2026 Community Survey Results: What You Told Us, and What’s Coming Next

Earlier this year, we ran our first community survey. You didn’t hold back. 441 paying customers responded, generating over 1,300 individual data points and 1,367 free-text responses that went well beyond the questions we asked. We’re grateful for every one of them.

Who responded

The survey reached across the full community. 46% of respondents are freelancers running client portfolios, half of them managing 10 or more active sites. 19% are agencies, the most enthusiastic users in the dataset, and the group with the highest feature adoption across the board. 21% are solo site owners managing their own properties. The remaining 9% are webmasters: in-house or technical site managers running their own or their organisation’s sites.

75% of respondents who responded haves been using GP/GB for three or more years. 44% have been using it for five years or more. This is not a beginner audience taking a first look. It’s a professional, experienced community telling us what they need from a product on which they’ve built real businesses on.

63% manage six or more sites. That matters because every workflow friction point, every missing feature, and every improvement we ship gets multiplied across their entire portfolio, not just one project.

What you think of the product

You rated the value for money at 8.68 out of 10. 61% of you gave a 9 or 10. Only 2% rated poorly. For context, that’s an unusually strong signal for a software product. We don’t take it for granted.

When asked why you chose GP/GB in the first place, 45% said site performance and speed. 27% said code quality and cleanliness. Combined, 72% of you chose this product because of what it doesn’t do to your output as much as what it does. That shapes every product decision we make, and it’s the constraint we measure every new feature against.

What follows covers existing features: what’s working, what needs improving, and what’s changing, alongside the new features you asked for most. At the end, three bigger topics that deserve their own dedicated posts.

The Feedback: Feature by Feature

Below is every feature area the survey touched, addressed directly.

Elements Module

The Elements Module is the most used and most trusted feature in the product, and the feedback reflects that. The frustration isn’t with what it does, it’s with managing it at scale. As sites grow, the flat list of hooks, layouts, block elements, and header elements mixed together with no visual differentiation becomes difficult to navigate. Experienced users regularly open the wrong element type, and would like UI improvements to group or identify different element types.

Several of you also flagged the friction of managing display rules in two separate places: conditions at the Elements level and separately at the block level, with no unified view.

Both of these issues have been noted and will be addressed in a future feature. More on that soon.

Conditions

Over half of you haven’t used Conditions, but those who have rated it 4.21/5, the third highest in the entire suite. The most common reason for not using it? Not knowing it exists. That’s on us.

Conditions lets you create logical display rules: show this block only on single posts, hide this menu item for logged-out users, display this panel only on pages in a specific category. Apply them across blocks, menu items, and overlay panels from one central place. By keeping Conditions as their own standalone feature, they can be managed globally, applied to multiple elements at once, and edited from any editor view.

“Once I discovered Conditions, it changed how I build sites. I just wish I’d found it sooner.”

Introducing Conditional Display for all blocks →

What’s coming: We’re expanding the condition types available. Planned additions include ACF and custom field-based conditions (for example, showing a block only when a specific field has a value), as well as date and time-based rules and improvements to meta comparisons. Geolocation-based conditions are also on our radar, though those are more complex and will take a little longer to scope properly.

Developers can already build their own custom condition types today using the API: Conditions API documentation →

Global Styles: Sorting & Search

Global Styles are displayed in output order, and that order matters. Loading a lower specificity style after a higher specificity one can break your styling, so manual control of the sequence is intentional and important. That said, when you’re managing 50, 80, or 100+ styles, the default chronological display makes your own careful naming conventions effectively useless.

We hear this. Search and filter functions are in the works to help manage large Global Style libraries without disrupting the CSS output order that makes everything work correctly.

Global Styles: Class Renaming

This comes up a lot, so it’s worth explaining clearly. When you rename a Global Style class, blocks that were already using the old name don’t update automatically. This is expected behaviour. It works the same way as editing a class name directly in a CSS stylesheet. The HTML doesn’t update itself. Doing a mass search-and-replace across WordPress database content is something we want to avoid, as bulk database edits carry real risk on live sites.

What we have introduced is improved CSS administration. You can now track exactly where a Global Style is in use, which means you can find every block with that class attached and update references without hunting through every page manually.

Query Block

The Query Block is one of our most powerful features, and we know you want to push it further. We’re working on expanding the query- building tools available, giving you more control over how queries are constructed, with less reliance on custom PHP to get there.

“The ability to query and filter by custom field values, meta comparisons, and ACF field data, in a structured way without custom PHP.”

Front-end filtering is also something we’re actively investigating this year. The ability to filter query results on the page, without a plugin dependency, is a gap we’re taking seriously.

Header & Navigation Blocks

A number of you are still on Customizer-based headers and told us there’s no clear path forward. There is, and we want to make it easier to find. Create a new Appearance > Element, set the Element Type to Site Header, and enable the Entire Site display rules. That gives you an editable header template you can build with the GenerateBlocks Pro Header and Navigation blocks. The full walkthrough is here:

Mastering Site Header and Navigation Blocks →

On the feature itself: sticky header transitions and scroll behaviour were the most common improvement requests: merge and transition effects on scroll, better mobile-specific layout controls, and less fragmentation of header settings across the editor. We’ll be reviewing these.

Pattern Library

Two gaps to address: discoverability and volume. On discoverability: patterns with names like “Pattern 66” tell you nothing, and browsing the library means clicking into each entry individually. Meta search and filtering are coming, so you’ll be able to find patterns by layout description rather than guesswork. On volume: more patterns and more advanced grid layouts are in the pipeline.

