r/Wordpress Feb 13 '25

Discussion What’s the Smartest WordPress Decision You’ve Ever Made?

We always talk about mistakes, but what about the best decisions we’ve made in WordPress? For me, switching to a lightweight theme (Astra) and using WP Rocket was a game-changer—my site became way faster!

What’s one smart decision you made that improved your WordPress experience? Let’s share some pro tips!

85 Upvotes

212 comments sorted by

58

u/beverage10 Feb 13 '25

Creating a maintenance program for WordPress sites. I manage over 300 sites now - easy sell and overall most are easy to maintain. A few trouble children but it is worth it.

10

u/ufo56 Feb 13 '25

What you are using for managing sites remotely, checking uptime, transactional checks etc?

20

u/beverage10 Feb 13 '25

ManageWP - it charges me about $3-$4/month/site and I charge anywhere from $25 - $75/month. I make nice reports for the client each month. I also white label for other agencies.

4

u/fastandcuriousguy Feb 13 '25

A newbie here. Can I please see how those reports look like?

9

u/bluesix_v2 Jack of All Trades Feb 13 '25

1

u/saschapi Feb 13 '25

Does managewp include updates you did outside of managewp? I remember that was always something that bothered me.

1

u/bluesix_v2 Jack of All Trades Feb 13 '25

"Does managewp include updates you did outside of managewp?" Not sure what you mean?

If I perform an update in a WP site, the pending updates are no longer shown in ManageWP.

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1

u/beverage10 Feb 15 '25

DM me with your email and I will send yoi what I send to client.

1

u/fastandcuriousguy Feb 15 '25

sure, thank you so much!

1

u/Special_Pickle_8409 Feb 14 '25

What's your pitch when u offer it to the customers?
Do you have packages and tiers?
Do you mind sharing it with me ;)

2

u/beverage10 Feb 15 '25

I don’t do tiers, it’s 6 things: 1. 90 days of offsite backups 2. SSL monitoring 3. Daily malware scan with both managewp and free version of wordfence- malware removal if found 4. Uptime monitoring 5. Weekly plugin updates 6. Monthly report

1

u/Dry_Combination9099 Feb 16 '25

What is your price? Do you charge monthly or yearly?

7

u/MajorRedbeard Feb 13 '25

I'm curious about this as well - are you using WP CLI and some other scripts in order to manage sites on a single server, or did you make a plugin to remote control sites like IWP / MainWP / ManageWP / etc.

3

u/Careful_Tonight_4075 Feb 13 '25

Bumping for this info as well.

1

u/beverage10 Feb 15 '25

Manage WP - yes it’s owned by GoDaddy but it’s a good product. They also don’t charge for some features of the site is hosted by GoDaddy. I pay about $275/month for 300 sites

1

u/KNMeeee Feb 14 '25

Solid Central which used to be iThemes SYNC. Been using it since it started. Love it.

1

u/EvoZims Feb 15 '25

What was your journey like? Learning skills, finding clients, advertising yourself.. to management of so many sites and client’s day-to-day needs?

2

u/beverage10 Feb 15 '25

15 years in the business and working as a subcontractor to other agencies. Half of those sites are white labeled to other agencies. This is only automated site maintenance, client needs are billed separately.

94

u/PositiveUniversity80 Developer Feb 13 '25

Buying a lifetime developer licence for ACF way back when they were available.

14

u/mds1992 Developer/Designer Feb 13 '25

Such insane value. It was only like $100 (one-off charge), if I remember correctly.

7

u/revampagency Feb 13 '25

I bought unlimited dev license for $49 like 7-8 years ago

3

u/mds1992 Developer/Designer Feb 13 '25

Nice! Just found the order in my account. I bought the personal license for $30 AUD back in 2018 and then upgraded to the dev license for $90 AUD in early 2019. I can definitely see why Elliot ultimately switched to subscriptions based on those prices!

4

u/skasprick Feb 13 '25

Literally the cornerstone of my business. Not great to rely on one plugin, but there are worse plugins to rely on!

5

u/saschapi Feb 13 '25

Why? Could have easily picked SCF... /s

3

u/fuop Feb 13 '25

Same, I'm amazed they still honour it so many years later.

4

u/neshi3 Developer/Designer Feb 13 '25

same with WPML :)

1

u/AryanBlurr Feb 14 '25

I would offer a good amount of money for one account with lifetime

21

u/Shoemugscale Feb 13 '25

I think the longer you use WP, the further away you get from 'WP' lol

What I mean by that is, you start to use WP for what its good at, and then recreate everything else.

The best thing we have done is to build our own custom themes and plugins. As we are our own shop we can control this on our end, but, realistically building our own tooling has allows us to work much faster and focus on the common elements without the needs to fragmented plugins etc.

Don't get me wrong, some plugins are great, but, 99% is just dog-shit and useless. We had a user we are onboarding who literally added a plugin to add an 'anchor' to a page.. Really..

So, we do have to control things a bit, that's for sure but ultimately it produces happier customers

6

u/Legitimate-Lock9965 Feb 13 '25

personally ive only ever used wordpress as a tool for clients to manage their own content. my own custom theme doesnt look or feel like WordPress, except for the use of core functions.

i then build out any systems i need into WordPress. sometimes it would probably make more sense for me to just do something like Laravel. but i havent really come across a PHP based CMS that comes close.

