Get 5 Free WordPress Developer Tools to increase your productivity. Discover how these core tools help you in making your website building more effective and quick.
The life of a WordPress developer is quite a roller coaster, and you have to juggle several projects at once. Building WordPress sites and applications can become a huge problem. Handling code, dependence, deployment, and performance adds to the complexity. This can happen within a short span of time if one lacks the right tools.
That is why it is crucial to focus on such WordPress developer tools and constantly use them in your work. These tools minimise the inconveniences that may come with styling, copying and pasting codes, managing plugins, and updating these tools.
They allow you to produce work that is free from errors. Your work is completed in a short time because it eliminates errors and tedious, repetitive work.
WordPress developer tools can stabilize the full cycle of creating complex websites. They do this with powerful task automation, performance optimization, and customizations. What is important here is what these frameworks let you do, and that is to create phenomenal experiences for users.
By using a toolbox of effective methods, you get the’superhero’ abilities to address any challenge and achieve it with ease. Consequently, your clients will benefit from the improved speed, consistency, and quality of the services you provide. Do not let WordPress development become a headache for you anymore! Make use of the appropriate tools today!
5 WordPress Tools that Every Developer Should Have
Currently, WordPress is the leading content management system, running 30% of websites worldwide. Anyone who develops WordPress sites can find that they already have the right set of tools. The same applies to those who manage WordPress sites.
Here are 5 essential tools every WordPress developer should have in their toolkit:
#1. Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) For WordPress Developers
This plugin is very popular for creating custom fields and meta boxes. These features are used for content that cannot be created through a standard WordPress post and page editor. Starting from managing custom post meta fields to designing flexible content layouts, it is an invaluable tool for developers.
Let’s discuss why it is gaining popularity:
Pros
- It should be easy to create new fields for saving the data.
- Perfect for adding fields of new custom types to posts and pages
- Compliant with leading page builders, including Elementor and Beaver Builder
- There is a lot of documentation and there is a large community active in supporting this field.
- Extremely popular and used by many, those users who are active on their sites are above one million.
- The pro version is available with all field types, while the freeware version has only basic field types.
- The pro version offers such field types as repeaters and flexible content. These are not available in the free version.
Cons
- Numerous extras can be purchased for added versatility
- This has to be updated each time the WordPress core is updated
- Here and there, there is a need to enhance some measures for supporting third-party plugins.
- Does not permit the management of new custom post types (there is a separate plugin for this).
- After that, it can get a bit complicated, especially for large sites that require a lot of customized fields.
- If very complex field groups are being built, then it could potentially cause some performance problems.
- The pro version is even more expensive than some other plugins. These plugins may have fewer features compared to the Pro version.
Thus, ACF is considered the most suitable tool for creating new fields and content. It is ideal for the typical blog post and page. The Pro version explores a wider range of stronger field types.
The script, however, is specifically oriented towards custom fields only and is not a one-stop customization script.
#2. WP-CLI (Command Line Interface Developer Tool)
WP-CLI is a command-line tool that makes it easier to manage WP sites. Tasks that are hard to do in the admin panel can be automated.
The command line can also be used to install and update plugins and themes. It can perform database migrations and trigger cron events. It can also handle other tasks.
Pros
- Automates many tasks: WP-CLI, in fact, helps to manage most of the WordPress administrative tasks. It handles tasks such as managing plugins, updating WordPress, importing and exporting content, and more. These tasks take a lot of time.
- Powerful command-line interface: WP-CLI is a command-line tool. It provides more sophisticated tasks and use cases. These tasks and use cases are not easy to implement in the WordPress admin panel.
- Boosts performance: This way, WP-CLI can help to enhance the speed of a WordPress site. It does this through capabilities such as batch changes. It can also rebuild caches and so forth.
- Ideal for developers: It is worth mentioning that the GUI is not the only interface. Developers have also preferred other interfaces. In fact, command-line interfaces are more preferred among developers. For the developers, WP-CLI is something they will enjoy being used in the development environment.
- Extendable with custom commands: WP-CLI has several operating commands that enable the creation of unique WP-CLI commands through PHP coding. This makes it possible for you to automate some of the activities you need to do within WordPress.
Cons
- Command-line only: The main con of WP-CLI is that it means switching to a command-line interface. This change requires some time to get used to.
- Risk of mistakes: Using aids such as automation, there is a high tendency to make mistakes. Mistakes can happen with the press of a button. This means that the users must be cautious with the destructive commands.
