An important message to our clients about your website and a big change to WordPress

WordPress is changing and your website may be affected.
We’re working hard to ensure there are no disruptions.
Please be patient and let us know if you see anything weird on your site.

*UPDATE – Dec 6th: Many hosting companies push through automatic wordpress updates now, in the name of security. We have requested SiteGround – our primary hosting partner for our clients – not force the new version of WordPress on it’s customers, but we don’t know if / when they will push through this latest version. If it’s automatic, we’ll be waiting and ready to check everything goes smoothly. If it’s manual, we’ll carefully update all our clients’ sites ensuring no disruption.

What’s going on?

The biggest change ever to happen to WordPress is somewhat unexpectedly rolling out tomorrow, December 6th. The impact will be major for the overall world of WordPress, but hopefully not for your website.

The new change is a fundamentally different type of content editor / page builder. The standard text composition area will be gone, replaced by ‘blocks’ that can be dragged-and-dropped. It’s called Project Gutenberg (WordPress 5.0)

How it affects us

The challenge for us is that we use a theme that already has a page builder component. However, there is a new plugin called “Classic Editor” that basically disables the new features and allows the theme to keep working normally. We will be installing the classic editor on your site and will keep using the theme as it’s intended.

What we’re doing

This message is to let you know in advance that we are going to be working hard this week trying to ensure a completely smooth transition, but we can’t be 100% sure everything will go according to plan. We manage more than 50 websites like yours and this update is “uncharted waters” for everyone in the WordPress community.

Our request to you

So, we are kindly asking for your patience but also your feedback. Please check your website on occasion in the coming days and send a message if you see anything broken or different than usual. If we do things properly, you won’t see any changes or downtime, but excuse us in advance if you do.

Will this cost you anything?

For those on our monthly maintenance plans, this is part of what you’re paying for, so no extra charges. If you don’t subscribe to our monthly maintenance package, you will see a small charge on your next invoice for the time it takes to do these updates. Our hope is under 30 minutes per site, but we simply don’t know until we go through it. (Also, this might be a good time to sign up for our monthly maintenance package!)

More info

If you want to know a bit more about the changes, here are a few articles:
https://wordpress.org/gutenberg – The official WordPress description of the new Gutenberg release
https://yoast.com/what-is-gutenberg/ – Yoast is always a great source of trustworthy WP info
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/08/complete-anatomy-gutenberg-wordpress-editor/ – A more detailed description if you’re really into it.

Final thoughts

From early testing, we’re not fans of Gutenberg, but we understand the rationale behind it – trying to keep up with the elegant page builder options some other CMS’s have. Our amazing theme covers our bases, but most people don’t use a great theme, so this might eventually help with easier page design. We assume the classic editor will be around for a long time and we as such will likely remain outside the Gutenberg ecosystem for the forseeable future and keep using our theme, which does much more (and does it better) than this new iteration of WordPress.

If you want to discuss this more, please don’t hesitate to email or call.