In this post I want to share my experience with Gutenberg and why I ended up building PAGEGRID. It’s not a feature-by-feature comparison, just a look at where Gutenberg fell short for my projects, and how PAGEGRID takes a different approach.

I’ve used WordPress for many projects, building everything from small websites to large multilingual platforms. And while Gutenberg is great for many use cases, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to rely on it for client work.

When handing the site over to the client, it's just a matter of time until they unintentionally break layouts, misalign content, or override design decisions. And users often face a steep learning curve before they feel comfortable building pages.

For me as a designer Gutenberg doesn’t offer the flexibility needed for fully custom designs. It also lacks an intuitive way to manage responsive behavior without relying on extra plugins or custom code. On top of that, keeping a WordPress site running smoothly can be a challenge, with frequent updates causing bugs or plugin conflicts.

These challenges inspired me to create PAGEGRID: a visual site builder focused on design freedom, team collaboration, and a powerful API for developers.

Visual Design & Layout Control: Built for Designers

One of the biggest challenges I faced in Gutenberg was trying to maintain creative control without writing custom code for every unique layout. Gutenberg gives you basic building blocks—columns, groups, spacers, and patterns—but once you step outside the default grid or want to fine-tune spacing, alignment, or responsiveness, it quickly becomes limiting or messy. Plugins can help, but they often introduce inconsistencies or override your design decisions.

And while Gutenberg offers a visual editing experience, what you see in the editor doesn’t always match the live site. Layout, spacing, and styles can differ, which means that when designing with Gutenberg, you can’t fully trust the live preview—often requiring extra time to adjust the final design.

With PAGEGRID, layout isn’t a limitation—it’s the starting point. Built on a responsive CSS grid, it gives you the freedom to visually drag, drop, and arrange content exactly as you imagine. Every detail of your design stays under your control, from structure to styling:

• Powerful CSS grid-based drag-and-drop interface for full layout control
• Styling controls that let you customize every element on your site visually
• Responsive breakpoints to customize the design for different screen sizes
• Scalable, class-based styling for consistent design systems
• Smooth animations and transitions
• Reusable components with Symbols

It’s like designing in Figma or Webflow—but directly within a powerful open-source CMS, giving you full control over your design, code and data.

User Management: Design Without Worry

One of the most overlooked aspects of visual site building is what happens after the site is handed off, especially when clients or content editors start using the backend. In many tools, including Gutenberg, it’s easy for well-meaning users to unintentionally break layouts, misalign content, or override design decisions.

PAGEGRID solves this with built-in user management. You can define exactly who can:

• Access styling and layout controls
• Add or remove blocks
• Edit content inside specific blocks
• Create or edit Symbols (reusable design components)
• Add pages with predefined layouts (Blueprints)

This means designers can lock in layout and styling, while still giving content editors the freedom to update text, images, and media—without touching the structure. You can even create a custom editing experience for different team members (e.g. translators, copywriters, designers), all within the same visual interface.

Whether you're working solo, with an agency, or directly with clients, PAGEGRID gives you peace of mind: your design system stays intact, and the site stays on-brand—no matter who’s editing it. Learn more about user management.

Developer Control: Clean Markup, No Guesswork

As developers, we often want one simple thing: control. Control over markup, over data structures, over how things render—and how they scale. In my experience with Gutenberg, that control is possible, but often buried under abstraction. Custom blocks require node build tools, learning React, REST integration, and a lot of boilerplate. Even then, layout decisions are often dictated by the editor, not the developer.

PAGEGRID flips that dynamic. It's built on top of the powerful ProcessWire CMS, which means you define your site structure with native custom fields—and every PAGEGRID block is just a regular ProcessWire page. Creating a new block template is as simple as placing a new .php file in the blocks directory. There's no special format, no hidden data structure, no opaque rendering layer. Extending or modifying PAGEGRID is both easy and incredibly powerful. Simply write HTML and leverage ProcessWire's intuitive PHP API for dynamic CMS content. PAGEGRID gives you full flexibility and precise control over every part of your site’s presentation and functionality:

• Complete control over your markup. Easily create new blocks or use and modify our ready-made blocks.
• No need to learn React. Use ProcessWire's powerful and intuitive PHP API and simple HTML. 
• CSS classes are clean and readable, not auto-generated or abstracted.
• Layout logic stays separate from content, so things are easy to manage and maintain.

