This article covers how to include custom JavaScript and CSS files in WordPress. It’s a chapter from our outstanding WordPress course, Up and Running. If you want to become a knowledgeable WordPress developer, Up and Running is your best, clearest route to getting there.

Learning WordPress development starts with a lot of key questions, including this one: “What language is WordPress written in?” Another common one is “Should I learn PHP or JavaScript first?” WordPress programming languages is a big topic, but we’ll cover all you need to get started.

After reviewing WordPress’s page builders in depth, I’ve found that Beaver Builder is my clear favorite, because it caters to people who want to do things right. Case in point: the Beaver Builder team have made it easy to add custom CSS styles to Beaver Builder elements. As with any front-end system, you can do a lot more with Beaver Builder if you understand CSS, and the software encourages this rather than trying to overcompensate for it.

This code demo saved my bacon on a client project that needed a very specifically styled file upload input box.

Last week Fred hosted our first Pro Community-style webinar, on Why Gutenberg Doesn’t Kill Pagebuilders (Yet). We really enjoyed it. It was fantastic to connect more deeply with WPShout readers, and we’ve had very generous and kind feedback on the quality of the teaching and value of the format.

This video and text Quick Guide explains how to prevent browser caching of CSS files, with a special focus on doing this for WordPress sites.

I really enjoyed this little talk I found while idly browsing YouTube recently. Wentin Zhang, who works at Adobe, draws something I didn’t have any idea CSS could so easily: a mustache. I know, I’ve seen the artisanly drawn CSS, like this portrait of Francine. And that’s cool. It’s also not something I feel I ever would learn from.

A Quora feed hits my email everyday, and it’s mostly “Why was Thanos afraid of ___ when he defeated ___?” content. I’m not sure why that’s what’s in my feed, but there you have it and feel free to ask me anything about why Thanos is afraid of people.

Stylesheets are at the heart of making HTML pages look good, in WordPress and the web. And the way that we make CSS stylesheets load into the page in WordPress is using the wp_enqueue_style function. It’s not too complicated, but there a few common places that people new to using it will get tripped up. This Quick Guide will cover those, and then get you running in a step-by-step guide.

Here’s something that I assumed required a plugin: How can you add one or more CSS classes to a WordPress menu item?