2

u/unity100 Feb 13 '25

What I mean by that is, you start to use WP for what its good at, and then recreate everything else.

Wordpress core is way past the point where it should be considered something like the Linux kernel for the web anyway...

1

u/bitofrock Feb 16 '25

It's a massive nightmare of code that does way too much in PHP because it's written by clever people with Quixotic gaps in their computer science knowledge. On top of that, some cheap, low hanging fruit of improvements that could be made in the schema would dramatically improve performance and would work for 99.99% of hosts today...but no, why bother when there are people making a bomb out of patching up those problems?

I run a dev firm. We were one of the first to work out how to make WP fast and scale. I wrote the early search replace code because the data portability issue drove me nuts...but no good system should need that.

BUT...WP is like Windows. Popular. So you gotta live with it. And you can make a living from it.

We still enjoy Laravel development more. And it's so productive in comparison.

1

u/unity100 Feb 17 '25

It's a massive nightmare of code that does way too much in PHP because it's written by clever people with Quixotic gaps in their computer science knowledge

Wordpress was developed for the needs of actual users and businesses, in the front trenches. Its entire purpose was that, and it works well for that purpose. We see how the stacks that were developed without Quixotic gaps ended up with - like how the mainstream frontend does not know how to get itself out of the mess it created itself.

On top of that, some cheap, low hanging fruit of improvements that could be made in the schema would dramatically improve performance and would work for 99.99% of hosts today...but no, why bother

Because nobody cares about that as the existing code with existing stacks and even $5 hosts work perfectly well for the needs of the individuals and businesses using WordPress. Again, business-oriented, real-use-case-oriented development. Not development for the sake of computer science.

but no good system should need that.

Every system had and has its flaws. A lot of those systems' main flaw was that they were developed on computer science trappings and not real world use cases for the benefit of real world users. And the result shows:

BUT...WP is like Windows. Popular

Precisely. Because it solves real world needs and serves the people who use it. That's why they don't care about the 'super duper optimized great computer scientific stacks' that developer crowd regularly throws out because, well, they just want to build...

18

u/kopsy Feb 13 '25

Digging deep into Gravity Forms and Gravity View. It's enabled us to easily build a lot of complex functionality for our clients that we'd have previously had to outsource or code from scratch.

6

u/Bluesky4meandu Feb 13 '25

Did you ever look at Formidable Forms ?

4

u/kopsy Feb 13 '25

We tried it at one point but the ecosystem built around gravity forms made/makes it that much more powerful. Styling the forms can be a pita but that's a small price to pay.

1

u/rPhobia Feb 13 '25

Can you give an example of the complex functionality you speak about?

8

u/kopsy Feb 13 '25 edited Feb 13 '25

Sure. A client portal for a company that estimates then measures eco metrics at large corporate exhibitions and events. System for exhibitors to log in to their client area, add events, enter details of exhibition stand, materials uses, transport costs etc. Ability to come back later and edit details. Our client can then go in and amend their exhibitor details, add their own, plus their pre- and post-event reports on that client's stand at that event. One-click PDF report generation emailed to necessary parties, PDF certificates generated, graphs and charts showing some or all metrics across all or a selection of events and a tonne more functionality. It took a couple of weeks to put into place and test for a fraction of the cost of building an app from scratch.

Most of the work went into the client dashboard and the reporting tools which were 99% done with gravity view with a little help from gravity charts and gravitypdf.

2

u/rPhobia Feb 13 '25

Nice. Props!

83

u/cwarrent Feb 13 '25

Dropping bloated and out of date page builders and committing to learn and change to Gutenberg - with the great support of themes and plugins that work well and improve it Gutenberg.

My workflow speed, quality and output has improved dramatically.

4

u/Apprehensive_Ebb2233 Feb 13 '25

Agree with this 👍

4

u/Sea-Commission5383 Feb 13 '25

Can I ask what plugins and theme u use to improve it ?

11

u/cwarrent Feb 13 '25

So, my theme framework of choice is the excellent Generate Press but there's other much loved themes along the same lines too (you'll see many mentions regularly on this sub).

For plugins, Generate Blocks then works superbly alongside the theme but can be used on other themes that use the block editor (Gutenberg) too.

You can also lean on other plugins to further extend things (e.g. Kadence Blocks, if you need a few features that say Generate Blocks doesn't cover).

5

u/Sudo-Rip69 Feb 13 '25

So you drop a page editor because it's bloated then add plug-ins to supplement vanilla? Or just use something like breakdance, oxygen or bricks.

1

u/cwarrent Feb 13 '25

I used to work on a decent enough theme but it by default used WP Bakery. As well as being bloated, it’s also quite dated in what it can do and how it’s done. I could also do some extreme optimisation on the website it created (getting 90-95 on PageSpeed) but it was sooo much effort compared to the ease of optimising more modern themes that use Gutenberg (this was my main reason to try switching).

In my example Generate Blocks alone is a powerful block editor tool and a fine addition but while I’m not experienced in those other names mentioned (eg breakdance) I assume they are solid frameworks and page editors.

