WordPress Development

Top 5 reasons why WordPress is our preferred CMS to build websites and eCommerce stores

1. Easy to use: WordPress has a user friendly interface that makes it easy for anyone to create and manage a website. You don’t need to have coding knowledge or technical skills to use WordPress, which makes it accessible to a wider audience.
2. Customizable: WordPress allows you to customize your website’s design and functionality to meet your specific business needs. There are thousands of free and paid themes and plugins available that you can use to add features, change the look and feel of your website, and optimize its performance.
3. SEO-friendly: WordPress is built with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind. It has built in features that make it easy for you to optimize your content for search engines, such as customizable permalinks, sitemaps, and SEO plugins.
4. Community support: WordPress has a large community of developers, designers, and users who are always willing to help each other. You can find answers to your questions, get support, and learn from others through forums, blogs, and social media groups.
5. Scalable: WordPress can handle websites of all sizes, from small blogs to large e-commerce sites. As your business grows, you can easily add more pages, products, and features to your website without worrying about its performance. Additionally, there are hosting providers that specialize in WordPress and can provide high-performance hosting solutions for large scale websites.

An overview of WordPress’s technology stack

WordPress is written primarily in the PHP programming language and uses the MySQL database management system to store and retrieve data. WordPress does not use the commonly known Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture pattern, however it does fit it with another lesser know software design architecture called ADR (Action Domain Responder) which was proposed to refine the MVC architecture and make it better suited for web applications. For developers who are passionate about performance and elegant coding, this is worth exploring.

The core of WordPress is built on a modular architecture, with each module responsible for a specific aspect of the website’s functionality. These modules include the core application, plugins, and themes. The core application provides the basic functionality of WordPress, while plugins and themes can be used to extend and customize the website’s features and appearance.

WordPress also follows the open source software model, which means that the source code is freely available to anyone who wants to use, modify, or distribute it. This has led to a large community of developers contributing to the development and improvement of WordPress over time.

Overall, WordPress’s technology stack and architecture make it a flexible and scalable platform for building websites of all sizes and complexities. Its popularity and community support also ensure that it remains a reliable and innovative tool for businesses and individuals looking to build their online presence.

WordPress best practices

When building a large scale WordPress website, it’s important to follow best practices to ensure that your site is reliable, secure, and scalable. Here are some best practices to consider:

1. Choose a robust hosting solution: A large scale WordPress site requires a hosting solution that can handle high traffic, provide reliable uptime, and offer fast page load times. Consider using a managed WordPress hosting provider that specializes in WordPress performance optimization. Some popular options such as Flywheel and WP Engine.
2. Use a content delivery network (CDN): A CDN can help distribute your website’s content across multiple servers, reducing load times and improving user experience. This is especially important for large scale sites that serve users from all over the world.
3. Implement caching: Caching can help improve your website’s performance by storing frequently accessed content and serving it quickly without having to retrieve it from the server every time. Consider using a caching plugin or a caching service provided by your hosting provider.
4. Optimize images: Large, high resolution images can slow down your website’s performance. Optimize your images for the web by compressing them, reducing their size, and using a format that works best for web images.
5. Use a scalable architecture: A large scale WordPress site requires a scalable architecture that can handle growth over time. Consider using a modular approach to development, breaking your site’s functionality into separate modules or plugins that can be scaled independently.
6. Ensure security: Implement strong security measures to protect your site from potential threats, such as malware attacks or data breaches. This includes regularly updating WordPress and its plugins, using strong passwords, and implementing two factor authentication.
7. Test your site’s performance: Regularly test your site’s performance using tools like GTmetrix or Google PageSpeed Insights to identify areas that need improvement and optimize accordingly.

Use WordPress for Headless eCommerce

To use WordPress for headless eCommerce, you’ll need to decouple the frontend (i.e the website interface) from the backend (i.e the eCommerce functionality). Here’s a high-level overview of how to set up a headless eCommerce solution with WordPress:

1. Choose an eCommerce plugin or API: WordPress offers several eCommerce plugins, such as WooCommerce, that can handle the back-end functionality of your online store. Alternatively, you can use an eCommerce API, such as Shopify’s API, to handle the backend.
2. Build a headless frontend: You’ll need to build a frontend interface that can communicate with the eCommerce backend. You can use a modern JavaScript framework like React or Vue.js to build a headless front-end that consumes the eCommerce API.
3. Use a REST API: WordPress offers a REST API that allows you to access your site’s content and functionality programmatically. You can use the REST API to expose your eCommerce functionality to your headless frontend.
4. Use Graphql API plugin: There are a few plugins that can be used individually or in combination to create a powerful GraphQL powered WordPress site. Each plugin offers slightly different functionality, so you should choose the one that best meets your needs.
   1. WPGraphQL: This is a popular GraphQL plugin for WordPress that allows you to query your WordPress data using GraphQL. With WPGraphQL, you can query WordPress content, including posts, pages, and custom post types, as well as taxonomies, menus, and user profiles.
   2. GraphQL API for WordPress: This plugin provides a GraphQL API for your WordPress site, allowing you to query your WordPress data using GraphQL. It supports querying posts, pages, and custom post types, as well as taxonomies and user profiles.
   3. GraphQL for WooCommerce: This plugin provides a GraphQL API for WooCommerce, allowing you to query your WooCommerce data using GraphQL. With this plugin, you can query products, orders, customers, and other WooCommerce data.
   4. WPGraphiQL: This is a plugin that adds a GraphiQL interface to your WordPress site, making it easy to test and explore your GraphQL queries.
   5. WP GraphiQL Explorer: This plugin adds an explorer to the GraphiQL interface, making it easy to browse and query your WordPress data.
5. Customize your eCommerce functionality: You can use WordPress hooks and filters to customize your eCommerce functionality and create custom endpoints for your REST or GraphQL API.
6. Implement authentication: You’ll need to implement authentication to ensure that only authorized users can access your eCommerce functionality. You can use token-based authentication or OAuth2 to secure your REST API.
7. Deploy your solution: Once you’ve built your headless/composable eCommerce solution, you can deploy it to a hosting platform like AWS or Heroku.

By following these steps, you can use WordPress as a headless eCommerce solution, providing a flexible and customizable platform for your online store’s frontend and backend functionality.