A note on our design approach: the Pattern Library is intentionally mid-fidelity. Patterns are designed to take on your site’s styles, not impose their own. That’s why they look different once you import them alongside a Starter Site. More opinionated patterns can be found accompanying each individual site in the library. This is a deliberate philosophy, not a gap in ambition.

Starter Sites

The feedback was clear: too blog-focused, not enough variety, and a gap on eCommerce. We’re taking all of that on board. More templates are coming across a broader range of use cases, including eCommerce which we know is severely lacking right now. There’s also something in the works that will help you onboard new sites faster and more easily. We’ll share more when it’s ready.

On build quality: all templates are built to our design team’s standards. Accessibility and HTML issues are addressed as soon as we become aware of them. If you spot something, report it, and we’ll fix it.

Overlay Panels

Overlay Panels is one of those features that doesn’t get discovered easily enough, and that’s something we need to fix. They let you build custom UIs that sit on top of your site: pop-ups, mega menus, off-canvas navigation panels, and more, all built with blocks and without plugin dependencies.

Introducing Overlay Panels →

If you attach a Standard or Anchored Panel to a block’s Advanced > Overlay Panel Trigger option, you can edit it via the pen icon without leaving your current post. See how here. Full live preview editing from within the page isn’t available yet, and it’s something we’re reviewing.

GenerateCloud

The most common piece of feedback on GenerateCloud was simple: “I’m not sure what it’s for.” That’s on us, and it’s something we’re addressing. GenerateCloud lets one WordPress site act as a pattern library repository that any of your other sites can pull from: your own private library, synced across your whole portfolio. If you’re managing multiple sites, it’s worth the setup time.

Introducing GenerateCloud →

Getting started documentation →

CSS Custom Properties

CSS Custom Properties (CSS Variables) are coming, along with broader CSS tooling and support for all CSS properties. The goal is to manage your Design Tokens (colours, spacing, type scales) from one place, without splitting them across child theme CSS, Global Styles, and block-level overrides simultaneously.

Client Controls

One of the most requested features from agencies and freelancers, and one of the most important gaps we see in the product. We can confirm a planned feature that will allow you to build custom editing UIs, controlling exactly what your clients can see and change in the editor. More details coming soon.

Forms

Styling 3rd party forms seems to be high on the interest list of many users. I get it, as forms generally come with their own styling and require additional CSS to alter.

Styling the HTML output of third-party plugins isn’t something we do; it has some real problems: plugins write their own CSS, change their markup over updates, and maintaining overrides for code we don’t control means accumulating legacy code that can break without warning and adds bloat to our code. It’s not the GeneratePress way.

So we built our own. Native forms are coming soon to GenerateBlocks Pro. 

For existing third-party form users, we’ll be looking at what we can provide, whether resources or integration functions, without taking on the maintenance risk that comes with styling other plugins’ output.

Animations

There’s no shortage of ways to add animations to GenerateBlocks sites today, from dedicated plugins to third-party services, and many of you are already using them. What we want to understand before committing to a native solution is whether a GP/GB-native approach would genuinely serve you better than what’s already available, or whether pointing you toward the right tools is the more honest answer.

We’re doing that research now. If you’re currently using an animation solution alongside GP/GB and have strong views on what’s missing, we’d welcome the input.

Gallery & Masonry

We were hoping CSS Grid Masonry would have broader browser support by now. It hasn’t made the cut yet, which means there’s no planned native implementation today. We’re keeping it under review as browser support develops, and it remains something we want to solve properly rather than reach for a workaround.

Accessibility

For many of you, particularly those building for public sector or enterprise clients, accessibility isn’t optional. It’s a contractual requirement. We take that seriously. Accessibility is a standard we hold ourselves to across everything we ship, it’s under constant review, and it will remain a core part of our development practice.

Documentation & Onboarding

The learning curve was the most cited challenge in the survey, and notably, it wasn’t just from new users. People who’ve been using GP/GB for years told us that advanced features are still harder to learn than they should be. That’s a signal we’re taking seriously, and better documentation and in-editor guidance are high on the 2026 agenda.

GP/GB has always exposed the technical side of building websites: simple systems you combine to build complex ones. That’s intentional. But the power of those systems should be accessible, and we know we have work to do to get there.

Bigger Conversations Coming

Some of the topics you raised are too important to address in a paragraph. These three each deserve their own dedicated post, and we’re working on them.

WooCommerce

Over half of you build commerce sites, and the friction between WooCommerce and the GP/GB styling system is something we hear loudly and clearly. It touches styling, templating, and the broader question of how GP/GB should integrate with the most widely used eCommerce platform in WordPress. We’re working through it properly.

AI & MCP

We deliberately didn’t ask about AI in the survey. You brought it up anyway, which tells us everything. We’ve been actively researching where AI fits our products and where it genuinely benefits the community, rather than adding it for its own sake.

Full Site Editing & Block Themes

FSE and block themes are back on the agenda. We know there’s uncertainty about which direction to build for, and that uncertainty deserves a proper answer rather than a passing comment.

Your Input and Feedback Make GeneratePress Even Better

To everyone who took the time to provide feedback on GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks, we thank you. Your feedback was detailed, thoughtful, and insightful. Our team is grateful for the time you took to share. And your feedback is helping us to refine our roadmap going forward. 

We do have a new roadmap and feedback site, and we invite further requests there. You can see what we’re working on, what feedback others have provided, and share your input. And of course, our support team is always available to help you get more out of our products.