The Figma-to-WordPress Handoff Is Still Broken

A designer delivers a Figma file. Clean, beautiful, client-approved. Then it lands with the developer. Two weeks later, the live site looks close — but not quite. Spacing is off. A component breaks on mobile. The client notices. Now someone has to own it. Every agency has a version of this story.

That gap is where agencies lose time, money, and occasionally clients. It’s still one of the most expensive unsolved problems in WordPress agency work – not because the tools don’t exist, but because most teams haven’t built a real system around them.

This is about fixing that. Not with a single plugin or a magic export button. With a workflow.

“The collaboration features of Figma are unmatched. Your clients can leave comments directly on designs. Your developers can inspect elements without asking for specs. Version control means no more ‘final_final_ACTUALLY_FINAL.png’ files cluttering up your folders.”
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The Problem Isn’t the Tools. It’s the Gap.

Figma and WordPress were built for different jobs.

Figma is a communication tool — great at showing what something should look like, getting feedback, and aligning a team around a visual direction.

In May 2025, Figma added Grid Auto Layout at Config, a proper CSS grid system that maps much more cleanly to how WordPress block themes handle complex layouts. Good news for handoff quality. But only if the developer building in WordPress knows what they’re looking at.

WordPress is a publishing and management system — built for content operations, editorial control, and long-term flexibility.

WordPress 7.0 brings real-time collaborative editing to the block editor. Full Site Editing adoption grew 145% in 2025. The block editor is no longer the future of WordPress. A workflow built around page builders and classic themes is increasingly a workflow built for yesterday.

The gap between these tools is where the loss happens. A Figma file doesn’t know anything about WordPress block structure, theme.json tokens, or responsive breakpoints. A WordPress site doesn’t care what your design system looks like. Someone — usually a developer – has to translate one into the other.

Most agencies treat this as a people problem. Better briefs. Clearer specs. More Loom videos. Those things help, but the root issue is that the design process and the build process are still running on separate tracks. The goal is to get them on the same one.

What “Figma to WordPress” Actually Means in Practice

The phrase covers several very different workflows.

For some teams, it means a plugin or service that converts a Figma design into a WordPress theme or page builder blocks. For others, it means using Figma as a visual reference while a developer manually builds in Gutenberg or Elementor. For others, it’s hybrid — automation handles the structure, a developer adds the logic.

All three can work. None of them individually works without discipline.

A landing page with a hero and a CTA is a very different problem from a site with custom post types, dynamic archive templates, and a membership area. The simpler the design, the better automation handles it. The more it needs to respond to real content and real users, the more human judgment is required.

As developer Martin Staudt, who works across both tools, puts it: “The concept of ‘export to WordPress’ is tricky, because there’s no single WordPress output format. You’d need to know whether you’re targeting classic templates, Gutenberg blocks, or a specific builder. It works, but it’s rough around the edges.”

Knowing which kind of project you’re working on — before the design gets too far — is one of the most valuable decisions an agency can make.

The Figma Side: Design for Build, Not Just for Approval

Most translation loss happens before a developer touches the file — when a designer builds a beautiful mockup without thinking about how it will work in a CMS.

Auto Layout – and now Grid – everywhere.

Since Config 2025, Figma supports Grid Auto Layout alongside standard Auto Layout. Both matter for WordPress handoffs: Auto Layout is non-negotiable for components that flex with real content, Grid maps to how block themes handle complex layouts.

Every conversion tool on the market — Yotako, UiChemy, others — depends on Auto Layout being present to produce reliable output. Without it, you’re cleaning up in WordPress instead of building.

Reusable components with honest naming.

“Card – Variant 3 – Updated – Final” means nothing to a developer or a conversion tool. “Blog Card – With Author” does. UiChemy uses Figma layer names to map elements to page builder widgets — unclear names produce unclear output.

Design tokens that map to theme.json.

WordPress block themes store global styles — colors, spacing, typography — in theme.json. If Figma tokens are documented, they can map directly to theme.json values. If they’re not, a developer invents the mapping, and a mismatch is how you end up with five slightly different shades of the same brand blue baked into a site.

States and edge cases shown, not assumed.

Empty states, long headlines, mobile layouts for complex sections. If these aren’t in the file, they get improvised in production — and improvised decisions are how inconsistency gets baked in.

None of this is about perfection. It’s about reducing the number of questions that require a meeting to answer.

The WordPress Side: Choose Your Stack Before the Design Gets Too Far

One of the most common agency mistakes: letting the design run ahead of the technical architecture. The designer completes five page templates in Figma, the client approves everything, then someone realizes the target stack doesn’t support half of what was designed.

Decide early. The decision shapes everything.

Gutenberg with a block theme is the native WordPress path and, today, the most defensible long-term choice. Full Site Editing makes headers, footers, archive templates, and single post layouts all editable in the same block environment. WordPress 7.0 adds per-device block visibility and real-time collaboration — features that work in the block editor, not inside third-party builders.

A designer who understands the block system can make decisions in Figma that work with it rather than against it.

Elementor or another page builder gives more visual flexibility and faster output for some teams. Elementor v4 (early 2026) introduced Atomic Elements and global class support that conversion tools like UiChemy now map more accurately.

Legitimate for client sites that need to be editable by non-technical users – but the design file should account for how components actually get built inside the builder – not just what they look like in a Figma frame.

Custom block development is the highest-effort path and the right one for complex, high-traffic, or long-term sites. It produces the cleanest, most maintainable output — but requires the most alignment between designer and developer from the start.

There’s no universally correct answer, but it has to be decided before the design is locked — not after.

