Hey all,
I’m a web developer, typically working with frontend JS stuff, and I’m fairly new to WordPress. I asked for help with an issue here a few months ago when I first took over the project I’m on now, and I received some very helpful responses. I’ve learned quite a bit since then, but I’m still learning. If something I say sounds completely wrong, please feel free to correct me on it. Anyway, I now have another issue that I was hoping might spark some good discussion here and give me some more insight into the modern WordPress ecosystem.
**TL;DR (with more details below) The site I am currently working on has been handled by at least 3 different developers over the past few years, and I might have the opportunity to rebuild it. It’s a mess, and it uses a child theme of a purchased theme built in WPBakery. It’s dated, and the Core Web Vitals performance is lacking (mostly yellow, some red, apparently there’s a lot of unused JS). The site is hosted on getflywheel and has a staging environment I can use.**
**My current options for the site going forward:**
1. **Design and build a new custom theme (still with WPBakery)**
2. **Redesign and rebuild with custom Gutenberg blocks**
3. **Go headless and build a custom frontend, probably in SvelteKit.**
4. **Stick with the current theme and just try to make incremental improvements**
**Details:**
The site is a bit of a mess. It was built using a custom child theme of a theme that the business purchased. However, it got to the point that they wanted some elements that deviated too much from the parent theme’s structure, and the various developers came up with solutions that seem pretty “hacky” to me. For example, the menus that appear when hovering over main nav items and the custom footer were built as posts which are then added to the page with PHP functions that retrieve the posts’ content. I don’t know if this is standard WP dev practice, but it’s very messy, with the menu being rendered as a bunch of nested HTML tables and all kinds of weird alignment issues on the footer that required a bunch of CSS overrides to fix.
I’ve convinced my boss that a rebuild with some more modern and performant tech might be worthwhile in the coming year for making the site more performant, improving SEO, speeding up my own work on it, and making it look more modern and appealing to the customer base. My challenge now is determining what solution would be the best value for the business. These are some things I have to consider:
1. My boss occasionally creates content for the site and does SEO audits, so it needs to be easy enough to use for him to get in there and dig around occasionally. He’s familiar with WPBakery and is able to create basic layouts with it. I usually go in and optimize his pages for mobile responsiveness and styling consistency when he’s done.
2. We focus a lot on SEO, and we heavily rely on the Yoast SEO plugin, so whatever solution we go with probably needs to be able to incorporate Yoast.
3. Other plugins we use are HubSpot, Slider Revolution, 301 Redirects, GTranslate, WP Rocket, and some others.
4. Most of the current site is written in WPBakery shortcodes. I tried activating the Gutenberg editor in a staging environment and it mostly rendered shortcode text.
I have been doing some research into various options, but I still lack the deeper WordPress knowledge to make a recommendation with confidence. These are the options I’m looking at right now:
1. **Build a new custom theme (not a child theme) using the traditional WP stack (PHP, JS, CSS)**. Pros here are that a normal theme would integrate with the current site and WPBakery easily. Cons for this one are that I’m not very strong in PHP yet, and this will have a steeper learning curve for me and a longer time frame to get it going.
2. **Redesign and rebuild the site with Gutenberg built in and custom blocks**. Pros here are that I am comfortable working with React and that Gutenberg might be more performant and include more long-term official support. Cons are that there would be a slight learning curve for my boss, though Gutenberg seems similar enough to WPBakery that I think he could figure it out pretty quick. I would also help train him.
3. **Build a custom detached frontend and convert to a headless setup**. Pros here are that I can build the frontend in whatever I want, which would probably be SvelteKit because it’s amazing and super easy and fast to build in. Cons would be that it would be very difficult for my boss to do any of the work he normally does on the site and make him totally dependent on me, which is good for me but IMO bad for the business.
4. **Status quo. Keep WPBakery and the current child theme, and just continue making incremental improvements.** Pros here are that it would stay familiar for my boss and would free me up to focus on content, SEO, etc. Cons are that the site would remain dated and clunky.
I would love to hear people’s insights on these different options or suggestions for other options I haven’t listed here. Improving performance and maintaining solid SEO are major sticking points for my boss, so whatever solution I suggest to him needs to at least satisfy those.
Also, if anyone has some good resources for learning about improving WP site performance, I would appreciate your sharing them.
Thank you for reading!
[ad_2]
It sounds like you’re quite new to WordPress, so if you wanted to do a rebuild of the site, I’d highly recommend you do that offline using something like Local from [localwp.com]), because I doubt you’re going to be able to replicate the production site at this early stage/with little experience.