divi. Page builder plugins can slow down your website, which in turn has a negative impact on SEO and user experience. They’re also an additional investment on top of the cost of a theme and web hosting, and as fellow business owners we know how quickly all these expenses can add up.

Since we originally launched our themes back in 2019, WordPress has undergone some huge changes. The block editor, which was introduced in late 2018, has evolved and now makes it simple to build pages and blog posts without needing to code. Then a few years later, full site editing was rolled out and this has been a game-changer for WordPress.

We’ve been keeping a close eye on these changes to WordPress and we wanted to make sure our themes utilised all these new amazing features. So, at the start of this year, we started making plans to rebuild our themes so that they would be 100% compatible with the block editor and full site editing.

What is the block editor?

The block editor is a tool that is build it into WordPress that allows you to create pages and blog posts using blocks. There are different blocks for different website elements such as paragraphs, heading, images, videos, columns, buttons, and more.

What is full site editing?

Full site editing takes the block editor a step further.

Originally when the block editor was released, you could only build out the content of pages and blog posts using it. Then full site editing was introduced and, like the name suggests, you can use this to build and customise your whole WordPress website using blocks. That includes headers, footers and page templates, such as blog archives, single blog posts, search results, error pages and more.

Why we’ve made our themes compatible with full site editing…

The more we played around with full site editing in WordPress, the more we realised how amazing this functionality would be for our customers.

Ability to edit the whole website design

While our original themes gave our customers flexibility over the design of their pages and blog post, there wasn’t an easy way for uses to customise the design and layout of other elements such as the headers and footer, or page templates. Back when we started Snug Designs in 2019, the old way to edit these elements was to edit the code of the theme or use a third-party page builder plugin; two things we wanted to avoid.

Full site editing solves this issue. Our customers can use the site editor to edit the header, footer and page templates that make up their website using blocks.

More control over colours and fonts

Full site editing allows you to set a global colour palette and font system which will be used across your website to make every element on-brand.

Not only that, you can easily edit the colours, fonts and design elements of individual page templates, pages and blocks so you can really fine-tune every detail of your website’s design.

If you’re using a theme with decorative graphics such as Thrive, Flourish or Aspire, you can even select individual graphics and change the colour of these by selecting a colour from your colour palette or using a colour picker.

Efficient page creation with patterns

Patterns are a relatively new feature of WordPress, but they make building beautiful pages and posts a breeze. A pattern is essentially a group of blocks that are arranged and styled in a certain way.

Each of our themes come with a selection of patterns that you can use to create different elements on your pages, including feature pages, latest blog posts, frequently asked questions, testimonials, page headers and more. Just add in a pattern, replace it with your own text and images, and that’s it; you’ve got yourself a new, on-brand web page.

Faster, more optimised websites

We’ve always took pride in how well optimised our themes are and how quick they are to load, but using full site editing has really taken things to the next level.

The amount of code that powers our themes has been significantly reduced. Less code means less for the browser to load and therefore a faster loading website. Paired with a good web hosting provider, our new themes will result in a website that loads in no time at all!

Ready to get started?

All six of our themes are now full site editing compatible and are available for you to purchase in our shop.

Select a template you like the style of and view the three demo websites we’ve set up for each template to get a better idea of how flexible each template is, and how you can incorporate your own branding to make it completely unique!