Glossary: WYSIWYG vs Drag & Drop

When you’re editing content in the WordPress admin panel, you can switch between visual and text in the editor.

Visual is a rich text editor or a WYSIWYG editor. WYSIWYG is “what you see is what you get” but what they left out of that acronym is a giant bold and underlined ALMOST. What you see is ALMOST what you get. You know, you can do things like you do in Word; you can select text, you can make it bold, you can throw it in italics, you can move pictures around within reason and that’s a WYSIWYG editor.

Actually WordPress uses the widely available and popular TinyMCE Rich Text editor, so that’s actually not even specific to WordPress.

Beyond that, there’s now a generation of drag and drop layout editors. The most common or at least easily named on thrown around the WordPress space is Visual Composer. And this allows you to not only modify the text, but say “I want to put this chunk of content here and that chunk of content there” and again, it’s about finding that balance between the non-coding approach and that abstraction layer of you using an interface that’s trying to interpret what you do and then it’s writing code. So it can be very good and let you do some things, but it doesn’t always work perfectly.

The other really goofy thing about the drag and drop editors in WordPress specifically, is the way that data gets stored in the WordPress database is not searchable by WordPress. So the content displayed on the front end is still searchable by Google and still indexable, that’s all good from and SEO standpoint, but if you run the internal site search, it’s not going to find any results of anything in that drag and drop editor. So if you have a lot of content on your site and it’s important for your users to be able to search that content, it’s probably best not to use that type of editor in WordPress because it blocks that content from search.