Open Letter to "WordPress Developers"

Someone recently posted in the #WordPress Experts Group about why WordPress is bad, and why Webflow is better. Their post was full of misinformation, but there were some half-truths too. This particular group is full of "developers" who are "building" websites with WordPress. The group is primarily made up of WP configurers who contribute to the bad reputation WordPress gets.

I like helping others, so I added a post in the group with some high level tips on how to build websites with WordPress well. Unfortunately, no one but the group members see the posts, so I thought I'd put it up where anyone can see it.

Here are my 10 tips on how to build with WordPress successfully.

Start with hosting.

A secure, reliable host that costs a little more will be significantly better than a shit one. Some good examples are WP Engine, Flywheel, etc. If you want to get into the nitty gritty yourself, try AWS's Lightsail, Linode, Digital Ocean, or similar. SpinupWP is also a good option to add on top of self hosting in the cloud.

Development Environments

Local dev is great. Give LocalWP, Lando with WordPress receipe, or even Github Codespaces a spin.

Don't use page builders

They'll save you time, but you'll stagnate as a developer, and they only complicate things as a site grows. If you're trying to build a WordPress site in a day, then you should probably be using something else like Wix or Webflow.

Plugins

Choose some good plugins that you can use for development and stick to them. My personal favourites are Gravity Forms, ACF Pro, Offload SES for emails, Query Monitor for trouble shooting, Rank Math for SEO (Yoast is fine, but a bit sluggish these days), Tinypng, etc.

Themes

Find a boilerplate starter theme that you use for every site, stick to it, and evolve it. I personally prefer UnderStrap, and Sage by Roots.io.

Use git version control.

Keep your design and logic out of your database. The DB should be for content. Have a deployment process for pushing changes.

OPTIMISE YOUR DAMN IMAGES

ALL OF THEM! Use WEBP where you can, or better yet, SVG's when possible. Most WP sites are slow because you're using a 1MB PNG file for a logo that could be a 1kb SVG.

Leverage caching.

If your server has Redis, perfect. It can keep regularly used queries in your servers' memory. It's significantly faster than having to run queries every time.

Minify where possible

Dequeue unused scripts. Don't add shit you don't need. Inspect the page, and look at how many scripts you have. Use the network tab of your browers' dev tools to see what's big, and what could be avoided.

ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS be learning and bettering yourself.

If you've been using a page builder for longer than a year or two, it's time to switch things up. Delete it now. Learn Bootstrap 5 or Tailwind. Pick up ES6, then a framework like Vue or React.

Bonus tip

If your next website isn't better than your last in every way, then you're not growing as a developer. Your code should be reusable on future projects, so there is no reason your next project should be worse in any way whatsoever.

Happy coding kids!