The Essential Blocks plugin is a very popular Gutenberg addon that allows you to easily extend the standard features of the WordPress editor. What the tool has to offer, I’ll show you in this post.
About Essential Blocks
Essential Blocks is developed by WPDeveloper, the company behind many other well-known plugins. Such as Essential Addons for Elementor, SchedulePress or the template cloud Templately.
Already since 2018, the free Gutenberg addon Essential Blocks is available in the WordPress repository.With over 100,000 users and a 5-star rating, it has become one of the most popular Gutenberg plugins.
The plugin’s functionality is extensive and regularly updated.
In the paid version, Essential Blocks Pro*, you’ll find many additional useful features. Prices start at €39.20 for a single license.
Currently, the tool offers over 45 advanced, powerful blocks that enable fast web design. The blocks can be classified into the following categories:
- Content Blocks
- Creative Blocks
- Dynamic Blocks
- Marketing Blocks
- Form Blocks
- WooCommerce Blocks
Each block comes with customization options, powerful features and functionalities. Animation is also possible for many blocks like buttons etc.
Essential Blocks at a glance
Here is a brief overview of the currently available features:
- Button & Dual Button
- Call To Action
- Countdown
- Flipbox
- Infobox
- Notice
- Pricing Table
- Social Icons & Social Share
- Team Member
- Testimonial
- Progress Bar
- Interactive Promo
- Image Comparison
- Wrapper
- Instagram Feed
- Image Gallery
- Advanced Heading
- Parallax Slider
- Typing Text
- Toggle Content (inkl. FAQ-Schema)
- Number Counter
- Row
- Post grid & Post Carousel
- Table of Contents
- Feature List
- Slider
- Advanced Tab
- Formular-Integration
(Fluent Forms, WPForms) - Advanced Image
- Woo Product Grid
- Advanced Video
- Advanced Navigation
- Popup
- NFT Gallery
- Openverse
- Shape Divider
- Timeline Slider (PRO)
- Advanced Search (PRO)
- Data Table (PRO)
- Woo Product Carousel (PRO)
- News Ticker (PRO)
- Fancy Chart (PRO)
You can see the function and design options of all blocks directly on the Gutenberg Blocks demo* page.
The key features of Essential Blocks
As you can see, the feature set is very high, so I’m only including some popular, new and premium blocks below.
Powerful Page Builder Blocks
Essential Blocks has right now 45+ ultimate blocks for Gutenberg to escalate your web design experience and make your website building experience faster than before. Let’s have a look at some popular, new, and premium blocks that can accelerate Gutenberg users’ design process without any hassle.
Wrapper:
With the Wrapper Block, you can present content and elements more attractively with its various style options. You can use a beautifully designed wrapper to insert as many blocks as you like within the wrapper block itself.
Shape Divider
If you want to separate different sections on your website in an impressive way, Essential Blocks for Gutenberg can help you. Similar to Elementor, the Gutenberg plugin offers you a shape divider*. You can embellish the section separator with lovely shapes and colors to inject more originality into your design.
Image Gallery
The Image Gallery Block allows you to display images or product photos in an interactive gallery view. It’s easy to handle with a wide range of styling options.
Accordion
An accordion is always very useful to insert content in a space-saving way. For example, the information inside the accordion can be displayed only when clicked. This is ideal, for example, to include a FAQ section on your website. EB also automatically generates the corresponding FAQ schema for this if desired.
Post Grid
For bloggers, displaying posts as a post grid is very interesting. While the WordPress editor offers this functionality, Essential Blocks enhances the visual appeal. You can choose from various templates or customize your own settings and queries. Alternatively, you can use the Post Carousel.
WooCommerce Product Carousel (PRO)
If you are running a WooCommerce store then Essential Blocks can be of help too – it comes with several advanced WooCommerce blocks that will help you showcase your product in a way that attracts your visitors. Among them, Woo Product Carousel is one of the feature-rich, premium blocks to enhance your web design and attract more customers.
Advanced Search (PRO)
Enhance the user experience with an advanced search function. Essential Blocks in the Pro version offers Advanced Search blocks with useful presets and extensive customization options. The visual design is also appealing.
Infinite Customization Options
Once you’ve activated the plugin, you can start designing your WordPress website immediately. Each block comes with ready-made presets that you can choose from. If you want to customize them, it’s also straightforward. WPDeveloper has created a similar Elementor addon, so you can easily change colors, styles, fonts, alignment, spacing, or other elements without ever having to write code, just like a page builder.
Global Block Control Options:
Like some other Gutenberg plugins, Essential Blocks provides excellent management and control of block settings.
Under > Essential Blocks > Blocks, you can enable or disable each block individually. It’s best to activate only the features you actually need to keep your site’s performance optimal. Styles and scripts are loaded only when they are in use.
In the settings, you’ll also find an option for asset regeneration. This allows you to easily clear the cache of your WordPress website and improve its performance.
Block Responsiveness
Each block of Essential Blocks is entirely responsive and you don’t have to do any extra effort on coding to make your website responsive. By ensuring your WordPress website web page responsiveness, you can enhance your customers’ experience right away.
Support for Dynamic Tags and ACF
Essential Blocks offers advanced presets for multiple blocks and exclusive features like support for dynamic tags and ACF. Dynamic tags help you define custom parameters and retrieve data dynamically. Integration with the well-known ACF plugin is also available.
Global Block Styling
Global Block Styling is a valuable feature that allows you to globally save your block customizations, saving you a lot of time and ensuring a consistent design.
To access global settings, click on the EB icon in the top right corner. Then, select the element to edit and save it to finish.
Integration with Templately
Templately* is known for its numerous Elementor templates, but it also offers many templates for Gutenberg. Essential Blocks can integrate these templates. As a Pro user, you can access over 2,000 professionally designed, ready-to-use Gutenberg templates. This makes it easy for even non-designers to create a website with just a few clicks. Each WordPress template has been created entirely with exclusive Essential Blocks.
Conclusion
Essential Blocks is one of the standout Gutenberg addons. I tested it a few years ago when I reviewed the best Gutenberg plugins, and since then, it has made significant positive developments. Besides the wide range of blocks, I particularly like the user-friendly handling. Every element can be customized well, reminiscent of the look and feel of proper page builders. The Global Styling option is also very useful and time-saving.
FAQ
What is Essential Blocks?
What is Essential Blocks?
Essential Blocks is a freemium WordPress plugin that includes over 40 Gutenberg blocks. This complements and extends the functionality of the default WordPress editor for editing and designing content.
Which themes are compatible with Essential Blocks?
Essential Blocks should work with all current WordPress themes without any problems.
Can I customize the blocks?
All blocks offer various predefined presets, but you can also customize them. So you can define colors, typography, spacing, animation, etc. yourself.
Will the tool make my website slower?
Since Essential Blocks only loads the code for the features you use, the impact on page speed is very small.