
Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) is a plugin for WordPress which has been around for just over 10 years, celebrating its birthday milestone in June 2024. It is a powerful tool that allows users to enhance their websites by adding custom fields and content. This plugin provides an intuitive interface for creating and managing various field types, such as text, images, files, relationships, and more, without needing to write any code.
What are the benefits?
ACF Incorporates a built-in UI for creating groups and fields that can be used to build out content on WordPress pages and posts. The plugin is organised and capable, offering simple- to advanced-level fields and relationships. There are advanced tools for creating conditional logic and validation rules that can be added to prevent incorrect input.
ACF can be rolled out across pages, post types and other sections of WordPress sites. However, its strengths lie in being used to create content that can be referenced in templates and elsewhere on your WordPress website. An example is using ACF in combination with a post type created for a portfolio. Specific text, image and other types of fields can be used and built into templates to output content-rich sections that have a lightweight structure. Because the content in these sections is saved to the database, it can be referenced and pulled in anywhere across your website.
Another benefit of using ACF is that you can control the validation of the fields that website editors can use. This can be particularly useful in preventing incorrectly formatted content or broken layouts from occurring on the page. ACF Fields can also be outputted using minimal code and lightweight page structure, which aids in creating smaller pages and faster loading times. In turn, this is beneficial for the user experience as well as SEO.
What are the disadvantages?
Although offering a large variety of fields, ACF still lacks the customisation of a page builder such as Elementor. Building out fields and assigning them to pages and post types is a manual process and the initial page/post layout must be built by a developer. With all this in mind, it means the process needs to be precise and efficient, but can also be slower to get off the ground. A visual page builder, like Elementor can enable better customisation, but does increase the likelihood of layouts being accidentally broken by users that don’t fully understand the limitations of the system. It also means that content from that page/post cannot be easily referenced or pulled out in other parts of the website.
A recent dispute
The world of WordPress plugins is almost entirely uneventful and free from controversy, but in October 2024 a spat erupted between WordPress and WPEngine (a hosting company that now owns ACF). There are two sides to the story: WordPress was accused of appropriating the Advanced Custom Fields plugin – i.e. taking over the free plugin – while WPEngine was accused of compromising the version of WordPress that it installs on all its users’ accounts. The ‘Pro’ version of ACF – that we use here at Novagram – is not affected by any of this.
For best results, partner with Novagram
To conclude, our advice is often to use a combination of both Elementor and Custom Fields to create a site which is engaging, content-rich and performs extremely well. Here at Novagram, our main goal is to not only build websites that perform well and look great, but also offer a simple editing experience. Using the power of Elementor, alongside tools like Advanced Custom Fields and bespoke layouts, Novagram can design and build exactly the right website to suit your needs.
Take a look at some of our work here.
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