Nowadays, every website development company (big and small) are involved in WordPress Website Development but how many do it in the right way? Every designer and developer should know if they are building the WordPress Website in the right and secure manner. Today we will be discussing the best practices for building a WordPress Website.
WordPress, a content management system that powers 34% of all websites on the internet and 60% of websites that run on CMS. The power of WordPress is in the ecosystem and there are a lot of different plugins and themes.
Let us see some of the best practices on WordPress Website Development.
Best Practices on WordPress Website Development
To Use WordPress Site/Home URLs
In WordPress, you must configure which domain should be used by the website using a Site URL and Home URL. While WordPress has a wp-config.php file where you can hardcode the website’s URL, it is way easier to use the native way. In the WordPress Admin Dashboard (/wp-admin/) you can navigate to Settings > General and edit the WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL) fields. These fields should match and should begin with http:// or https://.
Stick to WordPress Coding Standards
The WordPress community is a rich community of developers who have worked tirelessly to make it the success as it is today. The developers have learned through the trial and error methods, and have put together coding standards to ensure the best success and security. If you are creating a plugin or theme via PHP, check out the PHP Coding Standards for WordPress to get started. And if you plan on developing with JavaScript, you can look to the JavaScript Coding Standards for WordPress. Doing so will set you up for success later on, as you hone your WordPress skills further.
Choose Plugin and Theme Wisely
When setting up a site, you will undoubtedly need to choose which 3rd party plugins and theme to use. It is best to choose a plugin or theme that is updated frequently and has high satisfaction ratings. Frequent updates mean the developer is interested in keeping their work compatible with the latest versions of WordPress. It also means they are more likely to help if you encounter conflicts with their code!
Updating Is a Must
WordPress typically releases updates many times per year. Often times, between major updates there will be maintenance/security updates as well. Not to mention, good plugin and theme developers will also release improvements and maintenance/security updates often. These updates are important to the integrity of a site! Be sure to log in at least once per month to check for any available updates and run them. If you want to play it safe, it’s best to create a development or staging instance for testing first. Then you can run the updates in this testing environment first, to ensure there are no issues.
Stay Secure
It’s best practice to take some preventative security measures on your website as well. There are many users, bots, and services on the internet that might attempt to access your site in a way you don’t want. Unwanted access could mean spam login attempts, spam comments, or even malicious bots that tons of traffic in an attempt to take your website down. There are a few simple ways to prevent security issues:
- Pick a secure Username and Password. Don’t use easy to guess Usernames like “Admin,” and ensure your password is over 10 characters and a mix of numbers, letters, and special characters.
- Use a Captcha or other filtering method on any submittable form. This helps ensure a bot or spammer can’t easily send repeated requests to these forms, which is one of the most common spam methods.
- Use a plugin or service for additional security. There are comprehensive security plugins available like iThemes Security or All-In-One WP Security & Firewall which cover your website from multiple vectors. These plugins keep track of fake login attempts, allow blacklisting and whitelisting, log user activity, and block brute force attackers. You can also configure a firewall like Sucuri WAF or Cloudflare to mitigate the risk of a DDoS attack and control your website’s traffic in a more granular way.
