There are many benefits to developing plugins for WordPress, but the main reason is to give back to the community. If you’re looking for something to do in your free time, WordPress plugin development can be a great hobby. But if you want to make money with your skills, then you’ll need to develop high-quality plugins that people want to buy. In this article, we’ve listed some tips that will help you get started on the right foot.
Decide What Features You Want Your Plugin To Have
Do you want it to be able to add a contact form on your website? Do you want it to be able to automatically update your website with new posts from another blog? Do you want it to add social media buttons so visitors can share their favorite posts on Facebook or Twitter? Think about what exactly you want your plugin to do, and make sure it does that one thing really well before adding any extra bells or whistles.
Nail Down Your Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
After you’ve decided what problem your plugin should solve, you need to figure out how much time and effort it will take to build the MVP (minimum viable product). You don’t want to spend weeks or months building something that nobody wants or needs — or worse, something that only solves half of their problem!
Learn How To Code
You will need some coding skills in order to create a WordPress plugin. If you are new at this job and don’t know what HTML or CSS stands for, then start learning them from scratch. The good news is that there are lots of resources available online that can help you learn these languages quickly. Once you have learned the basics of coding, pick up a good book on PHP and MySQL programming language and get started with building your own plugins.
Use Plugins for Common Tasks
If you need to do something that is already built into WordPress, use the built-in functionality instead of reinventing the wheel. For example, if you need to add meta tags to your site pages, use the wp_head hook instead of creating your own function to do so. If you need to process an image before uploading it, use the WordPress Core Image Manipulation Library (WCIML).
Know Your Audience
You should always have an idea of who you’re building the plugin for before starting work on it. This will help you make sure that the final product actually solves a problem people have and will be useful to them. If you want to sell your plugin after creating it, this also helps with marketing because you’ll know what kind of customers would be interested in purchasing it and what benefits they’re looking for when buying something like yours.
Develop In A Test Environment
When developing plugins, I recommend developing in a test environment first and then moving to a production environment if testing goes well. This will help avoid any problems with missing or outdated dependencies in your plugin. It also makes it easier to update your plugin when WordPress updates its core or other plugins you’re using.
Test Your Code By Using It
One thing you should do when developing a plugin is to test it as much as possible. You can do this by installing your plugin on a local server or test site, or even just by creating a dummy post or page in your WordPress installation. The goal here is to make sure that it works correctly before you release it to the public.
Make Sure The Code Is Clean
You should write code that can be easily understood by other developers who may need to read or modify your code in the future. This means using good naming conventions for functions and variables, using consistent indentation across all files, and keeping everything well documented (including function parameters).
Make It Easy For People To Find Your Plugin
Your primary goal when developing a WordPress plugin is to make it as easy as possible for people to find and install it. This means adding the plugin information into the admin area as well as providing clear instructions on how they can install it and get started using it.
Create an SSL certificate (https)
SSL certificates are used by browsers to identify web servers as being legitimate. When you visit a site that uses HTTPS, the browser will show a green padlock icon in your address bar, indicating that the site is secure and verified by an SSL certificate authority (CA). The CA verifies that the website owner has paid for the certificate and has agreed to its terms of use. You can learn more about how SSL certificates work at wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Secure.
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