WordPress Customization 101 – Avoiding Plugin Overload and using WordPress Hooks to your Advantage with Ryan Wells

Ryan Wells, WordCamp KC 2019

Saturday, June 29th, 1pm – Capitol Federal Conference Center (RC 101)

I recently took over a website for a client. It was a simple Ecommerce site with about 2,000 visitors a month. Only one problem though: It had 122 plugins. Features as little as adding pictures of payment methods to the footer were powered by a plugin! This was incredibly bad for the site for many reasons, the main one being 63 of them needed an update and these updates would crash the site half the time. There are some very good plugin developers out there who build very useful additions to WordPress sites that make your website better. They maintain their code and send out regular updates to account for a constantly changing WordPress core. Then there are those who don’t maintain their code. They build a plugin because it sounds cool, then get bored or busy and stop updating it and here you are having built an entire system around this piece of software that flat out doesn’t work anymore. In my experience, a lot of the customizations you want to do can be done with some simple additions to the code. In this session I’m going to teach you how to make functions.php your best friend.

Ryan Wells

My name is Ryan Wells and I am a freelance full stack web developer and copywriter in Overland Park. I have been building in WordPress since 2015 when I built my first site to document my progress when learning a new language. I then started learning more about PHP, JavaScript,CSS and other Dev tools and fell in love. I also fell in love with copywriting and specifically with how it relates to email marketing and content development on a website. What I do for the majority of my clients is teach them how to build their site in a way so it is an asset for them, not just a placeholder.

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