8 Best Tips for WordPress Plugin Development
Plugins are a huge part of the WordPress development process. And this is one of the reasons that WordPress is empowering a large number of sites all around the world. The capacity of WordPress can be extended to much extent with these plugins. WordPress plugin development makes the working of your website more accessible and simpler.
Do you know, the WordPress repository has over 60K plugins to enhance the working of such websites? And if you want to be part of this race by adding your WordPress plugin to this class, you should be extraordinary then. That’s why you have to be careful before starting WordPress plugin development. Hence, in this blog, you will read about some of the best tips that WordPress plugin developers should know before jumping into the development part.
Let’s dive in to read further!
Best Tips for WordPress Plugin Development
Pay Special Heed to Security
One of the major concerns related to WordPress development is the need to pay special attention to security. If you don’t refresh your site often, then chances are you may get hacked. This can lead to serious security issues. So, there is a good need to emphasize security plugins. To take care of your website security is one of your major concerns as you know if you compromise with it, there will be nothing left on your website. To give enough time for the security of your plugins, you can need to focus on the given sanitize inputs and escape outputs:
- esc_url
- esc_url_raw
- esc_attr
- esc_html
- esc_textarea
- wp_filter_kses
Try to invest as much time in the security standards of your plugins. This way you can secure your website from any kind of online threat. And always remember to update it from time to time.
Work on Caching to Speed Up
Another best tip that you shouldn’t miss is to work on the speed of the web platform. And one of the ways to achieve this is to work on caching. WordPress has upgraded the facilitating administrations, like Siteground. Or one of the more expensive Wpengine that naturally supports WordPress sorting. If your host is one that supports WordPress explicit reserving accessible, it is one of the best solutions.
The next important thing is to realize the part that is more problematic with plugins. This way you will know which plugin is ideal for maintaining the speed.
Always Follow WordPress Coding Standards
One of the most important things is to maintain the coding standards of WordPress before starting the process even. You will pass through all the stages only if you maintain this. There are numerous developments globally available for WordPress. They have to go through a set of common rules to ignore any further issues like code readability, maintaining consistency, etc. The code should be written in such a way that anyone around the globe can understand the coding snippets. It’s only possible when you will follow all the coding standards of WordPress.
WordPress offers basic rules of language-related and accessibility standards. This all defines what should follow or should not follow. You need to stick to such standards if you want to go long in the WordPress development race.
Debugging is Essential
Being a developer, you are very knowledgeable about the importance of debugging in development processes. So, it is also very important to follow while developing WordPress plugins. You should always empower troubleshooting while building anything for the users. If you don’t do so, WordPress raises error or mistake alerts.
One of the ways to do this is to turn on the WP_Debug mode. It will help you to find out the errors you have made while developing the plugins. WordPress offers a standard code snippet to enable debugging mode. But remember to turn it off in live environments. You can always opt for WordPress maintenance services for this.
Focus on Needed Tools and Services
If you want to develop your plugins in a much easier way then you can focus on the necessary tools and services offered. You can always use a text editor to apply the codes, a staging environment, and an FTP client to transfer files. These three tools are essential while developing the plugins.
You can also focus on agile development ways to speed up the development process. You can also measure and monitor the condition of your plugin with many software testing tools. You should test your product against the coding standards and you can determine the nature of the user experience to be given with some devices or tools.
Focus on Namespacing
One of the crucial tips for doing the development accurately is to focus on Namespacing. The added functions, classes, and variables are thrown into the global namespace. If it shows the same namespace function that someone else has written, it will contradict it and display an error. This is why it is really important to add prefixes to your functions, classes, and variables. This will help to ignore overwriting problems. You can also try to cut the name length of the plugin by using the starting letters only. You can concentrate on namespacing in many ways.
Work on Nonces
One-time tokens to protect the URLs and forms from unneeded actions are called Nonces. It acts as a differentiated identifier for the users of WordPress in cases of doing work like removing or previewing a post. Hence, try to nonce within the WordPress atmosphere to validate a selected action. Suppose, if you want to remove a post, the URL will generate a nonce token to cross-check it. It will tell whether the post is real or fake. Every nonce is different for each user. It searches for the permission of the user to execute something.
Always Follow a Good Strategy
You very know that without a good strategy nothing can be achieved easily. If you don’t have a proper plan for WordPress plugin development, your result can be a big zero. You should find everything about your target audience, and give effective answers to their issues. And solve them as per your strategy. You should focus to develop a fresh plugin only if the existing plugin is not able to solve the problem. Only a good and planned strategy can help you to create and market a plugin successfully and hassle-freely.
Closing Thoughts
There are many painful challenges that you may face to market your WordPress plugins to the market. But with such given practices, you can overcome many of them and make your development journey smooth. You should always try to avoid the common mistakes that every developer makes. You should always examine the WordPress function library thoroughly. If you follow the given tips and suggestions, you can go a long way in the development stages.
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