Block Design

Segmenting code into “blocks” or “modules” allows you to easily and quickly expand and build your website. The ease of use and ability to customize each page is unparalleled. Since the advent of Gutenberg Blocks in Worpdress 5.0, modular CMS design has become the standard for new CMS design and development.
 

Last Word:
If you aren’t building with blocks in WordPress, you’re #doingitwrong. Block development simplifies and segments code in a way that makes updated, expanding and editing easier and more efficient.

Advanced Custom Fields Plugin

With a toolkit that includes fields for images, text, colors, date pickers, repeaters… this plugin is simply the most powerful, expandable and innovative plugin for WordPress ever built. Integrate this with Gutenberg block development and you’re really cooking with gasoline.
 
Last Word:
ACF allows us to give our clients exactly what they want – the unrestricted power to create pages and posts, any way they please. Props to Elliot Condon and the ACF team over in Australia

Native Menus

Menus – a simple native WordPress component with so much power. When used correctly, it makes adding, editing and removing menu items a breeze for our clients. We believe strongly in harnessing the native functionality of WordPress and so often we see Developers get it wrong when it comes to anticipating the needs of it’s users – this is not one of those. WordPress has absolutely nailed it with their built in menu system.
 
Last Word:
We all too often see developers miss this great feature and “bake” in menus that make it hard for their clients to update. This is such a simple and essential component – we encourage everyone to give their clients the power of menu editing today.

Enable Auto Updates

With website security being a critical component to any WordPress build – staying up to date with Plugins and the WP core is essential. WordPress has made this easy with allowing both major and/or minor WP updates to be automatic back in 2013. More recently they added the ability to automatically update Themes and plugins as well, which could create a self-sufficient eco-system.
 
Last Word:
Auto-Updates are a great addition – and while we encourage everyone to use these – it does come with a few strings attached. The primary concern being that with auto-updates, you could run into a situation where a feature of your website breaks due to some change from either WordPress or the plugins your site relies upon. A simple way to mitigate this is to pay attention to your email notifications for WordPress and Plugin updates.

WP-AJAX

Dynamic page and content loading can really boost the UX of your website. WordPress has a built in way to do this- WP-Ajax. This “hook” allows you to pass an “Action” and other data to call an Ajax function and then process returned data via JSON.
 
Last Word:
From Lazy Loading to saving data to a table, WP-AJAX is your friend. It’s a simple and secure way to interact with the SQL database and dynamically POST or GET data without reloading pages – which makes for a happy end-user.