Why WordPress coding standards are everything

We were recently asked by someone why we relatively expensive and charged more than someone else doing a similar thing. This is a question that has come up a few times and we always answer with one word, standards.

• High standards are what separate the developers from the outstanding developers.
• High standards are what ensures your project doesn’t break when you update WordPress.
• High standards are what ensures that your site doesn’t suffer from code bloat and loads fast.
• High standards are what you must insist on with any developer whether internal or external

The WordPress coding standards form part of our ‘culture of outstanding’ commitment and ideally, every WordPress developer would build sites using these standards. As you can guess, this is far from the case as developers often rush to get site completed fast and co they cut corners. Our commitment to these standards means we may take longer and charge more than some people. It also means we deliver the best possible WordPress site to you.

Another benefit to you in your developer using the WordPress coding standards is that any other developer you get to do work on the site will immediately recognise how the site is built. There is a standardised way of doing things and if that is followed then your site will continue to work well.

The WordPress coding standards are well documented and can be found here. They contain recommendations about how to code PHP, Javascript and CSS and we would always recommend you ask any developer if they use these standards and also how they ensure that their code would pass theme checking of the coding standards.

We have the coding standards plugged into our favourite code editor, Atom, so we know straight away if something isn’t done to the correct standards. When we first started using these standards we would find quite a few things that worked but were not quite right, nowadays it’s way less frequent that anything gets flagged up. We live by the standards and it has come second nature to us to use them.

Ultimately it all comes down to value rather than price and we know that producing a high-quality product that we offer huge value in the long run. There is no short-term thinking here, we are building WordPress websites that will last.