Sections Are the New Building Blocks of Modern Web Design

One of the major objectives we have at Duda is to provide our customers with easy-to-use design tools and resources, while at the same time enabling them to create their own resources and customizations. As a company catering to digital agencies and web professionals, this is an important concept since our users are looking for both productivity and flexibility.

Our vision is to build the best framework and tools for building websites, to use those tools in-house, and then open up them up to our entire community.

That is the reason we build beautiful templates, but also allow our users to create their own templates with ease. It’s also the reason we’ve built dozens of widgets, such as the Photo Gallery and Contact Form, but also invested in a widget builder that allows our customers to easily build their own widgets that work seamlessly in the Duda platform.

Today, we are applying this concept in a whole new way with Team Sections.

But before I explain what “ Team Sections” are, let’s first define the term “sections” and briefly discuss why they are so popular in web design.

Why Website Templates Are Not Enough Anymore

Typically, the website building process starts with the selection of a template. Templates are similar to complete websites, only with placeholder text and images. The problem with templates is their granularity — they are not flexible enough.

Since a template is essentially an example of a “complete website,” you need to customize it a lot in order to get something unique; otherwise, you end up with a site that has an unoriginal, cookie-cutter design. And on top of that, the template selection process can be quite difficult since you need to take a lot of factors into consideration quite early, which makes it very easy to get something wrong.

For example, would you choose a template based on its navigation design? Colors? Based on the homepage? Based on the type of pages the template includes? These are the criteria you have to evaluate before selecting a template; and if you’re halfway through building a website and realize you made a wrong choice, changing your template often means rebuilding the whole thing. Clearly, this is not the most efficient way to do things.

We see web professionals struggle with this challenge all the time. Some pros resolve the issue by limiting the customization of templates quite aggressively in order to hit operational budgets, but this can create a perception of not providing unique enough designs for clients. Others take the time to start with a blank canvas and build an entire website from scratch, but this makes it hard to hit profitability or be competitive.

There had to be a better way — and Duda found one.

Enter Reusable Sections

So what are “sections?" Sections are basically areas or rows of a website, and every website can be seen as a list of sections. Think of the hero image of a site as a section, or the features area as a section. When you analyze sections of a website, you can think of them as a combination of design and functionality together that are contributing to a page on a website. When responsive web design started to dominate the industry, sections as design elements became very popular as people started to design for a responsive grid, which made for a much easier design adaptation.

However, the power of sections is revealed when they are used as reusable building blocks for websites, and not just one-off custom builds.

In the last couple of years, many web design platforms and website builders started to offer sections as reusable objects you can add to a website. In the past, platforms offered only the basic building blocks such as images, text, buttons, photo galleries, etc.; now, platforms also offer sections such as “Contact Us”, “Our Features”, “Pricing”, and “Intro,” which are a combination of multiple elements with a predefined design and functionality.

For example, let’s take a closer look at the section below:

As we can see, this section is a combination of a background image, a title, three columns with corresponding icons, text in different sizes, and buttons.

There’s a good reason why reusable sections have become so popular. The granularity of sections makes them the ideal building blocks for creating websites. They are not too big, and not too small. And when done right, sections can really help to build beautiful and unique websites at a very rapid pace.

It is much faster to add different sections to a site and customize them as needed, rather than starting with one template and then making all the changes on the single component level.

Think of the pricing section I showed above — now, let’s go through a small exercise.

How much faster is it to adapt a reusable section to a business need rather than building it from scratch if it is not part of the initial template? I would assume 15 minutes — half an hour easy.

Now multiply this by the number of different areas you need when building a typical 10-15 page website and you end up with a huge time difference.

Reusable sections have several advantages over templates:

You can add sections anywhere on any page of a website. It doesn’t matter which template you started building the site with.
You can easily move sections inside the site you’re building.
It is easy to mix and match multiple sections on one site.
You can easily add or change a section of your site after it is built; changing a site template typically requires a lot of effort.

Don’t get me wrong, templates are still very important and we don’t think they are going anywhere. Templates provide inspiration and help users imagine what a site can look like in the end. They are also good for defining a site’s global design in terms of fonts and colors, for example.

It’s just that they are not enough to solve every problem. The combination of templates and sections is a winning formula.

Duda’s Take on Sections for Web Professionals — Team Sections

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, Duda has started offering our customers hundreds of reusable sections built by our in-house designers. Soon after we released this feature, we noticed it became one of the most used features on our platform.

In just a few months, more than 100,000 sections were added to websites by our customers.

