When we launched into public development in September 2024, we made a single promise: deliver a tool capable of building basic marketing brochure sites within one year.
What we actually shipped was something far more ambitious and far more capable.
And the story isn’t just about the tool and its capabilities. Etch’s development process—and the way users have been part of it—has set a new standard for how products should be built and released.
Our commitment to weekly releases, to polling the userbase, to getting features into people’s hands so they can test them and provide feedback, has shown users what it looks like to be valued and respected by a development team.
Customers should no longer tolerate software being developed behind closed doors, without their input, with little transparency, and even less consideration for their wants and needs..
With that said, we’re proud to announce that Etch v1.0 is officially here, and our community deserves as much credit as our hard working team.
What Does 1.0 Mean?
For us, 1.0 was never about features. We surpassed our original feature goals many many months ago. What 1.0 represents is a line in the sand that says, “You can officially use this to confidently build production sites.”
That’s the story of “1.0,” but the real story of Etch isn’t about numbers. It’s about how we think WordPress development should actually work and what modern development should look like going forward.
A Major Departure From Traditional Page Builders
Etch didn’t set out to be “another page builder with better features.” We set out to question every assumption the industry had made and rebuild from first principles.
That starts with one question: Who is Etch designed for?
Prior to Etch, all popular page builders in WordPress were designed according to one fundamental belief: people who want to use page builders for web development lack foundational web design knowledge and skill.
The question those builders chose to ask was, “How do we design something that’s easy for people who don’t know what they’re doing?”
And that’s precisely why all those tools look more or less the same. They all asked the same question, came to similar conclusions, and implemented similar “solutions” to that problem.
In many cases, they just directly copied each other.
We chose to ask a different question with Etch: “How do we design something that truly innovates a professional workflow and makes life a lot easier for capable users?”
That’s a fundamental philosophical departure and it’s the most important reason for why Etch is so different and why those differences are so important.
With that said, here are some of the highlights:
Workflow Unification & The Death of Magic Areas
Remember the old way? You’re working on a page and you need to create a custom post type. Off you go to some other screen in the WordPress admin. Custom fields? Different plugin, different interface. Need to upload and manage media? Leave the editor. Want to create a new page or template? Back to the admin. Component management? Somewhere else entirely.
Your workflow is scattered across six different locations and you spend half your time just leaving the editor to go do important work somewhere else.
We called these “magic areas”—all the critical stuff that lives outside the builder, forcing you to constantly exit your workspace to manage the things that actually matter.
Etch killed magic areas.
Need to create a CPT and custom fields? Do it in the Etch window you’re already in. Media management? Same window. Create new pages, manage templates, handle your content architecture? All inline, all in context, without ever leaving the editor.
This isn’t a convenience feature. It’s a philosophy. And once you experience unified workflows, bouncing between the builder and the WordPress admin feels genuinely broken.
While there’s still a ton of work to do in this area, we’ve proven the concept of workflow unification. There’s no longer any tolerance for endlessly bouncing around multiple interfaces and areas. A capable builder is one that is capable of managing your most important development tasks in one place.
Full HTML Access and Authoring
Other builders hide the code because they think it terrifies you. Etch puts it front and center. Not to force you to write it, because you don’t have to, but just to give you access.
It turns out that this access is extremely handy. For beginners, it shows you how the sausage is made, which is a fantastic learning experience.
For everyone else, it helps you do things much quicker. Tasks that take 5-8 clicks in a traditional builder are often done with a single click in Etch.
Pasting in raw HTML can save anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour depending on what you’re building.
And, perhaps most critical, HTML exposure and authoring pave the way for proper AI integration. Etch is currently poised to be the only Cursor-like AI experience in WordPress.
In fact, it’s better than Cursor because it already has an extremely capable visual development environment attached to it.
This means that LLMs can literally do everything they need to do, using the fundamental language of web development (not some proprietary builder language), and then you can interact with the output either in code or visually.
As users will see, Era 4 will have little tolerance of page builders that don’t provide code access.
The Death of Styling Panels and The Rise of the Mini GUI
Traditional builders give you convoluted, multi-panel styling menus.
