Best Gutenberg Themes & Plugins | Top 3 Free & Pro WordPress

okay so you know that guttenberg is the future of wordpress and you're psyched to get a super fast loading website that google's gonna love and you just wanna get started but what is the best theme and which plugin is gonna give you the most amount of gutenberg blocks to be playing with i'm jack with jack in the net welcome to the video in this one i'm going to be showing you the top three themes and plugins that you should be using to build an amazing site with gutenberg and stick around because at the end of the video i'm going to be showing you which one of the three you should choose depending on the type of website that you're making now just so that you know in order to choose these top three they had to meet a certain bit of criteria number one they have to be free now they can have premium versions but the free version has to be good enough that you can actually build a full website with it on its own number two they have to be by reputable well-known wordpress companies so you're going to get a lot of support and great reviews and they can't be too niche either okay there are some brilliant themes out there if you're wanting to i know build a real estate website but that's not good enough for everybody else so they have to be able to do everything and not be too niche okay and number three they have to be fast after all what is the point of building a website with gutenberg so that you're going to be quick and seo friendly and then have a low quality theme or add-on plug-in that's going to slow you down and ruin everything there isn't any point in that at all so that is how i've chosen these top three themes without any further ado let's make like a penguin and dive on in up first we have bloxy a lightweight theme with massive editing power now the only real downside to bloxy is that it doesn't have that many starter templates it's only these ones here and not all of these are available for guttenberg but once you have chosen one or started from scratch there are literally hundreds of different options to powerfully control your website layout now you've also got extensions which are quite cool and some useful plugins as well but of course we're going to be looking at the best plugin to go with this in just a minute for now though let's head on over to the site now if i go to the customizer this actually looks in my opinion pretty much like a page builder in the way that it's laid out it's very much just easy to access any of these options here you've also got a dark mode which is really cool as well so i'll keep that on for this and then we can go in and start controlling the full layout of the website something else that's cool is you get a live preview mode so if i want to click over to a different page i can do that and it changes here we're on the front end and i can see the changes as they happen so something that's quite cool is the header we've got these simple drag and drop builder here we're controlling the header just up at the top if i wanted to have some social icons in a separate bar above this i could grab the social icons drag them over and it's going to create a bar above them for us and then if we wanted to change those we click up here we can come on over alter the icon sizes change the icon spacing and we can also obviously change the different social options that we've got or click over to design and start to change the colors here as well it's absolutely awesome when we've done that we can head back over to our elements section and if i wanted to have an account option up here in the top left i could grab that drag it into the top and it simply puts it in there for me now something else that i really love is the ability to create a sticky header so if we come on over to headers choose the global option we can turn on the sticky functionality remember this is completely free so now this has only the main row being sticky you'll see that that top bar disappears as i start to scroll down the page if we wanted that to be sticky as well you can put that on and it stays with us or we can leave it off and we can also have different sticky effects so check this out this is awesome we can have a fade in effect so now when i start to scroll it fades in and one that i really love is the auto hide and show this i've only ever seen this as pro features on other themes so look at this when i scroll downwards it's not sticky but when i start to scroll up it suddenly appears again that is absolutely awesome and i love it it's brilliant so very quickly we can create cool headers and you can do the same thing with your footers as well with bloxy and you can also control the blog really really well so this is the default blog that it's imported for us if i come on over to blog posts look at this i can turn on the reveal effect at the moment there's no animations here i put this on and suddenly we get this awesome animation coming on in really really good you can also alter the sidebar as well choose whether we want that to be on the left or the right we don't have to have a sidebar at all i'll show you that in a minute as well um but the other thing with the blog post is we can change the structure of this so at the moment we've gotten side by side very quickly you can just change the whole layout of this have it with the wide picture instead if we want to have multiple side-by-side options it's going to just going to depend on the width of the overall site how many are going to show but this is so so cool in a free theme i think it's brilliant and bloxy sort of makes it um not really that necessary to have a page builder in the first place by itself so that's why when you pair it up with guttenberg the options are absolutely amazing so if i come backwards again you get the idea you can see that there are loads of things that you can control with bloxy you've got your site identity you've got menus you've got your different widgets that you can control such as the main sidebar and what you actually want to be displayed in here all the pages colors i haven't even mentioned those look we can change the overall color palettes put in custom colors if we want to obviously change the typography across the entire site there is so much here that we can do and if you really want to learn about this particular theme and bloxy then i have a separate course that i'll link to in the description below that goes into it in detail for you but this is a super theme that won't disappoint so if you're going to use bloxy what should you use as an add-on plug-in because although it's great as a theme it doesn't actually have any additional blocks okay it doesn't add anything to guttenberg so if i was to go into our home page for example if i want to actually add in anything here i would only have the default blocks that come with gutenberg so what's the best plugin to go with bloxy i've had a look through and in my opinion it is get weird getswit offers one of the largest