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Web Development

WordPress Divi and Gutenberg Theme Web Development Rant

Last week, I finally finished rebuilding my website, Big Truck Guide. It got a bunch of new pages, a new theme, it got faster and a lot better functionality on mobile. So I am super happy I got this done!!! But I have to say that I am relived the most about finally being free of the clutches of Divi, which I worked in for so many years.

When I started using Divi 5 years ago, I was new to web development and liked that it let me move stuff around on the page easily, and really it was what I was hired as a developer to work on so I didn’t question it and just started working with it. But as time went on, I got so frustrated with it!! It is so heavy with code, so many shortcodes and so complicated! I use a membership plugin on Big Truck Guide and making customizations to pages that had shortcodes from the membership plugin was a pain! I had to mickey mouse my way around a checkout page of all things to make it work.

So after a month of work, I finally got my website working with a new theme and using the (relatively) new WordPress editor. I understand why there is resistance to Gutenberg by developers who have spent years making page editors, but as a fairly experienced but not agency developer I like it!

But most of all I feel free from HAVING to use Divi by replacing all the Divi built pages with Gutenberg built ones. Yesss!