The story of WordPress, the popular website builder that powers one-third of the web today started with the end of an existing blogging software b2/cafelog. Back in 2003, Mike Little and Matt Mullenweg forked b2/cafelog to create an elegant and well-architected personal publishing system. Once WordPress was made free and open source, the contribution from developers around the world helped make it the most flexible content management system ever with the introduction of plugins and themes. Now, it holds 60% of the open-source CMS market.

Now you must be wondering what makes WordPress this popular. Packt Publishing had a chance to sit down with the author of WordPress 5 Complete - Seventh Edition, Karol Król to talk all things WordPress including recent developments and future outlook.

WordPress 5 Complete - Seventh Edition shows you how to build great looking and functional websites using WordPress. The book teaches you how to effectively use the important WordPress 5 updates on your website. From crafting content pages using the block editor, and customizing the design of your site, through to making sure it's secure, it walks you through it all.

Here are some of the highlights from the interview:

What makes WordPress a popular choice for creating a website?

There are currently many alternatives to WordPress including Joomla, Drupal, Wix, Weebly, and more. Ghost 3.0 that was released in October this year is also being hailed as a good alternative to WordPress. What sets WordPress apart is the flexibility and extensibility it offers. It has a vibrant ecosystem of 40k+ plugins and themes.

Król said, “There's simply way more tools, themes, plugins and other integrations available for WordPress than for any other website platform. This means that if you're building a website, you have access to a wealth of information, and you can work on top of what other people have already figured out.”

Another reason behind its great acceptance is its community, Król emphasized. He said, “There's also a huge community around WordPress, and those people are always ready to help. Apart from that, WordPress is great with general-purpose website projects - projects that need to provide the user with easy-to-use web publishing tools.”

Learning and mastering WordPress

Looking at its demand, especially in the marketing realm, learning WordPress has almost become a necessity from a job opportunity perspective. Some of the key skills that a WordPress developer is expected to have include HTML, CSS, WordPress fundamentals, SQL basics, and some basic PHP + Advanced Custom Fields Pro.

When Packt asked Król about how someone should go about learning WordPress, he said, “I'd say that the best path is to first start contributing to the WordPress project itself. This is how you really get to know WordPress and its inner workings. Later on, you can start working on your own plugins. At that stage, you can begin offering WordPress-related services on various freelancing platforms or find clients based on your reputation in the WordPress community.”

On the question of mastering WordPress, he said, “The degree of difficulty in mastering WordPress all comes down to how deeply you actually want to master it. Using WordPress to publish content on the web is exceptionally easy, so mastering it comes rather naturally. When it comes to developing plugins and themes, the learning curve can be steeper, but this is not as much related to the difficulty of developing for WordPress, but rather more about the challenge of building any new piece of software.”

Król on the Gutenberg controversy

Last year in December, WordPress 5 was released, which was dubbed by Matt Mullenweg as “the most controversial release in a while.” One of the major updates in WordPress 5, the Gutenberg editor received mixed reactions from the community with some calling it a “failed innovation.”

Packt asked Karol about his thoughts regarding this update. Król said, without a doubt, “Introducing Gutenberg was the right move for WordPress considering the current ecosystem of easy-to-use website builders like Wix or Squarespace and their growing popularity. With the block editor, WordPress is just much easier to use for the casual user.”

He adds, “While I do understand that many developers and WordPress power users feel that Gutenberg is making their work harder, these are just growing pains that we're going through now. We have to all agree that the new block editor makes it a lot simpler for everyone to create great-looking content, while the previous TinyMCE editor only made it possible to create okay-looking content.”

Security best practices in WordPress

While WordPress enables everyone to easily create plugins, people can also use it for malicious intent. For instance, in recent news fake WordPress plugins allowed attackers to backdoor unsecured WordPress sites to perform cryptomining.

Though building a perfectly secure system is impractical, we can follow some security precautions to reduce the risk of your website getting hacked. Here are some that Król shared in our discussion:

• only work with reputable hosting firms
• use good passwords for all user accounts
• don't call the main administrator account "admin"
• install a security plugin (iThemes Security, Wordfence, or Sucuri)
• use SSL
• keep WordPress updated, as well as all your plugins and themes
• don't install plugins you don't need, or plugins that have low numbers of installs (most WordPress hacking issues are caused by insecure plugins)

For more specific advice, Król’s book WordPress 5 Complete - Seventh Edition has a dedicated chapter on securing the WordPress website that teaches you how to put security best practices into practice.

Along with these, there is an abundance of security best practices shared by the WordPress community on different discussion sites like Reddit. Some of the top suggestions include ensuring regular backups, installing and configuring fail2ban and the WP fail2ban Redux plugin, using only maintained plugins, and keeping yourself updated with the wpvulndb mailing list. Also, check out the official Hardening WordPress guide.

On building mobile-friendly WordPress websites

Now that mobile users represent approximately half of the web traffic worldwide, building mobile-friendly WordPress websites has become extremely crucial. Another important reason why your website should be mobile-friendly is Google. Starting in 2015, Google updated its search algorithm to incentivize sites that are mobile-friendly. This essentially means that if your site reads well on mobile devices, it will have better Google rankings compared to the ones that don’t.

There are various ways you can optimize your site for mobile users. The very first step is making your website responsive, which means building a website that is adaptable to different screen sizes. The major advantage of responsive design is that you only have to take care of one website. WordPress offers various plugins to create mobile versions of your site including WPTouch, WordPress Mobile Pack, Jetpack, and more. Additionally, WordPress developers should use mobile-optimized plugins and improve page loading times. You can check whether your site is mobile-friendly or not with the help of Google’s mobile-friendliness testing tool.

When Packt asked out of the two ways for improving your website’s mobile experience: PWAs and AMPs, which one should a WordPress developer choose, Król said, “AMP is the way to go. There already are some good AMP plugins available, and integrating them is very simple. After you get AMP working on your site, it'll load lightning fast on mobile for visitors coming from Google.”

About the author

Karol Król is a WordPress developer, professional blogger, and writer. He has been building expertise in WordPress ever since his early years at the Silesian University of Technology (Poland), where he graduated with an MSc in computer science.

Early in his career, he worked as a freelance website developer for several years. Later on, Król decided to shift his interest toward popularizing WordPress as the perfect solution for all web-based projects and devoted his time to growing his writing career. You can find his articles featuring on wide ranging websites including About.com, MarketingProfs.com, SmashingMagazine.com, Adobe.com, CodeinWP.com, NIO.tips, among others. To get in touch, you can find him on his website.

If you are looking for an in-depth and comprehensive WordPress guide, check out WordPress 5 Complete - Seventh Edition by Król. The book teaches you how to create a blog site, start writing content, and use plugins and themes to customize the website design. You will further learn how to create your own themes and plugins.