WordPress Full Site Editing (FSE): Master All the Fundamentals 🔥

This resource addresses individuals familiar with WordPress who may have heard of Full Site Editing (FSE) but lack clarity on its implementation or starting points. The following explanation aims to provide a comprehensive overview of FSE fundamentals quickly, ensuring a solid understanding of this modern WordPress feature.

Full Site Editing, abbreviated as FSE, signifies the capability to modify the entire website structure using the native WordPress editor, Gutenberg. This includes editing everything from the header, containing elements like the logo and navigation menu, all the way down to the footer section.

A crucial distinction exists between FSE-compatible themes and older, classic themes. Classic themes rely on specific areas within the Appearance menu, such as the Customizer and Widgets sections, to adjust elements like the header or footer. If a classic theme is used, the full capabilities of FSE remain inaccessible, necessitating the activation of an FSE theme to unlock the unified editing environment.

I will not be able to do exactly what I want with the FSE theme.

When operating within an FSE theme environment, the traditional menus for customization, widgets, and standard menus disappear from the Appearance section. Instead, the primary interface becomes the Editor. This Editor provides access to navigation controls, site styles, pages, and soon, posts and custom content types. Furthermore, users gain direct administrative access to manage templates and compositions.

FSE themes propose various pre-built templates designed for specific page types, such as the 404 error page, the homepage, or a standard page layout without a title. For instance, the current 2024 theme offers these structures, and the forthcoming 2025 theme will introduce additional styles and color schemes. These are fundamentally just specific arrangements and compositions built using Gutenberg blocks.

To grasp template functionality, one must understand the template hierarchy. This hierarchy dictates which template WordPress selects based on the requested content type. If a specific Contact Page template exists, it is used; otherwise, it falls back to the general Page template, and ultimately to the index template if no specific match is found. Previously, this logic resided in PHP files within the theme structure.

This shift means that complex structures, like having distinct headers and footers for a list of recipes versus an individual recipe post, are now configured visually within the admin dashboard rather than requiring manual PHP file edits. This provides significant flexibility for structuring diverse content types.

The fundamental building blocks of these templates are known as template parts. By default, these include headers, footers, and sidebars, although other meta descriptions or elements can also be defined as parts. The theme provides a default header, but this element is highly flexible.

Users possess the ability to duplicate the default header and create entirely new variations, perhaps one featuring a background image or specific buttons. This allows for context-specific headers—one for standard pages and another for landing pages—which are then selected within the respective page templates.

Compositions refer to the various structural arrangements provided by the theme that users can utilize. These can be imported from external sources or built internally. This modular approach significantly streamlines the creation of complex page sections by leveraging pre-built components.

For instance, the Figma file associated with the upcoming 2025 theme offers an early look at planned templates and content types. This preview reveals how specific compositions will be designed for elements like author biographical links, media displays, galleries, and column layouts, indicating the standardized components that will be automatically available.

Within the editor, styles and variations provide immediate aesthetic control. Themes often ship with several pre-defined style variations, which are essentially curated palettes of colors and typography settings that can be applied instantly to change the site's look and feel.

Beyond these presets, deep customization is available. Users can select custom fonts by downloading them from resources like Google Fonts. Furthermore, control extends to color palettes for all text and titles, spacing, and even shadows, which became a native feature starting with version 6.5. This allows for comprehensive styling from the beginning to the end of the site structure without writing code.

The entire page from start to finish, the entire internet site, can be customized with full site editing.

The transition to FSE is strongly encouraged because it represents the native direction of WordPress development, ensuring longevity and compatibility. Future themes are expected to be fully FSE compliant, making adoption a necessary step for modernization.

For developers focused on scalability, the theme.json file is essential. This configuration file allows all settings demonstrated in the back office—including color palettes, style variations, models, and compositions—to be defined programmatically. This enables the creation of standardized theme.json files that can be varied per project, leading to highly efficient, pre-configured WordPress deployments that rely solely on Gutenberg.

Even with this robust native capability, custom extensions can still be added for specialized effects or functionalities not natively present. Starting with this lightweight, native base ensures continuous updates regarding performance, accessibility, and security, encouraging all users to begin experimenting with FSE immediately.