Visual Edit Lite – Visual Editor for Block Themes

Click any text, image or link on the live page and change it there. Visual Edit Lite is a front-end editor for WordPress that keeps every save as a restore point, so you can always go back to the page as it was.

It works in two places. On a block theme such as Twenty Twenty-Five, it hosts WordPress’s own editor and adds a floating inspector for typography, colour, spacing and Google Fonts. The native block, pattern, template and Global Styles controls stay available.

On a site converted from static HTML to WordPress, it makes the original pages editable by clicking. That can be a hand-written site, or one exported from Lovable, Bolt, v0.dev, aidesigner.ai or a Claude design. The markup stays byte for byte as it was.

Nothing is locked, timed or waiting for a key. Everything the plugin contains works on every install, offline included.

What you get

• Edit text, links, images and video on the live page, where they are shown. Every save goes into that page’s history.
• Go back to any saved version. The ten most recent saves plus the Original are kept for every page, all listed and any of them restorable. The Original is never dropped.
• With a block theme, WordPress’s editor opens inside a Visual Edit toolbar. You get a floating inspector, up to five Google Fonts, new sections from your theme’s patterns, and duplicate or trash for the open page or post.
• Repeating content works as a list. You reorder, edit, add and remove FAQ entries, service cards, team members or portfolio tiles together.
• Connect a designed HTML form by clicking, without rebuilding it. Submissions are stored in wp-admin and emailed through your server, SMTP, or Brevo, SendGrid, Postmark or Mailgun. A honeypot, a minimum fill time, a per-IP rate limit and, if you have it, Akismet hold off spam.
• You can also hand a form to Contact Form 7 or Fluent Forms. The design stays, and that plugin validates, checks spam, verifies its captcha, notifies and records.
• Mailing list signup comes with double opt-in, Brevo integration and a subscriber list in wp-admin.
• Blog listings repeat the design’s own card markup for real WordPress posts, with a “load more” button for the next page.
• Menus keep the design’s own navigation markup and are managed from Appearance → Menus.
• Each page gets its own SEO titles, descriptions, Open Graph, canonicals, robots and redirects, carried over from the original site. They work with Yoast SEO and Rank Math when present, and stand on their own when not.
• For AI search, the plugin adds schema.org structured data including FAQ and an llms.txt file. It also adds AI-crawler rules in robots.txt and a read-only audit of what the site tells search engines and AI assistants. This is about being readable by AI search. The plugin has no AI writing or image tools and sends nothing to any AI provider.
• Import brings in a converted theme’s content bundle (pages, menus, media, forms and SEO records), and you review it before anything is written.

Home page and documentation: html2wp.dev/visualedit.
Source, build script and translation template: github.com/iOSDevSK/visual-edit-lite.
The PHP, CSS and JavaScript in this package are the source, unminified.

What this plugin needs

A block theme, or a theme whose pages are raw HTML and which declares its contract through the clara_ve_theme_contract filter. The contract for converted themes is documented on GitHub: https://github.com/iOSDevSK/visual-edit-lite/blob/main/docs/developer/theme-requirements.md

Forms, email delivery, mailing lists, SEO, redirects and llms.txt do not depend on the theme and work on any site.

Important notes

• Raw-HTML editing requires the unfiltered_html capability, because markup round-trips through that editor. On a block theme the plugin uses WordPress’s normal permissions for the page, template or other entity being edited.
• Deactivating the plugin keeps all data and reverts the front page to the theme’s shipped design until reactivation. Other pages keep their edited content.
• Deleting the plugin always removes stored secrets (SMTP password, provider API keys) and its own transients. Everything else (submissions, subscribers, edit history, page sources) is kept unless “also delete all stored data” is enabled under Visual Edit Lite → Form Settings → Uninstall. That option removes the plugin’s options, its two database tables and the form submissions. It leaves your pages and their content in place. A few marker fields the plugin wrote on them also stay, and so do any files it imported into the Media Library or the uploads folder.

External services

This plugin does not contact any external service on its own. Every service below is reached only after you switch it on, or connect a form plugin that uses it, and only for the purpose described.

Google Fonts

Used only if you open the Google fonts picker in the editor. Opening it makes your server request the public font catalogue from fonts.google.com (cached for a week), and your own browser loads a preview stylesheet from fonts.googleapis.com, and its font files from fonts.gstatic.com, for each family you scroll past. A page that uses a font you kept loads that font’s stylesheet and files from the same two hosts, which means visitors’ browsers connect to Google and Google receives their IP address and user agent. A site where no Google font was kept requests nothing from Google on the front end.

