So, each time you go to a web development team and ask to build a website, eight out of ten will recommend building it on WordPress.
But why? The reason WordPress is in such demand has a lot to do with its ease of use for both professionals as well as amateurs. In addition, the huge global WordPress community, thousands of free plugins, beautiful themes, security checks, and many other features make it one of a kind.
How to Make Sure Your Website is Following WordPress Standards?
The burning question is how do you know that your website is perfectly built and all WordPress standards have been followed?
At Genetech, we have been working on this CMS for over 10 years.
Almost each time that we are asked to update or maintain an existing WordPress website, we notice that it misses out on the basic standards and the developer has done a crappy job to cut corners.
In this article, I will take you through some of the standards that we maintain at Genetech, so that next time you hire a developer or build it yourself, you know exactly how to do it right.
Standards to Follow for your WordPress Website:
The following checkpoints will aid you to keep a check and balance for your WordPress website.
- Child Theme
- Unique Designs
- Updates
- Security
- Speed and Efficiency
1. Child theme:
WordPress themes come up with a variety of features and some really cool designs.
However, every theme cannot provide everything you might need. So at times, you have to customize it.
Did you know that most of the developers would go in and directly customize the parent theme?! What happens then is that, when this theme has an update and you run that update, all of the customizations get wiped out! And you are left with a broken site.
What Should be Done?
So here is what we do at Genetech: We always create a child theme for every new build and make all required customizations to the child theme. In this way, the parent theme stays intact and theme updates are a breeze.
2. Unique Designs:
In theme settings, there are few styling options available. Like you can change the color, pick fonts from the list provided, add favicon, etc.
With these limited options, one cannot come up with a unique design and thus your website may end up looking pretty generic.
What Should be Done?
The way we do it at Genetech and that our customers love, is that, by keeping in mind the theme limitations, our designers create a unique design for the customer that matches his branding and is crisp and to his liking.
Only once the customer is sold to the design is when we implement this design into the theme. And we not only design the home page, we design all the pages to give the customer a dry run of how the actual website will look like when done.
3. Updates:
It is really important to keep the website up to date.
People usually ignore this point and keep their website running on older WordPress versions, themes, and plugins versions.
Using deprecated plugins and older versions might result in a broken or compromised website.
What Should be Done?
It’s better to keep everything up to date as we do! Keep a monthly maintenance check on our customer projects to make sure nothing is broken or compromised.
4. Security:
There are multiple security plugins available that one can use to safeguard your website. People install them frequently but miss out on the very basic details for a better security check.
What Should be Done?
I have noticed very basic points that are missed out by the website developers, for example:
- Captcha is missing on the forms. Captcha is essential as it helps to reduce spam submissions so never miss it out.
- Admin URL is usually kept as default that is domain.com/wp-admin. We do not prefer keeping it as“wp-admin”, because everyone knows about it and it’s unnecessary exposure. So change the slug from “wp-admin” to something else related to the project name. This way accessing the backend URL becomes a little tricky.
- Admin ID is 1 by default. If you do not change the admin ID from 1 to something random, then the hacker will easily have your userID and only have to break your password.
5. Speed and Efficiency:
Website speed matters. Period.
We have seen websites having more than 30 plugins installed unnecessarily. This is a huge count!
The more plugins you install the lower your site speed will get because each plugin brings a lot of external code with it. So for example, for speed optimization, WordPress provides many plugins but not all of them always work.
What Should be Done?
While working on page speed one should have the understanding and impact of every single option activated from the plugin settings.
Our team installs plugins one by one and tests the impact on page UI and functionality. We check the combination of plugins and use them for what they work best for.
Do you want to explore some additional Secrets to Maintain a Website Successfully? Look no more and thank us later!
Conclusion:
I am certain that if your web development team follows the aforementioned guidelines closely, you can have an amazing WordPress website to be proud of.
If you are finding all of this cumbersome, here is a list of top Software Development Companies compiled by DesignRush to help you choose the best professional agency for your website; or you can contact us with your project/product ideas and we will do all that is required to deliver superior value and user experience.
Want to learn about How to Create a Better User experience? Here is an amazing blog for your better understanding of UX!
