WordPress development is a hugely useful skill, but it’s also tricky to learn—especially if you learn things out-of-order and try to tackle advanced topics while remaining confused on the fundamentals.

This article explains what I’ve needed to know to work as a freelance WordPress developer.

Welcome! WordPress themes are one of the most important topics that one must understand to be good at WordPress development. Themes underlie the entire visual half of WordPress sites, but often grow to do even more. Because of the visual importance, they’re a great place to dive in if you’re interested in getting to the “code-side” of WordPress. I myself “cut my teeth” on WordPress themes back in 2007 and 2008. WordPress themes were where I started to come to grips with the power (and limits) of PHP, CSS, and HTML. So this course is great for newbies, and those just looking to confirm their understanding of the whole system.

This article introduces one of the most important topics in WordPress development: WordPress hooks, including action hooks and filter hooks. Hooks are at the core not only of how WordPress plugins work, but nearly all code in the WordPress ecosystem: most WordPress themes use hooks heavily, as does “WordPress core” itself. WordPress hooks are absolutely a must-know topic in WordPress development.

It’s a common complaint when you run your WordPress site through any “page speed score” tool: “defer parsing of JavaScript” and/or “remove render-blocking JavaScript.” Today, building on an article Fred first wrote in 2015, I’m going to discuss a was to solve that. It’s been possible since WordPress 4.1, which introduced of a new filter, script_loader_tag. This filter lets us easily change the HTML markup of enqueued script elements—that is, of JavaScript files that were correctly added into a WordPress site using WordPress’s wp_enqueue_script function.

WordPress is so much more than meets the eye. Behind its user-friendly UI and massive ecosystem of plugins and themes lie some incredibly powerful features. Features that, while thoroughly documented, aren’t necessarily common knowledge. Among the biggest of these hidden gems is WordPress multisite.

A major advantage of WordPress over other website solutions is that you can migrate a WordPress site. Unlike solutions such as Squarespace and Wix, WordPress sites can be freely migrated from one hosting environment to another, without your ever being locked into a specific provider.

Running a small business is a challenge. It seems like the smaller you are, the more hats you have to wear. But the right tools can help to lighten the load.

Here’s last week’s live Q&A webinar for buyers of our premium WordPress development course Up and Running. It’s a wide-ranging session on the practicalities of WordPress development.

Here’s last week’s live Q&A webinar for buyers of our premium WordPress development course Up and Running. It’s a wide-ranging session on the practicalities of WordPress development.