• Terms: https://policies.google.com/terms
• Privacy: https://policies.google.com/privacy
• Google Fonts privacy FAQ: https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq/privacy

Akismet

Used only if the separate Akismet plugin is installed and configured and you enable Akismet filtering under Form Settings. Each form submission is then sent to Akismet for a spam verdict: its field values, the email address found among them, the sender’s IP address, user agent and referrer, and your site’s address.

• Terms: https://akismet.com/tos/
• Privacy: https://automattic.com/privacy/

Email delivery providers

Used only if you select one as the mailer and enter its API key. From then on every email WordPress sends from this site, not only form notifications, goes through the provider you chose: recipient, sender name and address, reply-to, subject and body.

• Brevo terms: https://www.brevo.com/legal/termsofuse/
• Brevo privacy: https://www.brevo.com/legal/privacypolicy/
• SendGrid terms: https://www.twilio.com/en-us/legal/tos
• SendGrid privacy: https://www.twilio.com/en-us/legal/privacy
• Postmark terms: https://postmarkapp.com/terms-of-service
• Postmark privacy: https://postmarkapp.com/privacy-policy
• Mailgun terms: https://www.mailgun.com/legal/terms/
• Mailgun privacy: https://www.mailgun.com/legal/privacy-policy/

Brevo (mailing lists)

Used only if you connect Brevo as your mailing-list provider. Opening a form’s list picker in the editor asks Brevo for the names of your lists. When a visitor subscribes (after confirming, if double opt-in is on) Brevo receives their email address, the list you chose, the other fields they filled in on that form as contact attributes, and, if you use Brevo’s own double opt-in, the template id and redirect address you set. Same terms and privacy links as above.

Your own SMTP server

Used only if you select SMTP as the mailer. The message is sent to the host you configured.

Contact Form 7 and Fluent Forms

Used only if you hand a designed form to one of those plugins in the editor. The submission is then processed by that plugin on your own server: its validation, spam checks, notifications and records apply, under its own settings. Nothing leaves the site through this plugin for that.

Google reCAPTCHA

Used only if a form you handed to Contact Form 7 or Fluent Forms has reCAPTCHA configured in that plugin. The page then loads the reCAPTCHA script from www.google.com in the visitor’s browser, which sends Google their IP address, user agent and how they interact with the page, and Google may set cookies. The token it returns is verified by Contact Form 7 or Fluent Forms with the secret key you entered there; this plugin holds no key.

• Terms: https://policies.google.com/terms
• Privacy: https://policies.google.com/privacy

hCaptcha

Used only if a form you handed to Fluent Forms uses hCaptcha. The page then loads the hCaptcha script from js.hcaptcha.com in the visitor’s browser, which receives their IP address, user agent and how they interact with the page. The token is verified by Fluent Forms with your hCaptcha secret; this plugin holds no key.

• Terms: https://www.hcaptcha.com/terms
• Privacy: https://www.hcaptcha.com/privacy

Importing a remote image

When you click “Import image into this site” on a picture hosted elsewhere, the plugin downloads that one URL, which you chose, and stores the file in your Media Library.

Gravatar

Used only if a listing template you designed includes the {author_image} placeholder. It resolves through WordPress’s own get_avatar_url(), so unless another plugin serves avatars locally the portrait is fetched by visitors’ browsers from gravatar.com, which then receives their IP address and user agent. A template without that placeholder requests nothing.

• Terms: https://automattic.com/terms/
• Privacy: https://automattic.com/privacy/

Privacy

The plugin stores form submissions and mailing-list subscribers in your own database. It sets no cookies of its own, runs no analytics, and sends nothing anywhere about you or your site. Secrets you enter (SMTP password, provider API keys) are encrypted at rest with your site’s own salt and are always removed when the plugin is deleted.

Credits

The click-to-edit layer (assets/bridge.js, assets/editor.js, assets/bridge.css and assets/editor.css) is derived in part from Open Design (https://github.com/nexu-io/open-design), Copyright 2026 Open Design contributors, licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0). Those files were ported from TypeScript and modified for WordPress, and each carries this notice. The Apache License 2.0 is compatible with version 3 of the GPL, which this plugin’s “GPLv2 or later” licence allows.