Impress Bento Grid

A bento grid is a layout of different-sized tiles packed together, each holding one piece of content. Bento Grid brings that layout to WordPress as something you build by clicking, not by writing CSS.

Pick a preset and you have a finished grid: a complete theme, a layout rhythm and a mix of tiles that already looks designed. Then drag a tile to move it, drag its edge to resize it, and fill it with your own words and pictures. Place the finished grid on any page, in any editor.

There is no account and no key to paste. Every preset, theme, effect and tile ships inside the plugin and renders on your own site, so your grid keeps working exactly as you built it whatever happens to us. The one exception is the optional weather tile, which asks a public weather service for a temperature; it is described in full under External services below, and you can switch it off under Settings, Impress.

Six presets, five themes

Glass (frosted glassmorphism), Studio (dark cinematic), Gallery (near-white museum minimal), Agency (vivid gradient), Editorial (warm cream magazine) and Dashboard (live widgets). Each pairs a theme with its own spacing, type and motion personality, so switching preset repaints the whole grid rather than swapping a colour.

Full width, two ways

Edge to edge makes the whole grid bigger, breaking out of your content column. Background only keeps the tiles exactly where your page puts them and lets the background, and the light moving in it, run to the edges of the window behind them, so the grid sits on the page rather than in a box.

You arrange it by dragging it, whichever editor you use

Grids are built on the Impress, Bento Grids screen, so the same full designer is there whether your site runs the block editor, Elementor, WPBakery or a classic theme. A page builder does not get a cut-down version.

Drag a tile to move it. Drag its right or bottom edge to resize it, and the rest of the grid reflows under your hand as you go, so you are looking at the finished layout rather than at a form. Select a tile and its own fields appear: the words, the picture, the numbers. On a photo, drag the dot to choose which part survives the crop.

Build a grid once, give it a name, and place it on as many pages as you like: every editor offers your saved grids in a list, and the shortcode works anywhere. Change the grid later and every page that uses it updates.

Surprise me rearranges the whole grid for you, keeping every tile’s content and leaving no gaps.

A motion identity, not fifteen animations

Tiles tilt toward the cursor in 3D and the whole grid plane bends slightly under it. Tiles stagger in as they scroll into view. Each theme carries its own tilt strength and easing, so Glass feels springy and Editorial feels calm. One Motion control sets the whole grid to Full, Subtle or Still.

Living backgrounds

Behind the grid you can run Aurora (drifting light), Ripples, Fireflies, Grid warp (a dot field that bends toward the pointer), or your own photo. Individual tiles can carry their own effect: gradient mesh, aurora, noise flow, animated lines, or a spotlight that follows the cursor inside the tile.

Twenty-five tile types, including video

Photos with a slow Ken Burns pan, stats, quotes, a marquee, an avatar stack, a sparkline, a live pulse, a price, a logo wall and video. Self-building tiles: a headline that types itself, text that unblurs word by word, a graph that draws its bars, a ring that sweeps and counts, a big painted counter. Interactive tiles: a card that flips, a heart that counts up, a mini player, a switch. And live widgets: a ticking clock with a timezone toggle, current weather, and a drifting price ticker.

A video tile plays a file from your media library, or shows a poster with a play button for a YouTube or Vimeo link. Nothing is requested from YouTube or Vimeo until a visitor clicks play, so a page carrying a video tile stays fast and contacts nobody on load.

Works where you work

A block for the block editor, a widget for Elementor, an element for WPBakery, and a shortcode for everything else. All four render through the same code, so a grid looks the same wherever you place it.

Accessible and light by default

Every effect stops for visitors whose device asks for reduced motion, the tilt is off on phones, and animation pauses when the grid scrolls off screen. Tiles can be selected and resized from the keyboard as well as the mouse. Effect strength ships on Subtle, so the plugin is calm before you change anything.

External services

Two tiles can contact something outside your site, and only if you place one. A page carrying neither tile contacts nobody at all.

The weather tile is the first. You can switch it off entirely under Settings, Impress, in which case the tile shows a placeholder reading and no request is made.

When a weather tile is shown, the visitor’s browser requests the current temperature for the city set on that tile from Open-Meteo (https://open-meteo.com). Two requests are made: one to geocoding-api.open-meteo.com to turn the city name into coordinates, and one to api.open-meteo.com for the temperature. The city name and those coordinates are the only data sent. No personal data, no page URL and no site identifier is included, and no account or API key is involved. If the request fails the tile keeps its placeholder reading.

Open-Meteo terms: https://open-meteo.com/en/terms . Privacy: https://open-meteo.com/en/terms#privacy

The video tile is the second, and only when a visitor clicks play. A tile holding a YouTube or Vimeo link shows a poster image until then; on the click it loads that provider’s player, which receives the visitor’s browser request and your site’s address as the referring page. YouTube links are loaded from youtube-nocookie.com and Vimeo links are asked not to track (dnt=1). A video tile that plays a file from your own media library contacts nobody at all.

YouTube terms: https://www.youtube.com/t/terms . Privacy: https://policies.google.com/privacy Vimeo terms: https://vimeo.com/terms . Privacy: https://vimeo.com/privacy

No other part of this plugin makes a network request.

Credits

The demonstration photographs bundled with the starter layouts are AI generated. They are not photographs of real people or places, and no third party holds rights in them. They are provided under the same licence as the plugin, and are only there so a new grid opens with something to look at: replace them with your own pictures.