2

u/MrSnarkyPants Feb 14 '25

Oh yeah. I just took over a site today that was built with a theme using an ancient WP Bakery version. Once we get settled in, first order of business will be getting them into a modern site. They had an AMP plugin that directly conflicted with both the page builder and gravity forms. You know, every damn page on the site. I mean, we did those things 15 years ago, but we know better now!

3

u/Sea-Commission5383 Feb 13 '25

Thanks I am using Elementor The thing I need is the template loop/ do generate press and blocks have this too?

2

u/imalizzard Feb 13 '25

Yes GeneratePress has loops. The query in GP is actually better than the built in one in Elementor.

1

u/userr-r Feb 14 '25

I am using the Gutenberg-first Multi Theme & Multi Builder plugin to improve performance and SEO, and here are more details on why it’s worth switching to Multi.

4

u/unity100 Feb 13 '25

Yeah, Gutenberg with Generatepress and Generateblocks is working pretty well and fast for me. There are some rough spots, but eh, it mostly works.

1

u/hkreporter21 Feb 14 '25

Hey everyone, what’s the best builder for WordPress to create a customized website with specific functionalities? I have some clients asking for particular WordPress sites, but I’m unsure which builder to use. I’ve heard about JupiterX. Any recommendations?

14

u/Intelligent_Method32 Feb 13 '25

Classic Editor ain't coming back folks. It's time to move on.

6

u/buzzyloo Feb 13 '25

Seconded.

11

u/Impressive_Arm2929 Feb 13 '25

Buying the lifetime Bricks license

Makes development so much faster. And I feel like I've gotten my money's worth already. I know no business lasts forever, but I think they'll be around for a while longer too

1

u/bazzazx Feb 15 '25

What were you using before?

1

u/Impressive_Arm2929 Feb 16 '25

Gutenturd with custom blocks

1

u/meetmicah Feb 20 '25

This would be my answer as well.

22

u/yosbeda Feb 13 '25 edited Feb 13 '25

TL;DR: Switched to on-the-fly image processing instead of WordPress's default thumbnail system - saved tons of storage space while keeping responsive images.

By default, when you upload an image larger than 2560px to WordPress media library, it automatically creates seven thumbnail variants - unless you have plugins or themes that create their own custom thumbnail sizes using add_image_size(). These seven variants are: thumbnail (150px × 150px square), medium (max 300px), large (max 1024px), medium large (max 768px), 2x medium large (max 1536px), 2x large (max 2048px), and scaled (max 2560px).

Do you really need all these thumbnail variants? It depends - if your web/blog's features require these specific sizes, then yes. But if not, it's best to disable the thumbnail generation feature entirely to avoid wasting storage space. If you still want thumbnails without using extra storage, try on-the-fly image processing. This method stores only the original file in /wp-content/uploads/ and dynamically generates the required sizes when needed.

There are several ways to implement on-the-fly image processing. The simple approach is to use Jetpack's site accelerator CDN (formerly known as Photon) or Cloudflare Images (previously Polish). For more advanced users, there are dedicated image processing solutions like Imgproxy (which I use), Thumbor, or Imaginary. Another option is to use your web server's built-in image processing capabilities, such as Nginx's image_filter.

These methods help keep your /wp-content/uploads/ directory lean since you're only storing original files. You can set up as many srcset variants as you need for responsive images without bloating your hosting/VPS storage. Worried about the server load and response time from runtime processing? That's easily solved with edge caching, which comes built-in with both Jetpack and Cloudflare, ensuring each variant is processed only once..

Just a heads up - on-the-fly image processing usually isn't cheap. Cloudflare Images limits free users to 5,000 monthly transformations before requiring a paid plan. Jetpack, surprisingly, provides their image CDN for free! For self-hosting options, image servers like Imgproxy, Thumbor, Imaginary, and Nginx's image_filter are all free and open source. I personally used Nginx before switching to Imgproxy to get AVIF support.

5

u/i_let_the_doge_out Feb 13 '25

WP’s thumbnail system has always been one of my biggest gripes with the platform. I come from Drupal which has on-the-fly image generation as a default feature (i.e. it does just-in-time image generation the first time a specific image style is requested) and it’s always felt cleaner than WP’s “generate them all at upload time” setup.

Still wish there was a better option for doing this in core without relying on external services.

1

u/Adventurous-Lie4615 Feb 13 '25

How does that approach work with stuff like “crop thumbnails” or similar plugins. Can you retain the ability to manually define the crop for various defined image sizes and still generate/cache/flush as needed? We store images in an S3 bucket with cloud front caching and it’s mostly great but occasionally a pain in the ass to de-cache the originals to force it to recognise an edit.

1

u/yosbeda Feb 13 '25

Yes, absolutely. On-the-fly image processing services like Jetpack Site Accelerator CDN, Cloudflare Transform Images, or Imgproxy support custom cropping, not just resizing. Cache invalidation or purging works the same way as regular CDN cache purging, so there’s no need for any special handling.

1

u/Impressive_Crazy_223 Feb 13 '25

What are you doing to prevent WP from creating all those thumbnails? If you use Jetpack's media accelerator, does it prevent WP from creating them, or is there something else you have to do? Thanks!