We received a lot of positive feedback about this feature, and now we want to open this capability to our customers so they can build their own sections, just as they can build templates, widgets and other assets in Duda.

We listened, and recently released a new feature we call “Team Sections” — the ability to create sections and share them across the team.

This is a game changer for agencies and web professionals, as it completely shifts the paradigm from building templates to building sections and we see this already happening in many of our accounts. The flexibility and reusability of sections make their return on investment incredible.

These are some of the ways Duda’s customers are using Team Sections:a

Design once, reuse everywhere — Some of our largest customers who build hundreds or thousands of sites a month are building libraries of reusable sections according to their style guide, customer needs, and best practices. These sections are built by a few experienced designers and used by the entire website building team.
Copy and paste between sites — This is the most immediate use case and one of the most popular ones, too. Our customers often want to copy an area they built for one customer to another. They can easily do this by saving the area as a section and adding it to a new site later.
Library of industry-specific sections — Many of our clients serve a specific vertical, such as auto dealerships, for example. They create multiple sections for getting a car quote and then use those sections when building sites. Since they create multiple sections for the same use case, it helps them to ensure that every site looks unique and they don’t repeat the same design too often.
Using sections as page templates — Some of our customers believe the most effective building block for websites is a page object. They build a library of long pages constructed from multiple sections and reuse them later when adding new pages to their sites.
Many of our widgets work very nicely together with the Team Sections approach, as you can add widgets to sections, mix them with other elements, and configure them.

We are very excited about the possibilities that Team Sections open up and look forward to seeing the creative sections built by our customers.