Want to change padding? Find the spacing section, locate the padding controls, click four different inputs. Rinse and repeat for literally everything you want to do, which comes with a massive cost in terms of time, clicks, and cognitive load.
Etch has done away with all that.
We introduced the Mini GUI—CSS Quick Action icons that write CSS for you while you watch. And it doesn’t write just any CSS. It writes the exact CSS you prefer because all the values are pre-determined—either by you, your framework of choice, or eventually from an import file that other users can share with you.
It’s the fastest and most flexible workflow for styling things on the web, and it has definitively buried the concept of styling panels. Any interface still using them is dramatically slowing you down and limiting your flexibility to do the work you’re trying to do.
A Full Selector System With Dynamic Selector Matching
Most traditional builders limit you to classes and IDs.
A few builders on the market expanded this to handle more complex selectors.
None of them have a selector system that is anywhere near capable of what Etch is capable of.
In Etch you can add any selector you want. Etch doesn’t just let you add styles to them, it dynamically matches them to the elements on your canvas, showing you exactly which selectors are being applied in real time and gives you access to the styling rules of those selectors from the elements themselves.
Additionally, you can paste in HTML from anywhere and Etch’s selector system automatically adds all IDs and classes as stylable, attached selectors.
This is Real-Time CSS and it replaces most uses of global stylesheets and hidden custom CSS inputs.
Auto Block Authoring
There are two types of traditional page builders in WordPress:
- Builders that ignore the block editor and fail to leverage it in any meaningful capacity.
- Builders that exist within the block editor and are mired by the block editor’s terrible UX for page building.
The first category of builder comes with major problems for client editing. The interfaces are much too advanced for most clients to use, so they have to try and engineer special “client editing modes.”
Or, agencies and freelancers choose a specific builder because it feels more friendly for clients, with the tradeoff of it being a nightmare for their own development workflow.
The second category of builder is dead in the water because Gutenberg is an objectively bad page building experience. Nobody who cares about efficiency, flexibility, and real development power is using the block editor for development tasks.
With Etch, we just did what was obvious. We gave capable users a capable development environment and then engineered that development environment to author everything to custom blocks so the client would have a simple editing experience in the block editor.
This is Auto Block Authoring.
When you build in Etch, your content is automatically authored to Gutenberg as custom blocks. Your client opens the block editor and sees a 1-1 match of exactly what you built and can easily edit it without ever seeing or touching Etch.
This is not a trick. What they see is not a replica of what you built, it’s literally what you built. The entire site, after all, renders using the block editor’s rendering engine.
With Etch, the development environment, the editing environment, and the CMS all finally speak the same language. And in the future, any WordPress user will be able to use anything built with Etch—even without an Etch license. That’s going to fundamentally change how WordPress development works.
The Death of Global Breakpoints and The Rise of the Fluid Responsive Canvas
The modern era of various devices, accounting for over 2200 resolution and size possibilities, rendered old responsive development practices wholly inadequate.
Etch is the only platform to realize this and actually do something about it.
Defining three or four arbitrary breakpoints, styling each one separately, and hoping your design doesn’t break at the sizes in between, is a laughable approach to responsive development in the modern era.
Etch abandons this workflow entirely.
Our fluid responsive canvas lets you grab the edge and resize continuously. There are no breakpoints to “switch between”—you’re always looking at your real design at any real size.
When you do need size-specific adjustments, Etch uses dynamic measuring and auto-query-insertion. Make a change at a specific width, and Etch intelligently creates the appropriate container query for you.
All of the code that is responsible for the thing you’re building, across all possible sizes, is visible at all times. You’re never bouncing back and forth and never straining to remember what you did somewhere else.
Instead of fighting the interface and suffering under terribly inadequate preview limitations, you’re free to focus on making the thing you’re working on truly responsive.
From Media Queries to Container Queries (and the Has Me Selector)
Speaking of responsive design, Etch made another fundamental shift: from media queries to container queries.
Media queries ask “how big is the viewport?” Container queries ask “how much space do I actually have?”
