Rapid Web Development using WordPress
Great software should work with minimum set up. (WordPress.org)
Web developers are often faced with lots of options about the tech stack that is available to build a web application. Some of the most popular ones are JavaScript, PHP, Java, Python, and all of its frameworks. They have to choose from those available options while considering the kind of website that they are going to build and several factors such as compatibility, reliability, scalability, time-to-delivery, usability, and others.
There are times when a small number of developers are requested to build one or two websites (in parallel) with a very short development timeline and lots of features and backlogs to be working with. To overcome this challenge, choose the web technology that is simple and quick to develop, popular with developers, well-documented, and able to satisfy most of the requirements.
One of the most popular and suitable options is WordPress.
📊 Introduction and Statistics
According to Wikipedia and About WordPress, WordPress is an open-source CMS (Content Management System) written on PHP, which emphasizing accessibility, performance, security, and ease of use. WordPress featured plugin architecture and a template system, allowing web developers to quickly create a website and expand its functionalities by installing plugins and web “templates” or themes. It was originally designed as a blog-publishing system, but then evolved into supporting other types of websites such as internet forums, e-learning websites, online stores, corporate landing pages, product showcases, and others.
An article from kinsta.com stated that 35% of all of the world’s websites were built using WordPress and also takes the cake with a market share of 60.8% of all CMS (Content Management System), which made WordPress one of the most popular CMS in use in the world. Moreover, 22% of the top 1 million online stores use WooCommerce, a very popular and widely-used e-commerce WordPress plugin. But on a downside, almost 95% of the hacked and compromised websites were built using WordPress, which also raised questions about the security and integrity of WordPress websites.
This website displays some of the WordPress’ featured websites, with some of them are owned by companies belonged to the Fortune 500 group, such as The Walt Disney Company, Microsoft, and Sony Musics. Most of the featured WordPress websites are corporate blogs, corporate landing pages, news outlets, and magazines.
🧑💻 Development Experience
To summarize my recent experience in rapid-developing an e-commerce WordPress site, I would say that the development process can be easy, but with a cost.
One of the advantages of creating a WordPress site is the ease of use. Due to WordPress’s nature as CMS, it requires minimal coding skills to develop, manage, and even install the website.
Consequently, my recent WordPress website project took about 3 weeks to finish and launch, while the original timeline for my project was scheduled for 3–4 months without WordPress.
Here are some of my experiences and tips to develop a WordPress site:
1. 🚀 Rapid feature addition
To add new features into your WordPress site, search, and install plugins from the WordPress plugin store. To change and customize the layouts, search, and install a suitable theme from the WordPress theme store. You can also develop it on your own and upload it to the WordPress dashboard. The whole process is basically plug-and-play. Although good themes with lots of customization options aren’t free and can get quite expensive. Then, most of the WordPress plugins are free, but most plugins have several functionalities that are locked within the paywall.
But, we can’t just simply choose a plugin, install it and activate it right away. We have to make sure that the plugin is essential and can be operated alongside the other plugins or your theme that is currently installed. Otherwise, errors due to conflicting plugins will occur and ruin your day.
2. 🎨 A major effort for customization
As I said before, it requires minimal coding skills to manage and develop a WordPress website…until you received a feature request that can’t be achieved by just customizing and adding a plugin or theme. So, you might think, “let’s write some code?” Not so fast! Beforehand, we have to fully understand the target plugin’s internal process and its connections with WordPress or any other plugin, which is quite time-consuming. Then you have to back up your website or put your website into maintenance mode, in the case when things have gone south. Finally, you can start writing custom codes in it.
Avoid writing the code straight away into the main theme, plugin or system files, because if you installed a new update, that code will be forever lost. It is highly recommended to use child themes and custom code inserter plugin instead.
After you write some custom codes or implementing something new into the WordPress site, don’t forget to test it and make sure that everything is OK.
3. 🩺 Troubleshooting and optimization can be tricky
A missing semicolon in a recently edited file or custom functions could make the whole website break down. If you accidentally break your WordPress website, the next right thing that you have to do is:
(1) Dive down deep into its system directory to delete or rewrite your code
(2) Check the error logs
(3) Disable the custom functions, and
(4) Put your website into the maintenance mode, that you should’ve done before making any major improvements or updates.
Some other errors could have happened due to the presence of another conflicting object. It could be the plugins, theme, or settings that are related or sometimes unrelated to each other or the custom functions that you wrote.
It is also important to think about web performance and optimization, especially when the WordPress site is loaded with tons of plugins, themes, media, user data, and custom scripts. It would get heavy and slow to load its pages, and potentially losing costumers.
To overcome this problem:
(1) Install some plugins that are dedicated for web performance and security
(2) Make sure that the size of the uploaded media files is small and without sacrificing the image quality
(3) Limit the content displayed on the dashboard page
(4) Update your themes and plugins (also to minimize the security risks), and
(5) Install only the necessary plugins while removing the unused ones.
📦 Wrapping Up
WordPress is an open-source web technology that is versatile and one of the most popular options for web development in the world. While developing a WordPress site can be quick and easy, it came with a cost. Pay attention to how to properly customize your WordPress site, especially when adding custom code or function. Then, understand the inner workings of a plugin and the impacts on the other plugins or WordPress itself to troubleshoot and not breaking the website. And finally, keeping your WordPress site to stay optimized and not taking a long time to load.
Source:
- https://www.toptal.com/wordpress/tips-and-practices/
- https://wordpress.org/showcase/
- https://wordpress.org/about/
- https://kinsta.com/blog/wordpress-statistics/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress
- https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/october-2017-wordpress-comics/
- https://wisdmlabs.com/blog/slow-wordpress-admin-fixes/