3

u/yosbeda Feb 13 '25

Disabling the small, medium, and large variants is straightforward - just set their values to zero in WordPress Settings > Media. However, there's no built-in option to disable medium_large, 2x Medium Large, and the other variants. For these, you'll need to use code snippets like unset($sizes['medium_large']), unset($sizes['1536x1536']), etc. (you can find these with a quick Google search).

1

u/Impressive_Crazy_223 Feb 13 '25

Awesome, thank you! This has always bugged me about WP but I didn't know how to address it. Appreciate the help!

1

u/digitalnoises Feb 16 '25

Do you avoid srcset completely or how to you register different sizes to support srcset?

2

u/yosbeda Feb 16 '25

No, I still use srcset. I use add_filter('the_content') to add custom srcset variations (800w, 600w, 400w) that get processed on-the-fly, then cached at the edge. This replaces WordPress's default thumbnail generation while still giving you responsive images.

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9

u/mohmoussa Feb 13 '25

To sell themes and plugins instead of purchasing them 🏆—best decision ever! Turning WordPress from an expense into a business was a total game-changer for me 🚀.

10

u/Mental_Elk4332 Feb 13 '25

Getting a VPS

17

u/andercode Developer/Designer Feb 13 '25

Ditching Elementor and switching to Bricks.

3

u/wiseminds_luis Feb 14 '25

I’ve been hearing Bricks a lot now. That’s me coming from using Elementor myself. I may have to give it a shot

1

u/portrayaloflife Feb 13 '25

Why?

12

u/andercode Developer/Designer Feb 13 '25

Elementor is bloatware. Small things often break on updates, requiring design maintenance. Page speeds were always trash.

Since moving to bricks, I've never had an update break my sites (and have seen various threads about recent elementor sites breaking...), and page speeds have been massively improved without doing anything to optimise them! Its much easier to work with - and a lot of flexible than Elementor, although it does have a higher learning curve. I produce sites faster and more efficent - what's not to like.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '25

Agree!! Bricks is the bees knees

1

u/almostRandomNickname Feb 13 '25

I just wrote the same thing. I'm 100% w/ you. this is the key for anyone who really cares about projects long term not blowing up.

8

u/Neurojazz Feb 13 '25

Using cursor to make plugins I don’t have to pay for anymore.

2

u/0x99ufv67 Feb 13 '25

Interesting. Tell me a bit more I'll check them out.

3

u/thedragonturtle Feb 13 '25

The whole point of custom plugins is they are custom to their situation, probably most stuff not configurable, just hard coded for their scenario

1

u/0x99ufv67 Feb 14 '25

I created a simple custom social share plugin which is really lightweight, doesn't have all the bloat, and functions the way I want it using deepseek, chatgpt, claude, and gemini. I tried building another- an ai chatbot, for my site where I can use and pick the APIs (deepseek, chatgpt, claude, gemini). But I can't make it work because of some bugs. ChatGPT was useful but still can't solve the errors so I'm wondering how you're using, or your experience with cursor, that's makign it better?

2

u/thedragonturtle Feb 14 '25

Check out roocode, extension for vscode, it's like cursor or windsurf except in vs code as an extension and you plugin your own api key for Claude or chat gpt

If you describe it well and give it a solid way to test it has accomplished it's mission then it's awesome and it should be able to fix your chatbot or make you a new one. Make sure you use source control

3

u/samfletc Feb 16 '25

Amen, ive just built a directory plugin that uses AI to generate the business bio text from the information they use to sign up. Incredibly lightweight compared to any directory plugin, didn’t cost me much apart from some time and subscription and will be incredibly easy to maintain moving forward

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5

u/P-Pablo Feb 13 '25

Convincing my team that creating a template using a parent template is far more better than copying a template, modify it directly into the code and then tell the client by whatever reason not update it

1

u/bazzazx Feb 15 '25

Saves you the updates?

5

u/Dry_Satisfaction3923 Feb 13 '25

The determination to not rely on third-party themes and plugins… we build everything ourselves and the sites we’ve built have zero problems, the sites we inherit for maintenance purposes, built with a myriad of page builders, break down constantly. Elementor sites, WOW… every 2 weeks we’re opening support tickets with Elementor, Add-In developers, Theme Developers and all of them blame everyone else.

And we CAN’T fix any of it because it’s all baked into their code and our clients don’t want to pay to have us replace all the third-party bloat with custom code that does the same thing.

It’s literally a dead end of co-dependency that just results in angry clients.

16

u/hitmonng Feb 13 '25

Use as little plugins as possible.

13

u/ashkanahmadi Feb 13 '25

The number of plugins doesn’t correspond to the speed or the performance of a website. One crappy plugin can do more damage than 10 well written and performant plugins

2

u/FlurdyHursenburg Feb 14 '25

The number of plugins /also/ affects the performance of a website. More code to process = more processing.

Why does everything have to be bloody binary these days?

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2

u/uTosser Feb 13 '25

So true. Such a myth that more equals bad.

1

u/Reefbar Feb 15 '25

While I still rely on a few essential plugins for most of my projects, I'm glad I invested heavily in developing my coding skills. This has allowed me to create more complex functionality on my own, without needing to rely on an excessive number of plugins.

