How to Edit Several Gutenberg Blocks at Once on WordPress

WordPress switched its default editor to Gutenberg in late 2018, and a non-trivial chunk of long-time WordPress users still hate it for one reason: multi-block operations are harder than they were in the classic editor. In the classic editor, the whole post was a single text field, so multi-edit was just multi-select in a text box. In Gutenberg, every paragraph, image, and heading is its own discrete block. Selecting a range of them and operating on the range is not obvious from the UI. The shortcuts exist; they just aren't where you'd expect them.

Multi-Selecting Blocks

Click on a block to select it. Then hold Shift and click on another block. Every block between the two is now selected. This is the same range-selection pattern that file browsers use, and Gutenberg supports it once you know to try.

For a non-contiguous selection, hold Cmd (Mac) or Ctrl (Windows) and click each block you want to add to the selection. This works exactly the way it does in spreadsheets and finder windows.

Cmd+A (or Ctrl+A) inside a block selects the text of that block. Cmd+A again, with the block already fully text-selected, selects the entire block. Cmd+A a third time selects all blocks in the post. This three-press progression is the keyboard shortcut nobody discovers on their own.

Operations on Multi-Selected Blocks

Once you have multiple blocks selected, the toolbar at the top changes to show only the operations that apply to all of them. Delete works (the keyboard Delete key, or the trash icon). Cut and copy work (Cmd+X, Cmd+C). Paste works (Cmd+V), pasting all selected blocks at the cursor position. Drag-and-drop works: you can grab the selection and move it as a single unit.

What doesn't work: most styling operations only support a single block at a time. Changing the alignment, color, or font on a multi-selection silently applies to the first block only or fails entirely depending on the block type. This is the most consistent complaint about Gutenberg's multi-edit story, and it's the area where the block editor still lags behind a Word-style document editor.

Group Block: The Workaround

If you find yourself repeatedly multi-selecting the same blocks, group them. Select the blocks, click the toolbar's three-dot menu, and choose "Group." The blocks are now wrapped in a Group block, which can be styled as a single unit (background color, padding, text alignment all apply to the group as a whole).

Groups are also reorderable as one entity, which means you can drag a group of three or four blocks around the post much faster than dragging them individually. The right pattern for a long post: group anything that conceptually belongs together (a heading plus a paragraph plus a callout, for example) so that future edits operate on the group rather than on the individual blocks.

Reusable Blocks

For content that repeats across posts, convert a block (or a group) to a Reusable Block via the same three-dot menu. Reusable Blocks are stored in the database and can be inserted into any post. Editing a Reusable Block edits every instance of it across the site. This is the right pattern for site-wide CTAs, author bios, or boilerplate disclosure language.

The catch: editing a reusable block from inside one post still updates every other post that uses it, which is occasionally surprising. There's a "Convert to Regular Blocks" option that detaches an instance from the shared definition, which is the right move when you want to fork a one-off variant.

The Honest Take

Gutenberg's multi-block editing story is workable, not great. The keyboard shortcuts work, the group-block pattern handles most repeated edits, and the reusable block primitive covers cross-post consistency. The gaps are around bulk styling, which is genuinely worse than the classic editor for anyone editing long posts with a lot of inline formatting changes. WordPress is aware of this and the block editor's roadmap has been gradually improving the multi-block story across releases, but the experience in 2020 is still meaningfully behind a real document editor.