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Depending on how you went about this it could be bad practice. If your approach is to "never use plugins again" then WordPress is not the CMS for you because plugins are the expexted best practice way to expand the platform. You don't hack WordPress core. A WP shop will fire you for hacking WP core.
As a WP dev I would want to go the aggressive caching route to decrease load times by serving your content using a mix of caching, cdn delivery, db optimization and using HTTPS/2 along with typically fixing a themes' shitty render blocking asset output and assessing installed plugin performance.
These are all easy ways to get that page speed load time as fast as possible. You can cram very high performance out of WP but it's akin to a very high performance vehicle. At this level it requires a lot of upkeep and maintenance to keep running at peak performance lap after lap.
Everyone shits all over WordPress but the truth is most people don't do things "the WordPress" way when using it because they can't be bothered to learn how so they hack the shit out of it and you get glorious heaping messes of websites with a zillion plugins that all hate each other and bogs down the performance.
There are extremely aggressive caching plugins that essentially do what your doing and can provide the form features that your looking for. It's a beast but the best is W3 Total Cache as it's a whole caching framework and does so, so much for you. Learning that plugin will do so much heavy lifting it's surprising. Then you can develop anything to fill in the gap and use it as a W3T add-on so you can install it as you need without conflict. -
To give a bit more insight to my position - I joined just before the main (and only) developer left, who had worked here for about 10 years. From what I understand most of what he did was copy and paste stack overflow without really understanding what it was doing... During the handover he confessed that he didn't know the difference between inline-block and float, which was pretty concerning!
Anyway so having now just about sorted out the nightmare of fixing everything I'd inherited from him (mostly), I now need to figure out how to move everything to our VPS's where performance really counts - we're on quite the budget. And there's another member of the team that has been making sites with no dynamic contentin visual composer, which led to this absurd caching workaround.
I'm not trying to avoid plugins (or even Wordpress) forever, but the initial 'it fixes everything!' appeal has fully worn off on now. And thanks for the advice, that's incredibly useful info for the dynamic sites! -
Ah, I use Visual Composer plugin a lot as it gives WP content editing that "Squarespace feel" which non technical clients love. It also makes me create and save page layout templates so content generation for clients is quick and easy. when using WordPress it's all about working smart, not hard.
Themes that use Visual Composer/Revolution Slider well are hard to come by as they are heafty plugins and requires direct optimization in their respective settings.
I would also recommend looking at the Hummingbird and WP Smush Pro plugins by WPMU Devs. It along with W3 Total Cache will get you pretty far as it detects assets output by themes and plugins and lets you bundle, minify and/or move them so they don't render block the site. It has saved my bacon more than a few times. -
@vlatkozelka
Oh yeah, I'm about 6 months in so far and leaving is tempting... but truth be told I'm enjoying the different challenges that come up and it's a nice experience being able to jump from Wordpress to playing with react for a new project to fixing some random .net stuff to setting up a VPS!
I keep getting hit with things that I think are way out of my depth but nothing has been an unfixable problem yet (minus some ugly hacks!), though I am a bit concerned with future job-hunting it might seem like my skills are spread a bit thin and not focused on one particular stack. For looking for work, should I be spending more time trying to specialise? -
@vlatkozelka - I was just trying to be helpful.
Your "actually develop a website" comment feels like you missed the context of this whole conversation and you just saw the word WordPress and was set off like a sensitive snowflake. I'm sure if OP could make this website in something else he absolutely would.
WordPress is pure balls, but its a Marketing agency and he's the only dev. Why would you expect anything else? It's cheap. It's easy to use and although hacky as fuck you can really jerry-rig it to do anything you need.
If it works and the client is happy, #fuckit.
Got my first Webdev job at a small marketing company, felt very lucky as I didn't have much experience. Turns out I'm the only one that could program. The other guys just use Wordpress. It felt wrong at first, using plugins instead of developing, but we got results and clients were happy. I felt like there was a lot less to this development thing than I'd previously thought! And so we continued.
But I noticed that some of our more plugin heavy sites (not made by me - these were made in some drag/drop Wordpress interface) were running slow. I mean 15 seconds load time slow. I joined devRant around the same time and discovered that no - this is not what normal development actually is. Wordpress seems universally hated. Thank god, because something seemed very wrong!
So with us getting complaints all over the place over page speed from relatively high-profile clients, I've gone and set up a script on a server that downloads the whole front end of these Wordpress sites and serves them up instead of the 'real' thing. Did I mention that there's basically no dynamic content on most of these sites? It works like a charm! I'm now trying to figure out how to get forms and route them into the real, hidden version of the site, as well as automatically updating the html views whenever the client changes anything in the Wordpress backend. Not sure if this has fixed the problem or just enabled bad practice, but I don't think I'm going to be able to stop the others from doing things this way...
For the record, yes there are plugins that do similar stuff but I thought it'd be nice to never use plugins again! And hey, I got to learn all about bash scripting so I can't complain.
For real though, I didn't quite realise how bad the Wordpress thing really was until I came here. Thanks for making me aware, all!
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