During my years of using WordPress, I have made mistakes that I have learned to avoid by implementing certain strategies. In my opininon, the wordpress best practices.

These mistakes have also taught me that the platform is secure and stable in terms of its ‘core’ and that problems are often caused by plugins or themes produced by third parties, whether they only slow down the website or worse still interrupt the service.

In fact, it can sometimes happen that you activate a plugin or a theme and discover that unfortunately the website no longer responds or that it responds but only generates a blank page.

There is no worse thing that can happen to a website administrator: you install a new plugin or change the current theme and the website no longer responds as before. Panic. A few beads of sweat make their way down your forehead, and you ask yourself: What have I done wrong? Can I retrace my steps and restore the situation as it was before?

On second thought, other misfortunes can happen to a website administrator, such as the failure of a migration from one hosting provider to another, but I’ll try to talk about this in a specific post. In the meantime, here are the points to bear in mind, in my opinion, before installing any theme or plugin on our WordPress website.

WordPress best practices : My opinion

Plugins and themes can cause weight issues. If you install dozens of plugins and dozens of themes, don’t expect your pages to load quickly. The minimum countermeasure is to deactivate plugins and themes that are not strictly necessary. Ideally, you should remove any theme or plugin that does not contribute to the proper functioning of your website.

In fact, once you have chosen the theme for your website, what is the point of keeping the themes that you have tried before and then discarded? The same applies to plugins. Let’s assume that you need to connect WordPress to Google Analytics. There are several plugins that meet this requirement, and you have tried four of them before you are satisfied. Definitely eliminate the three plugins that you have tried and discarded. Their presence is unnecessary and, especially if activated, they can make the whole website heavier.

Themes and plugins can also cause security problems. For some time now, hackers have been concentrating on these third-party products in order to find security holes for their own purposes.

Before installing a theme or plugin, it would be a good idea to check whether the product in question is compatible with the current version of WordPress and whether it has been updated recently. Is there a support forum? If it exists, is it frequented recently? Has it been installed by many people? It is dangerous to install third party products that have not been updated for some time. Perhaps the development has been abandoned, so it is difficult to assume that the developers can work on it to meet the latest security requirements.

Summary

My WordPress best practices : Before installing any third-party product, it is best to check that the product has been updated recently, has been installed by many people, is compatible with the current version of WordPress and has an active support forum.

Finally, a few words about the Media Library. If it is overloaded with images and videos, the Media Library can also slow down the loading of pages and fill up the disk space at your disposal. Ideally, you should upload images and videos that have already been compressed and delete unpublished images and videos from the Library. If your Library is already overloaded and you do not know what you can delete, there are plugins which, once installed and activated, allow you to compress and, if necessary, delete unused images. In this case too, the best procedure would be to install and activate the plugin, use it to delete the unnecessary and deactivate or better still delete the plugin itself.