Introduction
After leaving WordPress.com for a self-hosted website, I found that the FSE theme I was using, Kiosko, has not been updated since 2024.
Worried about the security of the theme, I decided to move to a theme that was keep being updated.
Thus I chose one of the most popular classic theme: Storefront.
Was moving from a FSE Theme to a Classic Theme a good move?
The difference between a Full Site Editing and Classic Theme
Code VS What You See Is What You Get
As its name stated, the philosophy of Full Site Editing (FSE) is allowing the user to modify visually the website.
Classic Theme is a 20 years older philosophy (2003 vs 2021 for FSE). If you can still compose visually some parts of your pages, you are often forced to code directly in HTML/CSS/PHP to get the rendering you want.
My experience: Changes from Kiosko to Storefront
I am using Gutenberg
I prefer to use the Gutenberg Block Editor. Why ? Because unlike elementor it is totally free and doesn’t bear any useless features.
But some features of a plugin like elementor can make classic theme closer to the easiness of use of a FSE theme.
The templates
Since a few years, Classic Themes allow you to modify visually the template of your pages.
But some part of your website, like the header, footer, post category pages templates, or woocommerce templates still necessitate code to being personalized.
My method to ease things on Storefront
A way I found to avoid coding and see visually what I am doing was creating a composition.
I then reuse this composition in the code by telling in it: “display the composition id … for the footer/header”.
More options for the visual elements
Buttons, group, paragraph, etc.
On Twenty Twenty Five I can for example modify the internal margin of a group in the menu.
While in Storefront this option was not in the menu, which forces me to code.
Fonts
Installing new fonts on Twenty Twenty Five was very easy while laborious on Storefront.
With the Twenty Twenty Five FSE theme -used on this website- all I have to do was to go to the editor and install them.
For doing the same thing for my Storefront classic theme I have to:
- Download the fonts
- Convert them to the right format
- Install them on my website
It was just 2 minutes vs 1 hour, literally.
FSE Themes are the future, Classic Themes are an archaism
Unless you like to code or you are already used to a classic theme, from my point of view, a FSE Theme is what you should use.
A FSE theme is a lot more easier to manipulate and maintain than a classical theme.
It allows you to do all a classic theme can do but faster.
FSE themes are now mature
FSE themes were added to the WordPress ecosystem in 2021 and are now quite mature.
I didn’t found my website being slower or unstable because of the use of a FSE theme and I found my website a lot easier to maintain by navigating in menus rather than coding.
Go for a FSE theme if you’re beginning
So, if you’re beginning with WordPress, don’t even bother as I do by trying Storefront, go for a FSE theme.
It is a lot more accessible and you’ll end up with the result you want without sacrificing the performance of your website.
About Me
I am Rayhan Rahim Khan, the administrator of this blog and ElectroCroissant.Art.
While being a web-coder is not my main activity (I am an author photographer), it has consume a lot of my time since 2022 and the creation of my first WordPress website.
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