For people who want to make a website quickly and easily, the idea of learning to code in HTML, CSS, Javascript, and PHP comes off as a complicated, daunting, and frustrating task. WordPress makes this easy with a free open-source software and a helpful community with thousands of plugins that allow users to build great-looking website with extendable functionalities that would otherwise take weeks to code by hand, even for a programming expert.
As with many things open-source, there is one major downside to this – quality control. WordPress runs on the PHP language, which is fairly old and classical by modern object-oriented programming standards. In fact, the mere popularity of WordPress is one key reason PHP as a coding language has not died out. However, it is prone to occasional incompatibility issues and slow render and response times, compared to newer web coding technologies such as React.js.
When PHP and/or WordPress issues an update, all plugin developers have to tweak and update their own code to be compatible and work flawlessly with all the respective changes in the code and the WordPress software. Sometimes plugins aren’t updated for a long time, leaving them vulnerable to security holes and code conflict which can cause the site to malfunction, or worse, allow hackers to hack the website and cause serious damage. Whilst WordPress does give a disclaimer on if a plugin has been tested with the current version of WordPress software, there is still little guarantee that the plugin developer(s) have followed best practices for security. Even top-rated software companies fail; in 2019, a security flaw was exposed in the version 5.1 of Jetpack, a hugely popular performance and security plugin.
The best way to deal with this issue is twofold. First, try and find several plugins that are offering you the same features. Read their reviews and look up the developers who coded the plugins. Do they have a good track record? Try sticking to ones with high-rated, authentic reviews and established web presences. Also, try to learn some PHP yourself. Whilst totally learning the language inside and out can be super helpful, in most scenarios you’ll only need the bare basics – variables, functions, the syntax, etc. In this way, you will be able to troubleshoot plugin issues and also diagnose critical errors on your websites.
Top three resources I recommend:
- StackOverflow – the #1 code community
- WPBeginner – where I learned a lot of WordPress basics
- Traversy Media – a YouTube channel to learn all types of coding languages, including PHP