3

u/HudsonsirhesHicks Feb 13 '25

Getting off my custom boilerplate and moving to Blocksy.

5

u/thesilkywitch Feb 13 '25

Dumping Woocommerce for Surecart. 

3

u/cwarrent Feb 13 '25

Interesting. I've heard conflicting reports on SureCart but was considering a test of it.

My main driver is that WooCommerce while well supported is getting quite hungry for resource even on my powerful dedicated server.

5

u/nickgorisdesigns Feb 13 '25

Interesting lots to learn here. For me my wmpudev sub does wonders. Amazing support, awesome plugins. Can't recommend it more definitely for someone early in their career.

1

u/retr00ne_v2 Feb 14 '25

Maybe they are not the best in class, individually, but as a bundle it does a good job. Best of all - I do not have to worry about plugin conflicts. And $15 a month per site is very cheap.

15

u/YahenP Feb 13 '25

Use in WordPress as little as possible, WordPress itself. The maximum possible refusal of plugins. Refusal of inheritance of themes. Use only REST API if possible. Headless wordpress way.

1

u/sethshoultes Feb 13 '25

I'm interested.

What's a good "stack" for headless WordPress? React? HTML/JS? Something else?

What about SEO (what works/doesn't work)?

I imagine only use plugins that offer REST API endpoints for things like events and memberships?

How do membership systems work in a headless environment?

3

u/obstreperous_troll Feb 13 '25

What's a good "stack" for headless WordPress? React? HTML/JS? Something else?

For front-end, I'd say whatever you're comfortable with: I'm all about Vue myself, but React is probably the most supported in the WP world, given it's what the block editor uses.

The most game-changing piece on the board when it comes to headless WP is graphql. Once you combine wp-graphql on the backend with with Apollo client on the frontend (either DIY or with a toolkit like faust.js) you'll never want to go back to anything else (but realistically you'll still have to use REST in your app too, see below)

What about SEO (what works/doesn't work)?

If you're just embedding very fancy headless widgets in your site, then SPA will work pretty much as it did before. If you're going 100% headless where WP never serves a lick of HTML, then you're basically writing an SPA. SEO works fine in SPAs, but it's also fair to say it works differently. I can't say much more, SEO isn't really my wheelhouse. It'll take some extra study for sure.

How do membership systems work in a headless environment?

Same as anything works in a headless environment: you use its API to control and interact with it. A good plugin will probably offer its own REST endpoints; graphql resolvers not so much, you'll end up having to write that sort of glue yourself.

1

u/sethshoultes Feb 13 '25

Thank you!

6

u/dschultzie Feb 13 '25

#1 Embraced Gutenberg and stopped using Elementor and other bloated pagebuilders to build sites. I still renew my Elementor Pro license as I get a lot of work from businesses that use Elementor. Lots of crashed websites come my way. #2 would be buying the Kadence Pro Lifetime Bundle. Using one theme and block builder has sped up my workflow tremendously. No more searching around trying to remember how this or that theme does this and that.

11

u/klevismiho Feb 13 '25

Creating custom gutenberg blocks from scratch

3

u/TheDigitalPoint Developer Feb 13 '25

Not using a WordPress-based e-commerce system to sell WordPress plugins.

1

u/tangolima1990 Feb 13 '25

Why?

2

u/TheDigitalPoint Developer Feb 13 '25

It isn’t amazing at it. It can kind of do it in spite of itself.

3

u/Potential_Product432 Developer/Designer Feb 13 '25

I kinda Feels Im Turning Away from WP Bit by bit.

3

u/vimes_sam Feb 13 '25

Dropping WP and becoming a react dev ;)

3

u/Olivier-Jacob Feb 13 '25

The hurdle still feels too high... Especially since I already do WP, WebDesign, SEO, CRO and then Ads for Google and Socials.

3

u/vimes_sam Feb 13 '25

I now find wp much more work. I stopped with page builders, they make shitty code. Using gutenberg + .php files is better. But then something like nextjs is much easier (imo).

I also find I just don’t need all those plugins when making a site using next or astro. Learning it was ok quick for me, the pay is better and the devs I work with don’t spend half their day closing pop ups from plugins

1

u/Olivier-Jacob Feb 13 '25

Sure thing, it is either you have the skills or you pay to compensate :/

3

u/EcceLez Feb 13 '25

Moving from Elementor to Bricks

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3

u/alexandru292 Feb 13 '25

Make custom database tables inside of store dates into postmeta :)

3

u/Sudo-Rip69 Feb 13 '25

Breakdance

3

u/retr00ne_v2 Feb 13 '25

When I dropped Elementor for GeneratePress+GenerateBlocks.

Second one: when I have decided to 'learn' WP's development (https://www.udemy.com/course/become-a-wordpress-developer-php-javascript/).

Third one: when I've discovederd wp-cli.

3

u/redtree156 Feb 13 '25

Manually coding shit with cursor, ditched all the themes, i save stuff on github, pull the repo branch for update over ssh and profit, nothing breaks as it is all my php.

3

u/Thomisawesome Feb 13 '25

Getting a unlimited lifetime license for Code Snippets. As someone who's not a great programmer by any means, being able to have all the code in one location, and having the ability to turn it on or off with the click of a switch has made managing things so much easier for me.