One underused starting point: WordPress.org maintains an official Figma account with publicly available design resources, including its full design system and theme files for Twenty Twenty-Five. For agencies working in Gutenberg, starting there rather than from a blank canvas gives the design process a foundation that already matches how WordPress builds.

Where Automation Actually Helps (And Where It Doesn’t)

For marketing pages, landing pages, and brochure-style sites, the current generation of Figma-to-WordPress tools can significantly reduce the gap between a signed-off design and a functional first pass in WordPress. Two tools worth knowing in detail.

Yotako (yotako.io, 71,000+ users) uses AI to analyse a Figma design and generate a complete WordPress theme. It’s the fastest route from mockup to browser preview. As of early 2026, the AI better recognizes structural elements like headers and footers, preserving intended layouts rather than restructuring them. It supports Gutenberg, Elementor, and most standard builders.

The non-negotiable is Auto Layout – designs without it produce broken mobile layouts. Forms, dynamic content, and WooCommerce payments require separate handling.

UiChemy (uichemy.com, 80,000+ users, version 4.8 as of April 2026) takes a different approach. Rather than generating a theme, it reads your Figma layer structure — frames, Auto Layout, hierarchy — and converts it into native page builder widgets. Real Elementor containers, real Gutenberg blocks, real Bricks sections. Actual editable components, not HTML dumps.

The March 2026 update added full Elementor v4 Atomic Elements support and global class syncing, meaning design tokens from Figma can carry through consistently to Elementor’s global settings.

One user review on WordPress.org captures the ceiling accurately: it handles roughly 70% of the design work, leaving 30% to fine-tune in the builder. For agencies, that 70% is the structural scaffolding that normally eats the most time.

Both tools are genuinely useful. Neither removes the need for a developer on anything beyond a brochure site.

There’s a useful benchmark in the WordPress community for thinking about where this technology stands — what some people, like PootlePress.com’s Jamie Marsland, are calling the Screenshot Test. The idea: take a screenshot of a website, upload it to an AI system, and ask it to produce a clean, editable WordPress page made of native blocks. Not code that renders. A real page you can open in the block editor and hand to a client.

The honest answer right now is that no tool passes that test reliably yet. These tools are acceleration, not transformation – and that’s the right framing. They free up developer time for the judgment-heavy work: content modelling, dynamic templates, accessibility, and performance.

Responsive behavior is where the problems consistently appear first. A design clean at 1440px needs to work at 375px with real editor-written content, not placeholder text. UiChemy’s Responsive Output Manager lets you set custom values across breakpoints — but only works with what the Figma file gives it.

Dynamic content is the other persistent gap: archives, filtered listings, and taxonomy pages. No conversion tool handles these well, and trying to force them into an auto-generated structure costs more time than building properly from scratch.

Use automation to reduce translation work from Figma to WordPress. Not to eliminate developer judgment.

What This Workflow Looks Like End to End

1. Architecture first, design second.

Before any Figma frames, align on the WordPress stack, content types, and key templates. What are the post types? What do editors actually manage? This conversation takes an hour. Skipping it costs days.

2. Design with a system.

Auto Layout and Grid throughout, documented tokens that map to theme.json, components, not just pages. Start from WordPress.org’s official Figma resources if you’re building in Gutenberg.

3. Validate the design against the build target.

Walk the developer through the file to check what can actually be built as designed. This is where impossible layouts surface while they’re still cheap to fix — and where you decide what automation handles versus what gets built manually.

4. Use automation selectively.

UiChemy or Yotako for structural sections and simple pages. Flag immediately what needs manual work: interactive components, dynamic templates, and responsive edge cases. The automated output is a first draft, not a deliverable. Fix the Figma file before running the tool, not after.

5. Build for the editor, not just the reviewer.

Before launch, sit a real editor down and watch them try to update the site. What breaks when they upload the wrong image? A site the client’s team can manage stays healthy after launch — and stops generating the support calls that eat margin.

The Performance Question Agencies Get Wrong

A site can be pixel-perfect against the Figma file and still load slowly, fail Core Web Vitals, and rank poorly in search. Performance is part of the handoff, not an afterthought.

That means thinking about image formats during the design phase. Not specifying font stacks with six weights unless the design needs them. Understanding that conversion tools sometimes produce render-blocking CSS that needs cleaning up, and that every added plugin has a real cost in load time.

It also means hosting that doesn’t undermine everything else. A well-built site on the wrong host will be slow. Edge-delivered infrastructure with caching handled at the platform level — not bolted on through plugins — will be measurably faster and easier to maintain.

This is where Rocket.net fits into a Figma-to-WordPress workflow. Not at the design stage, but at the delivery stage – where the work done in Figma and built in WordPress meets real visitors.

Edge hosting with Cloudflare Enterprise built in means agencies don’t have to layer caching plugins onto already-complex WordPress builds, or manage the performance overhead conversion tools sometimes introduce. The infrastructure handles it. The team focuses on what they built.

The Bottom Line

The Figma-to-WordPress workflow isn’t broken because the tools are bad. It’s broken because most agencies treat it as two separate processes — design, then build — instead of one connected system.

With Figma’s Grid Auto Layout improving design-to-code fidelity, UiChemy and Yotako accelerating the structural first pass, and WordPress 7.0 bringing real-time collaboration to the block editor, the gap is genuinely narrowing. But it hasn’t closed.

The workflow still needs a system — and the agencies that build that system now will be the ones with the margin, the referrals, and the clients who stay.

When Figma defines structure and intent, and WordPress manages and publishes content on fast, reliable infrastructure, the result isn’t just a converted design. It’s a site that works — and keeps working.