Core web vitals: What agencies need to know in 2026

By Shawn Davis • April 1, 2026

Core Web Vitals aren't new, Google introduced them in 2020 and made them a ranking factor in 2021. But the questions keep coming, because the metrics keep changing and the stakes keep rising. Reddit's SEO communities were still debating their impact as recently as January 2026, and for good reason: most agencies still don't have a clear, repeatable way to measure, diagnose, and fix them for clients. This guide cuts through the noise. Here's what Core Web Vitals actually measure, what good scores look like today, and how to improve them—without needing a dedicated performance engineer on every project. What Core Web Vitals measure Google evaluates three user experience signals to determine whether a page feels fast, stable, and responsive: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how long it takes for the biggest visible element on a page — usually a hero image or headline — to load. Google considers anything under 2.5 seconds good. Above 4 seconds is poor. Interaction to Next Paint (INP) replaced First Input Delay (FID) in March 2024. Where FID measures the delay before a user's first click is registered, INP tracks the full responsiveness of every interaction across the page session. A good INP score is under 200 milliseconds. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability — how much page elements unexpectedly move while content loads. A score below 0.1 is good. Higher scores signal that images, ads, or embeds are pushing content around after load, which frustrates users and tanks conversions. These three metrics are a subset of Google's broader Page Experience signals, which also include HTTPS, safe browsing, and mobile usability. Core Web Vitals are the ones you can most directly control and improve. Why your clients' scores may still be poor Core Web Vitals scores vary dramatically by platform, hosting, and how a site was built. Some of the most common culprits agencies encounter: Heavy above-the-fold content . A homepage with an autoplay video, a full-width image slider, and a chat widget loading simultaneously will fail LCP every time. The browser has to resolve all of those resources before it can paint the largest element. Unstable image dimensions . When an image loads without defined width and height attributes, the browser doesn't reserve space for it. It renders the surrounding text, then jumps it down when the image appears. That jump is CLS. Third-party scripts blocking the main thread . Analytics pixels, ad tags, and live chat tools run on the browser's main thread. When they stack up, every click and tap has to wait in line — driving INP scores up. A single slow third-party script can push an otherwise clean site into "needs improvement" territory. Too many web fonts . Each font family and weight is a separate network request. A page loading four font files before rendering any text will fail LCP, especially on mobile connections. Unoptimized images . JPEGs and PNGs served at full resolution, without compression or modern formats like WebP or AVIF, add unnecessary weight to every page load. How to measure them accurately There are two types of Core Web Vitals data you should be looking at for every client: Lab data comes from tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, and WebPageTest. It simulates page loads in controlled conditions. Lab data is useful for diagnosing specific issues and testing fixes before you deploy them. Field data (also called Real User Monitoring, or RUM) comes from actual users visiting the site. Google collects this through the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) and surfaces it in Search Console and PageSpeed Insights. Field data is what Google actually uses as a ranking signal — and it often looks worse than lab data because it reflects real-world device and connection variability. If your client's site has enough traffic, you'll see field data in Search Console under Core Web Vitals. This is your baseline. Lab data helps you understand why the scores are what they are. For clients with low traffic who don't have enough field data to appear in CrUX, you'll be working primarily with lab scores. Set that expectation early so clients understand that improvements may not immediately show up in Search Console. Practical fixes that move the needle Fix LCP: get the hero image loading first The single most effective LCP improvement is adding fetchpriority="high" to the hero image tag. This tells the browser to prioritize that resource over everything else. If you're using a background CSS image for the hero, switch it to anelement — background images aren't discoverable by the browser's preload scanner. Also check whether your hosting serves images through a CDN with caching. Edge delivery dramatically reduces the time-to-first-byte, which feeds directly into LCP. Fix CLS: define dimensions for every media element Every image, video, and ad slot on the page needs explicit width and height attributes in the HTML. If you're using responsive CSS, you can still define the aspect ratio with aspect-ratio in CSS while leaving the actual size fluid. The key is giving the browser enough information to reserve space before the asset loads. Avoid inserting content above existing content after page load. This is common with cookie banners, sticky headers that change height, and dynamically loaded ad units. If you need to show these, anchor them to fixed positions so they don't push content around. Fix INP: reduce what's competing for the main thread Audit third-party scripts and defer or remove anything that isn't essential. Tools like WebPageTest's waterfall view or Chrome DevTools Performance panel show you exactly which scripts are blocking the main thread and for how long. Load chat widgets, analytics, and ad tags asynchronously and after the page's critical path has resolved. For most clients, moving non-essential scripts to load after the DOMContentLoaded event is a meaningful INP improvement with no visible impact on the user experience. For websites with heavy JavaScript — particularly those built on frameworks with large client-side bundles — consider breaking up long tasks into smaller chunks using the browser's Scheduler API or simply splitting components so the main thread isn't locked for more than 50 milliseconds at a stretch. What platforms handle automatically One of the practical advantages of building on a platform optimized for performance is that many of these fixes are applied by default. Duda, for example, automatically serves WebP images, lazy loads below-the-fold content, minifies CSS, and uses efficient cache policies for static assets. As of May 2025, 82% of sites built on Duda pass all three Core Web Vitals metrics — the highest recorded pass rate among major website platforms. That baseline matters when you're managing dozens or hundreds of client sites. It means you're starting each project close to or at a passing score, rather than diagnosing and patching a broken foundation. How much do Core Web Vitals actually affect rankings? Honestly, they're a tiebreaker — not a primary signal. Google has been clear that content quality and relevance still dominate ranking decisions. A well-optimized site with thin, irrelevant content won't outrank a content-rich competitor just because its CLS is 0.05. What Core Web Vitals do affect is the user experience that supports those rankings. Pages with poor LCP scores have measurably higher bounce rates. Sites with high CLS lose users mid-session. Those behavioral signals — time on page, return visits, conversions — are things search engines can observe and incorporate. The practical argument for fixing Core Web Vitals isn't just "because Google said so." It's that faster, more stable pages convert better. Every second of LCP improvement can reduce bounce rates by 15–20% depending on the industry and device mix. For client sites that monetize through leads or eCommerce, that's a revenue argument, not just an SEO argument. A repeatable process for agencies Audit every new site before launch. Run PageSpeed Insights and record LCP, INP, and CLS scores for both mobile and desktop. Flag anything in the "needs improvement" or "poor" range before the client sees the live site. Check Search Console monthly for existing clients. The Core Web Vitals report surfaces issues as they appear in field data. Catching a regression early — before it compounds — is significantly easier than explaining a traffic drop after the fact. Document what you've improved. Clients rarely see Core Web Vitals scores on their own. A monthly one-page performance summary showing before/after scores builds credibility and makes your technical work visible. Prioritize mobile. Google uses mobile-first indexing, and field data shows that mobile CWV scores are almost always worse than desktop. If you only have time to optimize one version, do mobile first. Core Web Vitals aren't a one-time fix. Platforms change, new scripts get added, campaigns bring in new widgets. Build the audit into your workflow and treat it like any other ongoing deliverable, and you'll stay ahead of the issues before they affect your clients' rankings. Duda's platform is built with Core Web Vitals performance in mind. Explore how it handles image optimization, script management, and site speed automatically — so your team spends less time debugging and more time building.

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By Ilana Brudo • March 31, 2026

Vertical SaaS must transition from tools to an AI-powered Vertical Operating System (vOS). Learn to leverage context, end tech sprawl, and maximize retention.

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