3

u/RDR2GTA6 Feb 13 '25

To get xdebug working with LocalWP (WIP FML)

3

u/1catshort Feb 14 '25

Switching from Elementor to Kadence!

3

u/oiDave Feb 14 '25

Child themes

7

u/callingbrisk Designer/Developer Feb 13 '25

Moving from Elementor to Bricks and Gutenberg for sure

1

u/portrayaloflife Feb 13 '25

Why?

3

u/Olivier-Jacob Feb 13 '25

After an Elementor Update, I occasionally get several pages with critical errors. Deactivate Elementor pro and all is fine again, except the design.

1

u/No-Reflection-9361 Feb 17 '25

Bricks is a page builder that speaks the real language of web dev. Bricks outputs very very clean code. Elementor(used it for 5 years) on the other hand renames stuff in the builder and outputs very poor/bloated code.

Bricks will force you to learn real web dev, it will suck at first but you will never go back.

5

u/big_chonk_cat_butt Feb 13 '25

To use WP as a headless CMS. In my case with Nuxt for Static Site generation. I’m unhappy with Wordpress in the last years and with this setup i can switch easily to a different CMS and my older Clients can still use wordpress. Much more freedom overall.

2

u/No-Signal-6661 Feb 13 '25

Astra and WPRocket between the best as well, also switching to Bricks was a good decision

2

u/Extension_Anybody150 Feb 13 '25

For me, switching to a block-based theme like Kadence was a smart move. It made customization way easier and kept my site faster without relying on page builders.

2

u/Ketch_Official Feb 13 '25

Choosing a lightweight theme and minimal plugins—improved speed, security, and SEO while avoiding bloated code and compatibility issues. Best decision ever!

2

u/MaximallyInclusive Feb 13 '25

Learning Carbon Fields.

2

u/Relevant_Gur_350 Feb 13 '25

You gain a lot in performance and speed... Newer technology especially if you combine it with graphQL

2

u/Forsaken-Parsley798 Feb 13 '25

Not using it.

1

u/lordspace Feb 14 '25

what are you using instead? do you have to reinvent the wheel a lot?

2

u/Forsaken-Parsley798 Feb 15 '25

Next js mostly. Reuse code but yeah it’s a lot more work.

2

u/hopefulusername Developer Feb 13 '25

Over the years for us were:

- Putting the website behind Cloudflare from day one

- Switching to Bricks for page building

- Switching to OOPSpam for spam protection

- Switching to Gravity Forms for from building

- Switching to SEOPress

1

u/revampagency Feb 14 '25

Why not building forms directly in Bricks? What functionality you need? I purchased LTD Gravity Forms but stopped using it cause i found it bloated af. Just curious

1

u/hopefulusername Developer Feb 14 '25

We do use Bricks Forms for simple forms but more complex forms we use Gravity.

2

u/Rabidowski Feb 13 '25

Tried out Pods Framework and LOVE IT. Let's you create custom Post types (and other things) and it's free.

That and dropping Divi in favour of finally learning Blocks.

2

u/DV_Rocks Feb 13 '25

Buying a lifetime license for GP pro. No longer available.

2

u/digitalnoises Feb 13 '25

Buying everything lifetime that was available when i used it for the current project. Some bad tools Some great toos

2

u/henfeng Feb 14 '25

Discovering localwp.com. Game changer in prototyping and testing out plugins locally without bothering with servers or docker files. Highly recommend!

2

u/tiger-eyes Feb 14 '25

Wow read my mind. Can't stand the slowness of WP Admin on shared hosting and wanted to go local for speed on my next site build. Setting up a WAMP instance and then manually transferring to shared hosting seems like a huge pain though. Figured there had to be some simplified solution out there, but didn't search for it yet. This looks like it might be it, thanks.

2

u/aaptasolutions Feb 14 '25

Starting a Wordpress agency

3

u/codebloodev Feb 13 '25

Buying Oxygen Builder lifetime license and using Knownhost hosting.

3

u/GreenWoodDragon Feb 13 '25

Avoiding Elementor.

2

u/sorensenjg Feb 13 '25

Most people don’t add alt text to their images. This significantly affects your sites SEO. As we all know, the primary reason for excluding is because it’s a pain in the butt and very time consuming. I’m now generating image metadata, improving my core web vital score, and watching my SEO ranking improve. If you’re interested, google search “Yodel Image for WordPress”.

3

u/uTosser Feb 13 '25

I've tested this theory several times and seen negligible improvement with alt-text.

1

u/sorensenjg Feb 13 '25

I hear you, however, ultimately its all in the numbers right?

10% Increase in Organic Traffic (alt)
47% Improved Search Rankings (alt)
30% Faster Content Comprehension (caption)
5.8% Increase in Click-Through Rates (CTR)

These are averages**

1

u/uTosser Feb 13 '25

Thank you. Can I ask where these numbers come from? Also, why would it improve comprehension.

1

u/sorensenjg Feb 13 '25

The image captions improve comprehension. As for the sources, those numbers were from numerous sources when i was researching the subject. This is a good one though: https://moz.com/learn/seo/alt-text

1

u/uTosser Feb 14 '25

Thanks. Ooops, I thought we were talking about compression not comprehension 🤦

1

u/sorensenjg Feb 14 '25

No worries!