Styling is handled through a JSON-based system that integrates directly with the visual style panel, meaning designers and developers can work together without stepping on each other's toes. If needed, you can extend layouts with custom CSS, JS, or PHP—without hacking around the editor.

And while PAGEGRID offers powerful visual tools for layout and styling, those tools are entirely optional. You're never forced into a visual-first workflow and can handle layout entirely in your own CSS or utility framework if you prefer it. Take a look at the styles documentation to learn more.

The result is a site that's fully visual for editors, but fully controlled by developers. Clean code. Clear structure. And no wrestling with WordPress' render pipeline to get things looking and behaving the way they should.

Performance: Fast & Maintainable by Design

One of the trade-offs with many visual editors is performance. They often ship with heavy JavaScript payloads, excessive DOM nesting, or inline styles that make optimization harder. With Gutenberg, this is a common pain point—especially when multiple plugins inject their own styles, scripts, and markup patterns into your site. Over time, this can result in bloated pages, CLS issues, and increasingly fragile frontends.

With PAGEGRID, performance is baked in:

• Clean HTML output 
• No hardcoded styles and low css specificity
• Modern vanilla CSS and JS with no dependencies
• Integrated markup cache for super fast rendering
• Optimized for Core Web Vitals and SEO

The result? Pages load faster, behave more consistently, and score better in performance audits—without needing extra caching plugins or performance patches. You get full visual flexibility without compromising speed.

And ProcessWire CMS provides a solid, flexible foundation for handling custom templates and complex content structures without unnecessary complications. This means the system stays clean and easy to maintain, even as sites grow in size and complexity..

Multilingual Support – Built In, Not Bolted On

If you've ever managed a multilingual site in WordPress, you know the drill: install WPML or Polylang, configure it carefully, cross your fingers, and hope nothing breaks during updates. While these tools get the job done, they often feel like add-ons rather than native parts of the system, which can lead to inconsistent UX, syncing issues, or frustrating workarounds for editors. 

On top of that, costs can add up quickly. Free versions only cover the bare minimum, and the subscription-based pricing models mean you’re often locked into recurring monthly or annual fees that escalate as your site grows.

PAGEGRID handles multilingual content natively. Because it's built on top of ProcessWire, language support is deeply integrated at the core level—no plugins required, no fragile glue code. Every field, page, and block can be multilingual by design.

Out of the box, you get:

• Full-language versions of each page, with localized content and URL's
• Built-in multi-language fields
• Language-switching directly in the editor
• Role-based control, so you can restrict access for translators, editors, or clients per language
• Consistent frontend rendering, regardless of language complexity

From a developer perspective, this also means cleaner logic: you don't need to patch together translation functions or manage third-party language APIs. Multilingual support is already baked into the core.

For editors and clients, the experience is seamless. They can switch languages from the PAGEGRID interface and see exactly which blocks are available in each version with no risk of overwriting shared content or breaking layouts.

Whether you're building a bilingual corporate site, a multilingual publication, or a localized product experience, PAGEGRID treats language as a core feature, not an afterthought.

Final Thoughts

Gutenberg has improved a lot over the years and for personal projects, blogs, simple sites, or solo creators who want to get content online quickly, it does the job well.

But in my experience working with client projects—where design precision, structured workflows, and long-term maintainability really matter—Gutenberg often fell short. Keeping layouts intact, ensuring performance, and giving clients a safe editing experience became increasingly difficult without relying on a patchwork of plugins or custom code.

That’s what led me to create PAGEGRID. It’s not trying to compete with WordPress as a whole, but it does offer a different approach—especially for web professionals who work with clients and need more control over the final product. PAGEGRID puts design, structure, and development on solid ground, while still being approachable for editors and clients.

Ready to Try a New Approach?

Try PAGEGRID for free and decide for yourself how it fits your projects. Sign up for our cloud hosting or install PAGEGRID on your own hosting. 

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