libraries of additional gutenberg blocks which you can drag and drop into your page to quickly build your design and of course it's free so our home page here is built with a mixture of your classic gutenberg blocks and some get whip blocks as well now to access the get web blocks you can just open up your blocks list over here and you will find them down here at the bottom there's over 30 of them they're really really cool they let you build things like this these price boxes here and if we wanted to say a content timeline we can just click and drag it on into the page add in extra sections and then very quickly obviously you style it up you've got yourself a content timeline so there's lots of different blocks that get with offers to you more i think than any other company that's currently offering any form of gutenberg blocks on the market so when you combine that with bloxy which controls all of the layout features on your website you've got something really really powerful now bloxy do have a pro version and if you want to unlock the true power of this theme then you can of course upgrade to that but as i've said it's perfectly possible to build a fully functioning website with the free version but if you're a web developer and you're building websites for clients or you just want to build something extra special for yourself then definitely check out bloxy pro it is amazing i'll put a link in the description below but for now it's time to check out our second theme and plug in for gutenberg so number two on my list is the cadence theme now cadence gives us more starter templates than the bloxy theme did and all of these are readily made for gutenberg you do also have some for elementor but of course we're looking at gutenberg in this so you can use all of these templates and what i really like is that when you click into one you can then go through and actively change the colors before you even import it and you can do exactly the same thing with the typography as well so you can choose how you like it to look then go right ahead and either import a single page or the full site and then you can have a template that you're starting with and just go in and obviously change your images over change the text and what it says but that's going to speed up the design process really quickly especially for beginners once you have your site imported you can go ahead and enter the customizer just like we did with bloxy now one thing i will say i prefer the the way that bloxy looks especially that dark mode i miss that with cadence however you do have very very similar controls here so once again if we wanted to we could go into the general settings and change colors from here we can access our different color palettes you can go in change colors save them as you like them you can do the same thing with typography as well and like with bloxy we can also go in and change our header this is going to look very very similar to what you just saw it's got a layout the two are basically like brother and sister really however they do offer some different aspects so once again we could do similar things with cadences we did with bloxy if we wanted to have the transparent header we can do that in fact it's already enabled or we could have the sticky header as well and i do have to say that apparently they've got an experimental uh scroll up for the sticky menu which is the thing that i really liked that bloxy's already done so it looks like cadence are trying to implement that as well they're just not quite there yet however something that they do have better in the free version is the footer so you can actually control the layout and design of your footer in the free version of cadence a lot more than you can in the free version of bloxy but otherwise the two are very very similar there's just a few little differences that you've got there and again at the end of the video i'm going to tell you what type of website it's best to use each individually for so we're coming up to that however for now what is the best plugin that you want to be using with cadence to add on to get more gutenberg blocks well this is a really simple one fortunately cadence actually have their own set of gutenberg blocks called cadence blocks is again it's a free download you can download the plugin and when you go into any page let's go into our home page here so from your home page what you can then do is access the cadence blocks you do that in the same way open up your blocks listener up here and you'll find cadence blocks up at the top and again same thing you can just click and drag them into the page they've got some really awesome ones here and frankly you can easily build up an entire site just using these and of course you've got your other classic gutenberg blocks as well now if you are interested in learning each and every one of these in detail i have a tutorial coming up on all of the cadence blocks both free and pro so make sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on that something that i do really like though is the the row layout so this this one here this way you can control different columns and you've also got the pre-built library so you can have a look through find something that you like the look of insert it and then it's just done for you and you can then just go in and obviously change the colors or what it says but that's a very quick way to put together the page and especially for beginners you can quickly have a site put together in a matter of minutes so when you combine both the cadence theme with cadence blocks you can easily create a gutenberg website that does everything that page builders previously did and you're not going to need a load of extra third party plugins cluttering up the website and slowing it down with just that theme and the cadence blocks plug-in you can do it all now of course although the free version is fantastic if you want to take your designing to the next level of creativity and have a website that really makes you stand out from the crowd or if you're wanting to start up a web design business and create sites for clients you can going to be able to get access to a lot more templates mobile accelerated pages more premium blocks and a whole lot more using cadence pro so as i said i'm going to be doing a tutorial on all of the pro aspect of cadence as well so make sure to subscribe to check that out and if you want to go and have a look at cadence pro i will put a link in the description below for you as for now it's time for us to check out theme number three and our third and final plugin to increase guttenberg usability so here we are at number three third on the list is the astra theme astra has been around for years and it powers simply thousands of wordpress websites one thing that has to be noted is that the starter templates plug-in that's by the astra creators has more starter templates than anywhere else really certainly within any of the three that we've just been looking at however once