New Technology To Improve Your Website's Performance
Over the past month or so, we have seen some incredible new additions and changes to our go-to page builder, Cornerstone, by our friends over at Themeco. These changes help keep Cornerstone as the most advanced WordPress builder, using native tools, rather than third-party plugins to keep your website performing better than the rest.
Let's have a look at some of these changes and what they can mean for your website.
HTML vs Shortcode Storage In WordPress
Traditionally, WordPress websites would use shortcodes to store more complex page content, such as galleries, videos and contact forms. Whilst everything renders perfectly well using shortcode storage, there are some disadvantages to this method of WordPress storage.
Why Shortcode Storage Has Disadvantages
The main disadvantage of shortcode storage is that the code contained within the shortcode is just that - a code. This means that many other plugins on your website may not be able to see or interpret the content of a shortcode.
Why is this important? Well, some of your most useful plugins, like Rank Math Pro for SEO or some translation plugins are unable to access content stored in shortcodes, which means they are unable to do their intended job, or only partially able to achieve it. This has obvious disadvantages and means that tiresome workaround are usually needed.
How Does HTML Storage Improve Accessibility?
HTML Storage converts the default shortcode storage so that all content is stored in full HTML language. This suddenly opens up the world to any website using HTML storage, because, with HTML being the standard website language, every plugin can now access all content on your pages!
For example, using Rank Math Pro, we have seen page scores leap by 20-30%+, thanks to Rank Math now being able to see content, which was otherwise hidden within shortcodes. This has made a big improvement in our ability to SEO pages well and leads to better search results positions and rankings, which in turn has led to more traffic to the website, which have been converted and optimised.
Why not learn more about the advantages of HTML storage and how your website can benefit from it, by getting in touch with us.
Discover HTML Storage
Native Masonry Layouts
Masonry layouts are particularly suited to photographic websites, or websites with galleries. Rather than placing images in a uniform grid, masonry respects the images' aspect ratios and calculates the ideal position for each image, whilst keeping its order in the gallery.
Traditionally, to be able to use a masonry layout, you would require a special plugin, which creates a masonry layout. No longer!
Cornerstone now has a new control on its Row element, which gives you the power to enable masonry layouts natively within Cornerstone - without the need for a third party plugin.
Here are two examples of galleries, which have been converted from square grids to masonry layout.
Why Use Cornerstone's Native Masonry Layout?
Quite simply, with the masonry layout functionality being native to Cornerstone's Row element, there is no longer a need for a third-party plugin to do this for you. Furthermore, third-party gallery plugins tend to consume lots of resources, slowing down your pages.
In addition, you can combine masonry layouts with Cornerstone's native Modal and Slider elements to create incredible designs, which would have required one or more plugins to achieve in the past.
Learn About Masonry Layouts
Big New Features Coming In 2025
We are incredibly excited about several game-changing new features coming to Cornerstone in 2025. Some of these will, no doubt, revolutionise the way we build our websites.
Cornerstone Forms
Cornerstone Forms will be a native forms element or extension to Cornerstone. From what we know, CS Forms will be more than just a native contact form plugin. We believe that it will be able to harness the power of Themeco's Looper Providers and Consumers and enable us to build forms of any type with ease.
With third-party form plugins, as soon as you get away from basic contact form creation, the subscriptions begin to get very pricey for the ordinary small business website user. Having CS Forms as a part of the Max subscription should turn form building on its head for Cornerstone users.
CSAI - Cornerstone AI
Cornerstone AI (CSAI) is promising to be a massive new feature of Themeco's Cornerstone builder. As yet, we have few details about it, but word has it that it will launch for beta testing sometime in the Spring of 2025.
Given the Themeco team's hugely innovative development over the past few years, you can expect CSAI to be an important addition to website building with their highly advanced tools. Keep an eye open for this!
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About The Author
Christopher White
Christopher White is the founder of Cotswold Websites. An accredited digital marketer and website designer, he has over 18 years of experience in creating bespoke websites.
With a background in international logistics and business analysis, Christopher uses his business experience to advise organisations how their website can and should work for them, along with helping them implement business strategies to use Digital Marketing techniques to boost their public exposure.