Creating Visually Engaging Blog Posts Using Gutenberg

Before publishing a blog post, try to take some time to make it more visually appealing:

highlight important messages,
group related paragraphs together, and
clearly separate sections to reduce confusion.

This is important because making your blog posts more engaging benefits both you and your readers. When readers find it easy to go through content, bloggers like us get a positive impression, which is great for our brand.

Here’s the good news: if you’re using WordPress and the Gutenberg or Block Editor like I am, it’s actually not that hard to do! Let me show you how and share some tips and techniques I use to make my posts visually engaging.

In Summary

I make blog posts more engaging through visual hierarchy—a technique that reduces the cognitive load on readers.

In simpler terms, in publishing and graphic design, it’s the method of using different fonts, font sizes, background colors, and borders to separate topics and grab attention.

By using varying visual elements, we emphasize key points, show importance, and help readers focus on what they’re reading.

Gutenberg Blocks to Use

What I like about WordPress and Gutenberg is how easy they are to use. You can create a simple web design and improve the reading experience by applying visual hierarchy, all with just a few design blocks. From what I’ve learned so far, the two main blocks you need are the group and columns (or row).

You can adjust the background color, font color, font style, spacing, margin, alignment, stickiness, border thickness, and border color—basically everything you need for visual hierarchy can be managed in the settings of these two blocks. Once you’re familiar with CSS units, designing becomes pretty straightforward.

Note: While I mentioned that you only need two or three Gutenberg blocks to design your blog post with visual hierarchy, you’re not limited to just those.

For example: Grid block and Spacer block.

You can also use the Grid block, which automatically arranges your content into columns and grids with preset sizes. This is helpful if your audience mostly uses desktops with different screen sizes.

Another? The Spacer Block. It creates space between other blocks. However, I wouldn’t recommend using it because you can achieve a similar effect by adjusting the margin and padding values in the groups and columns block. The spacer block is really only necessary for specific situations, like when you need uneven spaces between two columns.

For examples of blog posts with visual hierarchy, check out these.

Design Ideas

Before you start designing, one thing you shouldn’t forget is defining your color palette. If possible, assign a level of importance to each color.

This step is important for keeping your blog consistent, which helps with your branding. If you’re not sure how to change your blog’s color palette, your theme should have documentation on how to do it.

Once everything is set, figure out the key parts of your post, where it can be divided, and where the action points are. After that, you can start designing. Below are some design examples I created for inspiration.

1. Group & Give a Different Background

One way to reduce cognitive load for our readers is by organizing the content of our posts visually. Specifically, we want to minimize extraneous load, the extra mental effort required to understand how the information is presented. The clearer the presentation, the less extraneous load there is. This will help readers grasp our message more quickly.

So, how can we improve the organization of thoughts in our posts? We can group consecutive sections that discuss the same topic into a single block and use a different background color to highlight these groupings. This will make the structure of our posts clearer and reduce confusion.

For example, have you ever read an article that covers a broad topic with multiple categories, each containing several examples? As you read, the ideas seem to get more and more tangled, causing disorientation. Eventually, you might feel lost and unsure of which category’s examples you’re reading.

(This part demonstrates the concept)

By grouping related content clearly, we can prevent this disorientation and make our posts easier to follow.

2. Obvious Separation by Color

As attention spans get shorter with the rise of short-form videos, people are engaging less with written content. This creates a challenge for us as bloggers to keep up. One way to re-engage readers is by shortening our paragraphs, but that alone isn’t enough, especially since younger generations are used to visual content from an early age. To keep our audience’s attention, we need to make our posts more visually interesting.

Instead of sticking to one plain background color, we can use different colors for each section.

This helps create a sense of change or development and lets readers feel like they’re coming across something new, like a fresh idea, a different argument, or a new way of looking at a problem. It makes them think, “Hey, this looks different. There’s probably something new here.”

(This section shows how it’s done; as well as the ‘In Summary’ section)

How we organize our posts depends on the content. Usually, we can use headings as natural breaks, or if we’re writing a list, we can make each item its own section.

3. Clear Topic Group using a Border

Besides the background color, borders are another way to style the group and columns block. They help separate different parts of a blog post and highlight key points. Borders are especially useful for minimalist blog designs that don’t rely on a lot of colors.

This part of the discussion is an example, along with the ‘Gutenberg Blocks to Use’ section of this post.

When using borders to organize content, it’s also smart to adjust the padding in the group or columns block. This adds space between the border and the content, making the layout look cleaner.

4. Shades of Color for Incremental Changes

If our post is a list organized in a specific order, we can give each section a different background color that gradually changes, either lightening or darkening as you move through the sections.

This idea is similar to the one I mentioned earlier: Group & Give a Different Background. The key difference is that sections should be set up for each topic, example, or heading, not for every single thought or group of paragraphs.

This approach works well for readers who tend to skim and might overlook the sentence explaining the list’s organization. It also adds excitement, encouraging readers to keep going and look forward to the end of the post.

When using different background colors, it’s important to keep the text easy to read. Make sure there’s enough contrast between the text and the background, and avoid bright colors like neon that can be hard on the eyes.

5. Emphasize Clickable and Expandable Elements

Words and images aren’t the only ways we can make our posts more valuable. The links to sources and related articles are important too, and as a reader, I really appreciate them. They help me check the information and find other content that could be helpful for learning more.

The issue is that some of the most important links are hard to notice, and as a blogger, I’m definitely guilty of this. I often put links in parts of a paragraph that readers quickly skim or skip, which means they might miss useful info. This is a missed chance to add value and boost credibility.

One way to make sure readers notice links is by adding a background color or a clear border. The same goes for expandable elements like detail blocks and accordions—group them together and change the style so the background color stands out from the rest of the post. If a link or expandable element is really important, use a thicker border to make it pop.

This Details block below is an example, along with the Details block under the ‘Gutenberg Blocks to Use’ section.

Here’s a helpful tip

Gutenberg has a button block you can use to highlight links, but I wouldn’t suggest it unless you’re including a call to action.

More Examples

Aside from these five, there are plenty of ways to structure and design blog posts to make them more engaging. The key is to focus on the purpose of the post and its important parts, like disclaimers, summaries, key takeaways, and context—anything that helps guide the reader and make the content clearer.

Thinking about the purpose of the blog post in design, I have a few more ideas.

If the post is comparing two things, we could use a two-column layout (one Column Block with two columns inside) to show the key info readers care about. Each column could have a different design (like a background color) to highlight the comparison.
If your blog post is a how-to guide, you might want to highlight the “materials/tools needed” section using Gutenberg design blocks. This is important because without it, readers won’t be able to follow the steps. Plus, it’s usually the first thing they’ll look for, so making it easy to find by making it visually stand out is really helpful.
When you write opinion posts, you likely have a section where you present your main argument with supporting points and examples. Make sure that section is designed to grab attention. It’s important for readers to easily spot the key parts of your opinion, which will spark curiosity and encourage them to keep reading.

More Design Ideas

Adding background color can already boost reader engagement and improve their experience, but be sure to check out my other design tips too. I came up with them myself, so you won’t find them anywhere else.

Don’t miss my post on designing engaging blog posts!

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