you've chosen one there isn't as many options to customize it before you go and import it into the site but once again you can import single pages or the entire starter template once you have imported your template or started creating your site from scratch here we are inside the customizer now straight away you can see that there aren't as many options here as there were with bloxy or cadence we can once again go into global settings and choose our typography we've also got the option to choose our colors although we don't have as many color palettes but you can customize these uh to get the colors that you want um you also have astra's new header builder they've just introduced this and funnily enough it looks a little bit familiar however it doesn't have the same usability as bloxy or cadence um that aren't the same options for the transparent uh header that we had with bloxy and cadence you can design it up a bit but it's just not the same and obviously the sticky option you know you just don't have it now i will admit that when you look at astra pro you start to get way more things included you can easily create mega menus and it does to be honest start to go beyond cadence and bloxy but that is only the pro version and when we're focusing on free i have to say that this theme is coming in a little bit lacking when we're looking at the customizer however something that isn't lacking is the add-on that we have and that's why this has to be put on the list for pairing up when it comes to designing with gutenberg because not only do we have those pre-made templates that have been made with gutenberg in mind we also have the ultimate add-ons for gutenberg plug-in so this has been made once again by the creators of the astra theme so you know it's going to work perfectly in conjunction with one another if you open up your little list of blocks here and scroll on down you will find the ultimate add-on blocks just here and there are loads of them not quite as many as we had with get with but it's not far off and there are certainly more here than we had with cadence blocks once again anything that we want we can just simply pull on into the page they do actually have a content timeline like i showed you before so i might as well drag that in to make this very similar but they've got loads of things we've got advanced columns you can put in a google map if you want to there's just so much you can easily put together a full site just using uh ultima add-ons for gutenberg and i have to say here there's not even a pro version of this it is a completely free plug-in there's no upsell or at least there isn't yet certainly at the time i'm filming this in uh what are we april of uh 2021 there's no premium version it's just completely free all of this you can get for free um so obviously where cadence did have that upsell for good reason because there are some amazing um extra blocks on there you get it all with this free plug-in with ultimate add-on so it's definitely one to take a look at but all of that said you may now know what the best three themes are and what to pair with them but which should you actually choose hmm that depends upon the type of website you're going to be making frankly you're not going to go wrong if you choose either of these three themes and amazing add-on plugins for gutenberg however i think that there is a certain type of website that goes best with a certain type of theme and also the blocks that you're going to need to build that type of website so having a play around with each of them and looking into them this is what i think if you want to have a blog website one that is going to be dedicated mostly to putting on articles and of course getting found on google but really designing up the blog side of your site bloxy is the way to go it is much better than the others it gives you so many more design options it is incredible now if you want woocommerce or a type of ecommerce solution where you can be selling digital products or physical products then again bloxy is good but more if you start to look at the pro version much better is cadence it gives you more options when it comes to designing the shop and also the products that you've got on there and if you do go for their pro version then it's a whole different ball game it's amazing also it has to be noted that if you want to do a type of membership website where you're going to be using some of the really popular course options like learndash for example then cadence integrates with most of the major players there restrict content pro this sort of thing so if you're wanting to keep your design going over into your courses as well cadence is definitely one to go for so what does that leave astra well i think astra is the best for your generic websites so if you're a local business and you're just offering some services you're not wanting to sell online you might have a blog but you're not wanting it to be dedicated you know mainly to a blog you're just needing sort of a general website that's good for services that's what you want to be using astra for and of course for beginners it might not have as many uh customization options in that customizer but that keeps it kind of simple and it gives you all of those starter templates as well so that is what i'll be using astra for and of course the ultimate add-ons for gutenberg that goes with it for woocommerce for online courses choose cadence and cadence blocks and for your blog sites go with bloxy and of course get with as well so that's what i think but of course i want to hear what you think what you've been building your sites with what you're planning on building them with so post those in the comments and do me a favor please please hit that like button it really makes such a big difference so if you've got any value at this at all do me a favor and hit that like button i genuinely appreciate it and of course i'd like you to subscribe as well and turn on notifications i'll tell you why i've got more tutorials coming up on gutenberg including a full feature length video showing you how to take a website build it from scratch with gutenberg in fact i'm putting my money where my mouth is my current website is built with elementor i'm taking it and redoing it and building it from scratch with gutenberg and i'm going to be sharing that with you and of course the uh the theme and plugin that i choose for my own site so make sure to subscribe thank you very much for watching and i look forward to seeing you on the next one you

Channel: Jack in the Net

Views: 8,999

Keywords: best gutenberg themes, best gutenberg blocks plugins, gutenberg, wordpress, gutenberg wordpress, top 3 free gutenberg, gutenberg tutorial, gutenberg wordpress tutorial, jackinthenet, jack in the net, jack duel, gutenberg jack, wordpress themes, best wordpress themes, free wordpress themes, gutenberg blocks, wordpress gutenberg tutorial

Id: gmAH8ZpqnPA

Length: 20min 57sec (1257 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021