This means components can respond to their actual context, not just the window size. A card in a sidebar behaves differently than the same card in a full-width section—automatically.
Container Queries have been around for a while now, but no other builder has cared about them, let alone adopted them.
This is partly due to the fact that these tools are focused on solving the problems of laypeople instead of the problems that you face as a capable user.
And it’s also due to architectural limitations. Once you hide the code, implementing things like container queries effectively and efficiently is an extremely difficult task.
It will only get harder and harder for traditional builders to keep up. CSS and web development are evolving rapidly and not having access to the code and not speaking the real language of web development is going to prevent these tools from creating the experiences that users actually need.
Components With Props, Inline Editing, Slots, and Expose-to-Parent
Components in Etch aren’t simplified “reusable blocks.” They’re a proper component system.
Define props that control appearance and behavior. Edit content inline without opening modal windows. Use slots to define insertable content areas. Expose props of nested components to their parent.
Build a button component with color, size, and icon props. Drop it anywhere. Edit the text right where it sits. Change variants from the parent context. This is component architecture that actually scales.
Other page builders have spent close to two years trying to ship components to users. Not only did we ship more capable, more flexible, and easier-to-build components in less time than that, we did it while innovating, building, and shipping literally everything else at the same time.
WP Native Loop Syntax With Full JSON Preview and Global Loop Management
Dynamic content in Etch uses WordPress-native loop syntax. No proprietary abstraction—just the WP Query system you already know, expressed in clean JSON that you can preview and validate.
Create a loop, see exactly what it will return, save it for global reuse, and apply it anywhere. Dynamic content that’s both powerful and transparent. Finally.
In addition to that, we use convenient loop blocks that don’t output any wrappers and accept multiple root level elements. It’s a superior architecture to the typical looped element workflow that most builders use.
CMDK/I/M for Instant Actions
We’re the first builder to make the CMD+K bar truly useful.
- CMD+K opens the command palette for instant access to any action
- CMD+I jumps straight to element insertion
- CMD+M opens navigation to jump between any element
No more clicking through menus. Think, command, execute. Your keyboard becomes a direct interface to Etch’s full capabilities.
Recipes
Recipes is a feature we originally innovated in Automatic.css. They allow you to capture complex or repetitive styling actions as single executable snippets.
With Recipes, complex and repetitive tasks become one-click operations.
Need a complex, responsive, three-column “flex grid” where the orphan items automatically center themselves in the last row? It’s just one of the dozens of recipes that’s available in a single action.
Recipes are designed to solve challenges that developers constantly run into, making your life so much easier and your work so much more enjoyable. Less problem solving gives you more freedom to be creative and to spend more time on professional touches.
This Journey Wasn’t About Catching Up
Let’s be clear about something: Etch v1.0 was never a journey toward feature equivalency with existing tools. We weren’t trying to match what Elementor, Bricks, or Breakdance could do.
Instead, every meeting was spent questioning why they did things that way in the first place, and how capable users actually want and need things to be done.
Etch v1.0 was never about feature parity. It was always about setting the example for how modern web development should happen and what a visual development environment was truly capable of being.
In the words of Jay-Z, “You made it a hot line, we made it a hot song.” Which is a perfect reference, by the way, considering this is now a full blown Takeover.
2026 is unequivocally the year of Etch.
What’s Next?
We’re just getting started.
Components API — Extending component capabilities to third party developers and our own native components.
Full AI Integration — AI-assisted development that understands Etch’s architecture and your project’s context. A Cursor-like experience paired with a visual development environment, all inside of WordPress.
WooCommerce Components and Templates — First-class e-commerce support with dedicated components and production-ready templates.
A Top Secret Exploratory Mission — We’re working on something we’re not ready to talk about yet. But when we are, it’s going to change the model again.
Version 1.0 is here. No more betas. No more caveats. Just the most powerful, innovative WordPress builder ever created—stable and ready for your most important projects.
Welcome to Era 4.
Kevin is a WordPress and web development educator, speaker, and the founder of three WP plugins: Etch, Automatic.css and Frames.