- Security issues: Making WordPress CLI available through shell or remotely exposes some threats. These threats must be addressed in order to secure the system.
- Hosting incompatibility: WP-CLI is a command-line tool. When it comes to shared hosting services, some web hosts do not allow its usage.
#3. Query Monitor
This is a developer plugin. It enables you to track database queries, PHP errors, block editor data, HTTP API requests, and more. It assists in debugging performance problems and other errors on websites that are developed with WordPress.
Here are some key pros and cons of Query Monitor:
Pros
- Gives metrics for query execution, database loads, etc. that can help in the detection of possible problems or delays.
- Allows the filtering of certain queries, allowing the user to view execution plans, IO statistics, etc.
- Leads to decision-making on certain adjustments that can improve the performance of the system.
- Alerts and notifications in the event of critical occurrences to previously identified contacts.
- Incorporation of new features that users may find useful at least twice a year.
Cons
- Depending on the number of variables involved, analyzing and deciphering all the gathered information may prove challenging.
- It is a flood of information, which the receiver feels may be hard to handle at first.
- Inability to sustain a proper QA testing process due to the constant release of updates.
- Increased resource utilization of the monitored databases to gather metrics.
- It doesn’t provide the ability to monitor general platform-level metrics such as CPU, memory, etc. by default.
The main trade-off, however, is that Query Monitor always offers extremely detailed information about database performance problems. It provides comprehensive information compared to other tools. But this is done at the expense of extra layers of complexity. These complexities involve configuration and the interpretation of the results.
#4. Local by Flywheel
The tool for local WordPress development lets you create a copy of a live WordPress site on your local machine. This is intended for developmental purposes. It’s faster than the live site and it can be done without an internet connection.
With the help of LOCAL, new WP sites can be launched using the HTTPS protocol. This ensures their protection in a very fast and simple manner. Still, it requires more system resources, employs Nginx instead of Apache, and might not map to real-world production servers.
For those who’re developing specifically for WordPress, it can be rather helpful. However, it may cause problems if one plans to run the application on a traditional LAMP stack.
Pros
- Good-looking design and very user-friendly, especially for the creation of the new WordPress websites with just a couple of clicks.
- Integrated SSL support allows HTTP with no security restrictions for local websites.
- Fast start-up: compared to other sites, the starting time is very small or has a very short idle time.
- Although it can be used for different CMS platforms,.
Cons
- Heavier resource usage occupies more space in memory as compared to WAMP.
- The nature of the differences between Nginx and Apache is significant. These differences can lead to problems. These problems do not match the production server configuration.
- Preferred Nginx over Apache—can’t leverage. access for redirects and other related functionalities may pose a problem if the target server is Apache.
#5. Xdebug
This PHP treatment tool can be integrated with IDEs such as PHP Storm. It enables step-by-step debugging and comprehensive profiling of WordPress PHP code. A search for bugs and analyzing the performance of the application becomes significantly faster with the help of Xdebug.
Let’s compare their favourable and unfavourable conditions:
Pros
- Can be readily installed and set up in many situations and contexts.
- Ability to generate profiling data to show where code execution is taking the most time. Helps optimize performance.
- Gives information on code coverage to help the user identify which lines/branches were executed in the code. It is helpful in cases where there is an intention to enhance the test quality.
- Allows the specific breakpoint of a PHP script. This permits the viewing of expressions, calls, or anything else at a certain point in the code. This can be of great use when debugging.
- It complements all the development environments and editors, such as PHPStorm, Visual Studio Code, and Sublime Text, among others. This offers the advantage of a more natural way of debugging.
Cons
- Remotely or debugging over the network can cause issues like delay, and it is comparatively less reliable.
- The debug options cause the memory usage to be higher. The overhead on the server is also higher when it is turned on.
- Another layer of complexity is setting up debuggable environments on distinct machines and configuring firewalls.
- May slow down a script while debugging, especially in cases of large scripts. Overhead can impact performance.
Which tools do you use?
Thus, these fundamental tools should be in your arsenal to optimize your WordPress development process. They help develop the websites faster. They also offer better management of WordPress sites for clients. All these tools meet needs that WordPress doesn’t address by default, which each tool serves to address.
These tools can be described as incredibly useful tools to handle and customize WordPress sites using the command line. Before choosing, it may be preferable according to one’s comfort zone and the security concerns that come with remote access. So, which tool are you going to install?
