WordPress 6.2 shipped in March. Among the dozen things in the release notes, the one that has changed how we quote projects is the maturity of Full Site Editing. After two years of FSE being almost-but-not-quite, 6.2 is the release where block themes cross into production readiness for most projects.
That is a meaningful shift. Block themes were first introduced in WordPress 5.9 in January 2022. We have shipped exactly two block themes on client projects in the eighteen months since. We are now quoting block themes on five of the next eight builds in the pipeline. The conversation has changed.
What 6.2 actually moved
Three things, in our experience.
First, the site editor is no longer beta. The ‘Site Editor’ menu in the admin no longer says ‘beta’ next to it. The interface has stabilized. The keyboard shortcuts work. The undo behavior is predictable. Editors can navigate between templates, template parts, and patterns without getting lost.
Second, style book and global styles are usable. The global styles panel — typography, colors, spacing, dimensions, layout — actually works as a design system editor. Set a body font in one place and every block on every page picks it up. Change a color palette and the entire site updates. This is what Full Site Editing always promised and 5.9 through 6.1 only partially delivered.
Third, the block patterns library and the ability to register custom patterns through theme.json plus PHP is mature. We can ship a client a block theme with twenty branded patterns. The marketing team builds new pages by dropping patterns and customizing them. The result looks on-brand by default because the patterns are built against the global styles.
The classic theme question
The first conversation that comes up is whether existing classic themes — the kind we have been building for ten years — should be migrated to block themes. The answer, for most existing projects, is no.
A classic theme that works is not broken because block themes exist. The maintenance cost is the same as it was. The editing experience is the experience the client is already trained on. The migration cost — typically forty to a hundred and twenty hours for a non-trivial theme — is not justified unless there is a specific reason.
The specific reasons that do justify a migration:
- The client is hiring a non-developer marketing team who needs to launch landing pages independently.
- The brand has consolidated and the existing theme has accumulated inconsistencies that a clean design-system rebuild would fix.
- The theme is on an old version of PHP or jQuery and a rebuild is on the roadmap anyway.
- A planned redesign would have happened in 2023 regardless.
What block themes do well
For new projects, block themes have two genuine advantages over classic themes in 2023.
First, the design system is built into the theme. theme.json defines the global styles. Every block respects them. There is no longer a gap between ‘how the theme renders’ and ‘how the editor renders.’ WYSIWYG is finally real.
Second, the editing surface is the same as the rendering surface. A pattern is the same in the editor as it is on the public site. An editor learning the system learns the system once. A classic theme with custom shortcodes, ACF flexible content fields, and Gutenberg blocks layered on top has three different editing models in the same admin. Block themes have one.
What block themes still struggle with
The honest list, eighteen months in.
First, deeply custom layouts that do not fit the block model. A theme that needs a non-rectangular asymmetric layout with custom CSS-grid trickery is still easier to ship as a classic theme. The block editor’s layout primitives have improved but they are not yet at the point where you can build any layout the design team imagines.
Second, WooCommerce. The WooCommerce block templates exist but they are still rough at this point. For an e-commerce build with serious product page customization, we are still defaulting to classic themes with WooCommerce hooks. This is on the WooCommerce team’s roadmap and should improve through 2023.
Third, sites that depend heavily on third-party page-builder plugins. If the existing site is on Elementor or Divi, a block theme rebuild is effectively a rebuild from scratch. There is no clean migration path.
The pattern library question
The biggest practical shift in our quoting is that block theme builds need a pattern library, and pattern libraries take time. A typical custom block theme delivery for us now includes fifteen to thirty branded patterns — hero variations, content sections, CTAs, testimonials, pricing tables, contact blocks, partner grids.
Each pattern is two to four hours of design and build. The library, by itself, adds 60 to 120 hours to the project. The trade-off is that once the library exists, the marketing team can ship pages independently for the next three years. The upfront investment pays back in saved developer hours later.
This is something we now explain explicitly in proposals. A block theme build is more upfront but less ongoing than a classic theme with a page builder bolted on. The economics over a three-year horizon favor the block theme on most projects we are quoting now.
The 12-month outlook
By WordPress 6.4 or 6.5 — probably this winter and next spring — the gaps that still keep us on classic themes for some projects are likely to close. Block-based WooCommerce templates are improving release-over-release. The site editor is gaining features at a pace that suggests it will be feature-complete relative to most classic theme needs by the end of 2023.
For a new build in mid-2023, block themes are now the default unless there is a specific reason to choose otherwise. That is a new sentence we did not say six months ago.