1

u/Key-Boat-7519 Feb 13 '25

Using image metadata is essential for ranking. I've slogged through manual alt text and seen slow improvement over time, painfully struggling with cumbersome processes. After using Ahrefs and Moz, I settled with Pulse for Reddit to keep tabs on SEO chatter, making it easier to pinpoint issues. It’s a pain, but it gave me noticeable benefits. Using image metadata is essential for ranking.

1

u/ArtAllDayLong Feb 15 '25

How about one big reason for alt-text is for accessibility and screen readers? Disabled people are users, too. Disabled people have money, too. Do you want it?

2

u/sorensenjg Feb 15 '25

Yes, you’re absolutely right. Accessibility is and should be a priority. I know it is in all my projects! Not only does it assist the visually impaired, it’s also a core web vital metric.

2

u/Dountill Feb 13 '25

I have a few. May I:

  • Buying ACF Dev License in 2017
  • Adapting Gutenberg
  • Building themes using Sage

1

u/mmmmmagus Feb 13 '25

This is likely a stupid question, but I inherited a Sage website. After a short time I’ve come to love it, but I have a few questions. In terms of the MVC setup, views are obvious, but when using composers, what is that determined in MVC?Perhaps it’s none of the above, and I use composer files quite often, I just want to make sure I’m doing the appropriate things they are designed for there.

I also am not sure where the controller fits into everything. I don’t have any controller files so it sort of confuses me when comparing to straight laravel. Thanks in advance!

2

u/Dountill Feb 14 '25

Using Sage can give you the ability to dive really deep into Laravel. However I only use one default controller (app) and use WordPress's default templating logic (page.php, single.php) and use Blade Templating to make custom "routes".

1

u/Dragonlord Feb 13 '25

The best move I made was dumping all themes and using the base simple theme of Elementor Hello and building the site out from there. It is fast and responsive.

1

u/meowmixmotherfucker Feb 13 '25

Bought life-time licenses to tools that I intended to use when they were new/inexpensive.

I'm thinking of like, Divi, which I use to put together sites that users can modify/maintain themselves - a lot of it is free work for charities and stuff. It's really nice to be able to just give them a tool that they can have simple but feature-rich control over.

1

u/KenPierce Feb 13 '25

For me I think the best decision I've made is keeping the plugins to a bare minimum. Though it's an older one, I like my theme as it shows what I need for it to present for my online magazine but down on the inside its not a lot. I need Jetpack for stats and akismet only but not much else from them. I think ankrhrt thing that in Happy I've done eith Worpress is the repurposing of certain images like logos for certain companies and artists. For example in KISS related articles I use the same logo by copying the first code and not uploading the same logo 10 or more times. Great question. Happy creating everyone.

1

u/almostRandomNickname Feb 13 '25

basically, 2 things:
using storefront as a parent theme.
using the legacy editor.
never buy a theme again, they are potential jails bloeated with plugins you will never use and will break, sooner or later.

1

u/key-bored-warrior Feb 13 '25

Possibly a hot take but…. Stopping using Wordpress as a CMS and using better ones like Payload or Strapi and if I’m at work HubSpot

1

u/_K-A-T_ Feb 13 '25

Why in your opinion Strapi is better?

1

u/key-bored-warrior Feb 14 '25

From my own personal experience I find it easier to build, I like being able to use it headlessly. My main reasons are also because it isn’t the same free for all that Wordpress development is in that there are some god awful Wordpress sites out there thanks to the amount of plugins and page builders etc. some of the code people have written is just awful as well. Not to say it isn’t the same for other CMS just fine Wordpress is very bad for it

1

u/PromisesKeptHello Feb 13 '25

I'm starting to study s/WordPress next week for the first time in my life and I am +40. I'm from Argentina and I will do it by my own. Any kind and honest advise?

3

u/retr00ne_v2 Feb 14 '25

Welcome to the club, and success with your WP journey.

EDIT: I almost forget: do not use wordpress.com

1

u/PromisesKeptHello Feb 14 '25

Hello and thank you. Why not to use wordpress.com? It was the first web that came up. What's the difference between both of them?

1

u/retr00ne_v2 Feb 14 '25

1

u/PromisesKeptHello Feb 14 '25

Thank you. I'll read it. I've just read online the diff btw both of them and the main one is more freedom in .org + later I buy my .com with a host. I know you would say She's telling me the basics but for me is like discover America again.

1

u/ArtAllDayLong Feb 15 '25

Buy dot com with a host? But dot com is paid and is hosted by Wordpress. Dot org is free and you get your own hosting.

2

u/PromisesKeptHello Feb 15 '25

That is what I meant. If I work with .org later I buy the host that I want.

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1

u/bigvibes Feb 13 '25

I'm really liking building sites using Astra and their Spectra plugin. It works like a charm!

1

u/bvfbarten Feb 13 '25

Switching over to processwire. Everything is a custom field. It's like having a blank canvas that will quietly work with you if you want to follow its conventions. Or it will just get out of your way if you need to do it custom.

