Professional WordPress Development

WordPress is by far the most popular CMS worldwide. There are countless ways to build sites with it: pre-built themes and plugins, a wide range of page builders, and the ever-improving native Gutenberg editor.

In this article, I’d like to share the tools and workflows I rely on when developing with WordPress.

Page Builders

Over the past five years I’ve tried a lot of page builders, but the only ones I find suitable for professional use are Bricks and Breakdance. Even these come with downsides: writing CSS and JS inside a page builder is cumbersome and repetitive. You don’t have access to AI coding tools that accelerate development with code completion. Using CSS frameworks is off the table, and personally I much prefer working in a code editor. For those reasons, I usually skip page builders and build sites with ACF and custom themes instead.

ACF – Advanced Custom Fields

ACF Homepage

ACF is a plugin that lets you create custom fields, which you can use in pages and posts. All content can be managed through ACF fields. There’s a wide variety of field types—text, WYSIWYG editor, links, images—as well as advanced options like repeaters or the clone field for duplicating content.

Unlike a page builder, the WordPress backend is then used strictly for creating and editing content; most of the styling lives in the theme files.

Advantages of this approach:

• Separation of content and design
• Ability to use a code editor and AI tools
• Support for CSS frameworks like Tailwind
• Reusable templates (possible with page builders too, but far more cumbersome)
• Lower risk of accidental changes in the backend

A slightly older but excellent YouTube course on theme development with ACF can be found here.

Tailwind

A tool I lean on for theme development is the Tailwind CSS framework. Tailwind provides a rich set of utility classes, which speeds up styling. Although Tailwind is typically associated with frontend frameworks, it’s equally useful for WordPress development—many WP developers simply don’t have it on their radar. Setting up Tailwind with a custom theme can be a bit tricky; I’ll cover that in an upcoming article. Until then, ask Claude or your favorite AI for guidance.

Backup and Migration

Most of my WordPress development happens locally. To transfer files and the database to the server, I use the Duplicator plugin. It also works well for creating backups. While it’s primarily intended for site migrations, it handles backups reliably. I’ve had poor experiences with other plugins like Updraft. Ideally, your hosting provider should run daily backups too—don’t rely on plugins alone.

Additional Plugins

Here’s a shortlist of plugins I regularly use and recommend:

• Cookie banner: Complianz
• Contact form: Contact Form 7
• Site speed: W3 Total Cache
• Duplicate post: Duplicate Post
• SEO: Yoast SEO