As you use the WordPress block editor, also known as Gutenberg blocks, you will be adding new blocks or even collections of blocks that meet the design needs for your website.
But, over time, it’s possible that one of these situations will happen:
- Blocks from collections that you never use.
- Blocks are missing from an entry/page that you have deleted by mistake.
- Blocks are missing from entries or pages because you deleted the plugin that installed them.
You have no idea which blocks of which collections or plugins you use and which ones you don’t use.
All these situations ultimately result in one of two things: either you are loading too many resources (plugins, blocks) that you don’t need, and this is detrimental to the speed and optimization of your website, or you have posts or pages with a broken design because you are missing blocks.
None of these situations is desirable, and WordPress does not offer any tool to find or detect which blocks are missing or which blocks are extra.
But, as always in WordPress, there are several plugins that serve to solve these problems, in this case, there are 2 very interesting ones:
Blocks Detector Finder
As soon as you install the plugin and activate it, it offers its own menu, extremely well organized, in which it will show the blocks it has detected, separated into:
- Installed blocks
- Blocks used
- Blocks that are not being used
- Blocks used but deactivated
This makes it very easy to focus on what you want to review, which is especially useful for the blocks used screen, which shows you which blocks you are using on which pages, with links to view and / or edit the page.
The only thing I missed in this plugin is the possibility, from the plugin itself, to summarize which blocks or collections of blocks can be uninstalled and deleted, if possible from the same interface of the plugin.
Otherwise it is a very interesting and practical tool for our growing use of blocks for the WordPress Gutenberg editor.
Find My Blocks
This other plugin, which I already wrote about on another occasion, is an alternative to the previous one, with its particularities, and the main one is that it focuses only on showing the blocks that are in use.
It does it all in a single settings screen, although in this case giving some more information, such as how many times it is in use in each entry or page, and even if it is nested to another block.
And, again, as with the previous one, you can quickly view or edit the page or entry where each block is located.
Also, you can filter the blocks by alphabetical order or by more or less usage.
What I like most about this plugin is its interface, very intuitive, using cards.
Again, I miss the ability to delete plugins or blocks from the plugin interface, but this does not detract from its usefulness.
Which one is better?
It depends on what you are looking for but, although the interface of Find My Blocks is more attractive, the reality is that Blocks Detector Finder is more practical, because its screens of unused blocks or, especially, of blocks in use but deactivated (for having deactivated its plugin), are especially useful to detect which plugins or collections of blocks we can delete without risk, or which ones to install to recover the design of the web.