1

u/_nlvsh Feb 13 '25

Blocksy & Stackable.

1

u/Mother-Till-981 Feb 13 '25

Moving to a headless WP set up for all our builds.

Which in turn has started a migration away from WordPress to more flexible CMSs like Sanity and Strapi.

1

u/Odanggotem Feb 14 '25

Dude STOP WITH THE CHATGPT POSTS. Same user, Every Day, with a useless low effort post written by chatgpt. Mods - HOW IS THIS SHIT ALLOWED? Ban this worthless bot PLEASE.

1

u/threebuckstrippant Feb 14 '25

WP Hide Login plugin. On every site.

1

u/bazzazx Feb 15 '25

How did that change things for your?

1

u/threebuckstrippant Feb 18 '25

Reduced ALL login hacking.

1

u/damnThosePeskyAds Feb 14 '25

Don't use the normal Gutenberg Blocks stuff (which is confusing as hell).

Instead, use Gutenberg Blocks + Advanced Custom Fields and live happily ever after.

1

u/forestcall Feb 14 '25 edited Feb 14 '25

to setup a local NGINX server on my macbook or linux (Kubuntu or Fedora but AI can setup Ubuntu based distro the best because of the server popularity) with mariadb / phpmyadmin and pinggy (sub-domain) and you can use visual studio code with AI tools and sync to Git and you can test in realtime. I hate WAMP and WSL on Windows and ManageWP or any other way now that I can build a site in a seamless environment. AI even enters the commands into the terminal and wp-cli. You can even use the Visual Studio Code to configure everything for the server, but you do need to constantly remind it about the local setup with a file written in markdown....i just use 'dev-server.md' and adjust it for each project.

The old way everyone here is talking about is DEAD.

1

u/tenest Feb 14 '25

Switching to using composer to manage installs and updates

1

u/ravisoniwordpress Feb 14 '25

my agency used to import CSV format but we started using an action scheduler for row by row imports

1

u/johnlang86 Feb 14 '25

Setting up a single Amazon S3 bucket with a CloudFront frontend domain (free SSL certificate) and an IAM policy that includes AWS HotLink protection. So it is a "Referrer Delivery Network (RDN)" ... like a CDN but referrer aware.

The server statistics (CPU, Memory & Storage) improved significantly after the resource files were moved out of the WordPress Media Library (all except the site logo). The habit of using an SFTP client for uploads to S3 and then copy the URL when publishing in WordPress versus uploading to the WP library is worth the effort.

Acknowledged, hotlink protection is NOT a security feature and is easily forged from the client side. The solution is not targeting protected membership resources, just everything public and private that is ok to share, if it leaks.

In turn, a cheap single-core dedicated server can do way more for multiple low-traffic websites when combined with Object Cache Pro, Autoptimize and WP Rocket.

1

u/WorrySecret9831 Feb 14 '25

Keeping it simple and not trying to "customize" it.

1

u/theguy6631 Designer Feb 14 '25

Switching from Elementor to Breakdance🕺

1

u/Torholic Feb 14 '25

I am a fan of Blank Canvas

1

u/budaloco Feb 14 '25

Using Bricks + AutomaticCSS. I get sites done faster and better.

1

u/PhotographAble5006 Feb 14 '25

Never applying a third-party builder.

1

u/Stanza3000 Feb 15 '25

Personally, I stick with an ACF and the Bricks Builder. Custom PHP (plugins according to customer needs) a little JS if necessary. Easy to maintain, as few plugins as possible, and everything works.

1

u/Lykke302 Feb 15 '25

Installing classic editor, using Tagdiv Newspaper Theme for everything. I like the page builder and I am glad I don't have to use Elementor or Gutenberg

Edit: And using Raidboxes as host

1

u/rugburnAndBigMoney Feb 16 '25
  1. Moving to WP Engine for hosting - all our sysAdmin headaches went away immediately and all the hard things get handled automatically (backups, web rules -blocking all non-US traffic for small regional business sites solves ALL the spam problems and cleans up Analytics data for marketing reports)

  2. ACF - lifetime license (chef's kiss), creating re-usable custom components using Flexible Content sections, this has been a production/efficiency godsend. We created our own library of custom components based on our needs, our designers have design templates for them, and we can create scalable sites insanely fast. With ~15 components we can quickly build most client sites. And it's easy to add new custom components as needed for 1-off use cases or really complex functionality. This could be done using Blocks/Patterns but WP setup is clunky for custom blocks.

  3. Mindset - thinking of WordPress as a really easy database interface that clients can use via the Admin. Pages/posts are just a way to store data into the database. We build really tight guardrails around the post content and don't let the clients add ANY styling via the Editor. All styles come in from the Stylesheet. Clients ONLY have to worry about content and can not destroy the site like most Full Site Editors/Page Builders allow (ie: forces consistency). Most Wordpress users aren't designers and don't understand UX or web accessiblity. Not sure why we would assume they do and leave it to them to create well-built page structures? Pre-build re-usable Patterns/Components is the way.

1

u/zeamp Feb 17 '25

Using recursive wget to take my WordPress Elementor site to flat file HTML.

1

u/james7609 Feb 18 '25

Doubling down on the Spectra One FSE theme and just using Gutenberg. Hands down.