Two things you should never do in WordPress

With 60K+ plugins available, WordPress pretty much allows you to add any functionality you like. Versatile, but not smart to do just anything in WordPress.

Here’s 2 things you should never (want) to do in WordPress.

Security

I’ll start with the most obvious one and that’s the use WordPress security plugins. Solving bad actors and bots on your WordPress site powered by the application itself is putting the effort in the wrong place. Why? You want to solve problems as close to the source as possible. And since you can’t stop the actual bad actors and bots, you’ll want to stop them in the first place you can. And that’s in front of your website. This means that you have to look at solutions that allow you to do exactly this.

The two most obvious solutions that allow you to do this are Cloudflare and Sucuri. My personal favorite is Cloudflare for all the extras that the bring to the table.

There’s two bonus reasons for doing so. First, you’re site will be greener and consume less energy.

You see, you don’t have the load the entirety of WordPress for every single attempt any security plugin needs to evaluate. Secondly, you get the benefit the machine learning that’s happening at scale when you use a dedicated solution that works in front of your site.

Caching

Now this may come at a surprise for some of you, but hear me out. When you’re using a caching plugin in WordPress that produces static HTML, you’ll still have to load WordPress itself for that cache to actually be served.

There’s way to make this smarter, but if all your WordPress cache solution is doing, you’re still wasting valuable resources.

The most logical place to solve caching is on server level, or even better in front of your website. Again, Cloudflare is a perfect solution for this.

For the record, I’m referring to HTML caching specifically, as solutions like ObjectCachePro (by Till Krüss) are perfect for what they do as they work on server level mostly.

Find yourself a WordPress host that solves this problem for you on server level. Want to know my favorite caching solution? Hands down, that’s Accelerated Domains by Servebolt.

I’m biased having worked there, but I’ve also seen what it does. And it’s absolutely amazing at how it reduced load, spam, bots and improved caching *everywhere*.

So there you have it. Two things you’ll never see me solve inside WordPress.

And in doing so, I have a greener, more sustainable, better cached, faster, and more secure site for it.