3 useful tips for WordPress theme development with Pinegrow
Developing WordPress themes with Pinegrow offers you a major paradigm shift.
You don’t have to be a pro developer and code your templates by hand to produce high quality themes that comply with official development guidelines. You don’t have to force yourself to use a site builder plugin (Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi) which will certainly make the initial design easier, but which will impose its own format, its own limitations and above all which will considerably hinder the performance of your site.
However, with great power comes great responsibility, so here are 3 pieces of advice that may help you make the right decisions.
1.Not all your site content is intended to be dynamic
In your templates, there is no mandatory rule preventing you from using static HTML content for elements that are not expected to change in the long term.
It is even recommended in order to optimize the performance of your service by limiting dynamic calls to the WordPress database.
2.You have to choose the right WordPress feature for your needs
The use of custom WordPress blocks is super trendy and Pinegrow offers a great way to create them using Advanced Custom Fields Pro (ACF Pro), but not all content has to be a block.
Depending on the situation, you can also use the WordPress customizer, custom fields, widgets …
3.Theme versatility is not necessarily compatible with site performance
If you have any experience in the WordPress world, you have probably already installed a few themes, either downloaded for free on the official repository or purchased from platforms such as Envato and found yourself overwhelmed by dozens of customization options: fonts, colors, shapes, icons, logos, animations, layout choices etc…
All WordPress themes are not intended to be fully versatile. If you create a WordPress theme for your own site (personal, business and more), there is no need to implement customisation options that will only be used once or not at all and will have a negative influence on the performance of your service.
If your theme is well thought out and well designed from the start, implementing future changes will be super simple. These changes/additions to your theme will then be integrated into production through a simple theme upload.
Easy peasy!
A summary …
With Pinegrow, it is easy to design, create and maintain real WordPress themes that are tailor made for the specific customer / business / project.
Such themes are not bloated, they don’t require a lot of plugins, use minimal WordPress database calls and are therefore very performant.
On the other hand, the WordPress page builders such as Elementor, and many popular All in One themes like Divi try to be useful for every project and therefore require a huge amount of dynamic customization leading to performance issues while overwhelming end users with a bunch of customization options.
Did you like these 3 tips? Don’t hesitate to check our 5 tips to make your WordPress theme project a success and our FAQ about creating WordPress themes with Pinegrow.