WordPress, an imperious easy-to-learn tool, requires a lot of mastered skills for anyone to be a professional in it. Being the most common Content Management System around, it's no brainer that lots of business owners are on the lookout for WordPress developers for hire so they can dominate the online market.
But what are the key WordPress how to’s business owners look for?
Aside from knowing the fundamentals of this important tool, you must also be proficiently skilled in using WordPress to create and develop themes, plugins, widgets, a complete website, and a web application through the use of REST API. You will need to be very good with HTML, CSS, PHP, MYSQL, JavaScript, AJAX, and jQuery before you can boldly say you are a WordPress expert.
By becoming a WordPress developer, it’s your choice to either share your work for free via WordPress repositories or monetize it by finding clients.
In this article, we will explain intensively all the essentials you need to know in order to become a proficient WordPress developer.
Table of contents
WordPress Challenges You Should Know How to Solve
In this section, we have made available for you some possible challenges you must be familiar with and their respective solutions:
Install WordPress
Installing WordPress is one of the simplest things to do – you are done with its installation in less than 5minutes. Most importantly, there are a few important things you need to pay attention to before proceeding to installing WordPress.
First and foremost, download and ensure you have a properly unzipped WordPress package. The next thing you have to do is to create an MYSQL database and user for WordPress on your web server.
Try as much as possible to configure the wp-config.php file without forgetting to upload WordPress files to your preferred location on your web server. Lastly, by simply having access to the URL in a browser, run the WordPress installation script.
Add Google Analytics
Google analytics comes with advanced features to improve WordPress.com stats. Why is important to do this? If you care so much about how visitors get to your site then you would love everything about funnel reporting.
Another interesting thing about Google analytics is its goal conversion that helps in measuring how a visitor complete tasks such as contact form, getting to the product page, etc.,
To get started on how to make this happen, create an account on the Google Analytics site. And if you have used Google Analytics with other sites before, you can simply create a new account in your existing Google account.
How do you create a new analytics profile? All you need to do is to click “Admin" in your google analytics account and click "Create Account” to simply have a new analytics profile.
Once the aforementioned is properly done, the next thing is to fill the Property Name, Reporting Time Zone, and Currency in the Property Setup. Fill in your business details and click Create after completing everything in the Property Setup.
After all the above steps are done and dusted, you will be provided with your Measurement ID. Finally, to get your website connected to Google Analytics and start sending data to Google, copy and paste the whole Measurement ID from the Google Analytics site into the “Google Analytics Measurement ID” box.
Backup WordPress Site
Backing up your WordPress site requires two parts: Files and Database. As you are planning to back up your entire website have it at the back of your mind that you are also going to need to backup your database too.
What Differentiates a WordPress Site From a WordPress Database?
A WordPress site includes key features such as WordPress Core installation, WordPress plugins, WordPress themes Images and files, JavaScript, PHP, and other code files Additional files and static web pages. A WordPress database, on the other hand, exclusively comprises only your posts and lots of generated data on your site.
How Do You Backup Your Site?
Almost every host makes available software for backing up sites. You can check with your host to discover the service and programs they offer. Programs like WINSCP enable you to sync with your site so that you can have a mirror content copy on your server and hard drive up to date. You can easily compile these files to a folder on your PC many thanks to FPT Clients or Unix Shell Clients. You might want to save space by compressing them into a zip file and have more than one version of them. To simply backup your WordPress database, you can go with either Plesk, cPanel, Direct Admin, Ensim, vDeck, or Ferozo.
Build a WordPress Site
Do It Yourself! – you can easily build a WordPress site on your own within a short limited minute. Choosing WordPress as your site platform is the first step you have to accomplish when building a website on your own.
After that, the next thing is to pick the name of your choice for your site, buy a domain and hosting. The more you interact with the platform the more you become very conversant with the WordPress UI.
You have to pick a theme/design that goes well for your website and get enough plugins to extend the functionalities and abilities of your site. Once you are done practicing the above-mentioned, you can proceed to create a basic page and consider starting a blog.
Update PHP in WordPress
PHP versions are getting updated every ear and there because of these two main reasons: security and speed. In other words, an updated PHP version is much faster, resource-friendly, and more secure than its predecessors.
To simply update the PHP version of your WordPress site, navigate to “Sites” and click the particular site you want to change the PHP version on. After that make a click on the “Tools” tab. Lastly, click on the drop-down and make a selection on your preferred PHP version under the “PHP Engine”.
You will definitely get a prompt after selecting the PHP version of your choice. In order to confirm the particular one you have chosen, click on the “Modify PHP version” button.
Increase Memory Limit
As WordPress overrides the memory_limit setting of PHP, you will have to edit the WordPress wp-config.php file in order to get the memory limit of your WordPress app increased.
The location of the wp-config.php file...
You will find the wp-config-PHP file in the public folder of your app at “apps/APPNAME/public”.
How Do You Increase the Administrative Memory Limit?
For this particular one, WordPress does without the memory limit of PHP and does its own configuration. You must be ready to set WP_MAX_MEMORY_LIMIT in wp-config.php if you desire to change the memory limit to anything entirely different from 256MB.
For example, add “define('WP_MAX_MEMORY_LIMIT', '512M') ;” if you want to increase the memory to 512MB.
Open the wp-config.php file of your app and add “define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '512M') ; ” if you care to increase the memory limit of your public-facing pages to 512MB.
Speed Up Your Site
The importance of a highly-speedy WordPress site can’t be overemphasized. A WordPress developer must know how to make this happen because search engines rank a fast-loading site higher than the slow-loading ones. Any important reason is that every online buyer prefers sites that their pages load very fast within a second.
Only consider getting hosting from a better hosting provider and make sure you use a lightweight framework/theme. As you are reducing your image sizes, don't forget to minimize your CSS and JS files too.
In addition, make use of advanced caching mechanisms with a caching plugin and don’t hesitate to use CDN (Content Delivery Networks). Lastly, clean up your WordPress database, deactivate unwanted plugins, have minimalistic external scripts and enable GZIP compression.
Conclusion
The best WordPress developers for hire know how to effortlessly perform the tasks we have mentioned above in the text. You won’t only attract the services of potential clients when you are skilled in all of them. The WordPress How-To’s would also make you stand out among other developers.
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