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You are here: Home / Web Development / WordPress best practices: our top tips

WordPress best practices: our top tips

Be clear if WordPress is right for you

By finding out about the nature of your business and what your website needs to do we’ll help you work out if WordPress is really the best CMS for you or if a different system would be better.

Keep the WordPress core and plugins up to date

We will always advise keeping the WordPress core and plugins on their latest versions to keep your site secure and take advantage of new features in this fast-developing branch of technology. However, we know that updating WordPress to the latest version can be a scary prospect, especially if you’ve lost data or functionality before with an update. We can do this for you as part of a hosting and support package.

Use a robust premium theme framework

Have you chosen a theme based on looks then found it doesn’t have the functionality you were expecting? The best practice for WordPress is to use a powerful theme framework with a lot of functionality built in and guarantee of maintenance, then create a child theme for custom styling and extra functionality. We use only the premium theme framework Genesis for our custom child themes. We never change anything in either the WordPress core or the theme framework because we want our sites to be upgradable and secure.

Be very, very fussy about plugins

The majority of problems with WordPress come from plugins that are not working efficiently or which are clashing with each other, for example loading different versions of javascript onto a page, or a plugin that used to work well but hasn’t been maintained and updated alongside newer versions of WordPress and thus become buggy or broken. At Thameside Media we use only tried and tested plugins from reputable sources, and we may even decide to hard-code a function into a child theme in preference to using a plugin.

Test your site for speed

All content management systems slow down their sites because the server, database and your browser are given a lot more data to parse than with a static site. If your WordPress site is running painfully slow, though, we will investigate to see where the problem lies.

Use high-quality hosting

To run efficiently WordPress needs recent versions of PHP and MySql on the remote servers and a decent amount of bandwidth. (Don’t worry if you don’t know what these are.) The cheapest hosts are often not capable of delivering this. And as with any website, weak passwords or malicious people with access to your hosting account can be a security hazard. We put all our clients onto a premium dedicated WordPress hosting service.

Plan for backups and updates

We will keep a daily backup of your WordPress site as well as backing it up before any major development work or upgrade.

 

See our WordPress hosting and support plans.

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