WordPress web development is a crucial task that should be approached with modern best practices. To ensure extraordinary WordPress development, the quality of your code should be readable, reusable, modular, and maintainable. Without such qualities, you won’t be able to ensure outstanding WordPress development.
There are several development techniques and best practices that can help organizations to develop high-quality code. In this article, we’ll discuss such practices so that readers can implement them effectively in their WordPress development.
Strategies for Modern WordPress Development Approach
Modern WordPress Development Workflow is as below:
- Use Version Control
Also known as “source control”, version control refers to the practice of tracking and management of changes to a software code. So basically, this practice means using Git. Version control should be the very first thing you do after taking on WordPress web development.
Git makes it exceptionally easy to amend mishaps such as code mistakes, the appearance of malicious code, deleted files, and negative ramifications of version updates. git reset can help in rectifying these errors and git checkout can help to restore the original files.
- Use Separate Environments
Doing development on live sites leads to downtime and unhappy clients. So, you should always use separate development environments, ideally three in number. Separate development environments with code going in a single direction towards production in a sure shot method to avoid collisions of any sort. An outstanding way to set up different environments is by using environment variables.
Ideally, the direction of the code should be local > staging > production, which implies that all core updates, plugin, and theme updates should be done locally first. From there, it should move towards testing on staging and then be deployed to production.
- WordPress Theme development
Using WordPress Codex best practices for WordPress theme development is important to achieve the best outputs. Hence, you must follow PHP coding standards according to the Codex tutorials.
In addition, paying attention to the following practices helps as well:
- Keep the PHP file organized and clean
- Use Action and Filter hooks extensively
- Instead of putting everything in the PHP file, extract more significant logic to standalone plugins
- Use WordPress AJAX for exceptional UX
- Have translation-ready themes
- Maintain the template hierarchy and template tags correctly
- Use flexible plugins like Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)
- Use Modern Tooling: Sass and ES6+
For front-end development, the following core technologies are easily the best ones:
- ES6+ – It is modern-day JavaScript.
- Sass – It is the modern-day CSS preprocessor that makes CSS writing easier, less complicated, faster, and smaller.
- Webpack – It is the tool that ensures backward compatibility to use all these modern features.
While Webpack acts as a front-end app compiler that is responsible for generating files to use in a browser, Sass allows you to perform the following:
- Nesting CSS selectors
- Using math operators
- Using variables and mixins
- Code modularization via partials
- Extending CSS to envelop specific selectors
- Use Linting
Referring to automated checking of errors in code, linting is a boon to most developers handling projects of any size. Usually, simple editors such as VSCode need a dedicated program called a “linter” that can be set up by configuring your editor to run it whenever you save a file.
For PHP, the de-facto linter is PHP_CodeSniffer that can verify if your code is following the style guidelines or not, in addition to checking syntax errors. It helps to simplify the practice of following code standards.
On the other hand, ESLint is the widely known linter for JavaScript as it supports custom configurations for all JavaScript frameworks and has an extensive ruleset.
Incorporating linting into your CI/CD pipeline is a powerful step as all your code will be validated automatically before being deployed.
- Use the WordPress REST API
The REST API is a standardized interface of WordPress to request and modify data remotely. It is responsible for standardizing the communication between the front-end and the back end, leading to benefits like:
- Modularity
- Readability
- Reusability
By eliminating templates that have PHP, HTML and SQL mixed together and bringing in the templates with just HTML that have data placeholders passed as parameters, passing the data in PHP becomes almost the same as passing the data through the means of a REST API to a front-end app, along with becoming easier.
- Gutenberg is awesome
Gutenberg is the new WordPress editor. All relevant custom fields are integrated seamlessly with the Gutenberg editor in the form of custom blocks, which allows you to build complex post layouts using your native blocks and custom blocks covering all required custom logics.
Created by the core development team of WordPress, Gutenberg is extensible, flexible, and supported. Being React-based, it is fast and provides an exceptional user experience. The WordPress web development team adds more and more to this powerful tool with each new release.
- WordPress Plugin development
Choosing the 100% object-oriented programming path for WordPress plugin development is one of the best approaches. You can use a boilerplate generator to create a basic plugin setup to optimize your processes and then follow the best practices of Codex and PHP to deliver functionalities that match your expectations and requirements.
Wrapping Up
WordPress is an exceptional content management system that is at the peak of its popularity. Many people and organizations leverage WordPress development for their professional needs.
WordPress web development is tough. However, there are several resources and tools offered by WordPress itself to ease the process. Adopting the apt WordPress development approach by leveraging best practices can help you to ensure exceptional WordPress web development.
In this article, we at AsianWeb Technologies provided you with a list of some of the best practices for outstanding WordPress web development. Having knowledge of these practices and implementing them effectively can help you to ensure high-quality WordPress development for your business.
If you want to ensure exceptional WordPress development for your business, it will be helpful to partner with a leading WordPress development company. However, make sure that you do thorough research and invest time in communication before finalizing your WordPress web development partner.