You might have heard of a boilerplate in other contexts – for example, boilerplate documentation helps to reduce the cost of drawing up legal documents, reducing the overall effort, allowing for time and resources to be focussed on the areas that are most important and require tailoring to your requirements.
We also use this approach in our work at Appeal Digital in a digital context.
A WordPress boilerplate is a powerful tool that we use to cut through the clutter, speed up development, and provide our clients with a consistent experience that is easier to maintain.
Boilerplate code is one of the most powerful tools that you can use when developing a website with WordPress. The approach helps produce better quality code that’s easy to maintain. In this way, boilerplate code can help streamline the entire development process.
Working with a boilerplate enables the team to focus on the strategies and areas of the site that are unique to you – removing the grunt work involved in including the basics and the vanilla stuff that, while important, is not the variable to success.
In this article, we unpack the approach we take at Appeal, including;
- What is Boilerplate WordPress Development?
- The commercial benefits
- The evolution of our boilerplate, ensuring it evolves and improves with time
Want to learn more about boilerplate development? Read this helpful guide for everything you need to know before your next project.
What is a boilerplate in WordPress theme development?
Boilerplate code is simply batches of code that can be adapted quickly for your website. This helps keep the code organised and uniform from one project to another. Using boilerplate code speeds up the development process as you can use it instead of rewriting hundreds of lines of code for each individual project.
It’s important to note that boilerplate code is not a pre-built theme. This is simply repeated code, plugins and frameworks that help provide more time for developers to customise and develop a unique website for your business.
At the end of the day, we understand that there are things that every business needs to have on its website. Boilerplate code allows us to put them there quickly so that we can focus more energy on the features, integrations and design elements that are the variable to success and unique to your brand.
Commercial benefits of boilerplate WordPress development
Boilerplate development comes with a wide variety of benefits that will help you build the best website possible. These benefits include both the backend and front end of the website. Here’s a closer look at the benefits of boilerplate theme development.
1. Cost-Effective Development
Boilerplate code includes prebuilt functionality, predefined style frameworks, and basic layouts. This significantly reduces development time.
As a result, developers can launch websites faster. This is especially beneficial for businesses with tight deadlines or limited budgets. The less time developers have to spend on rebuilding standard items, the more time they have on developing unique features for your website.
This keeps development time and costs down.
2. Better Quality Code
Using boilerplate themes creates uniformity in the codebase. This means that your code is simpler and easier to understand if other developers need to take over. From an operational perspective, this means faster resolutions to bugs and issues, and it makes it simpler to iterate and evolve the site over time.
3. Consistent Design and User Experience
There are many things on a website that should follow best practices. There are some areas where standardisation is the answer. For example, there’s no benefit in having a basket and checkout that is wildly different on every site.
Customers have set expectations of how a basket and checkout should behave. In this case, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. By using boilerplate code, the development time decreases along with the costs of building your website.
Additionally, standardised navigation and familiar design patterns contribute to improved usability. This helps users find the information they need quickly and efficiently. It also means that are our UX and design team are able to review data across multiple sites, find patterns, solve issues and drive improvement more effectively.
4. Easier Maintenance and Support
Boilerplate code comes with a modular structure. This means that it’s easy to build from and even easier to maintain. Since the structure is uniform, it’s effortless to customise without having to change the underlying code.
You can also include testing tools in your boilerplate code. This makes it easier for you to find and fix bugs in your code later on. This is a major benefit since a majority of developers say that they spend more than 25% of their time finding and fixing bugs.
Did you know?
A new WordPress website is created on average every 2 minutes and 52 seconds. That’s 500 new sites a day and 182,500 per year.
The underlying code also remains uniform and organised. This is important to note if you ever want to change something to divert away from the boilerplate theme. In this way, you still have full control over the customisation of your website.
Furthermore, boilerplate themes are designed with scalability in mind, allowing businesses to expand their websites efficiently as they grow.
5. Enhanced SEO Performance
Boilerplate themes are designed with SEO in mind. The website is made from clean, organised code that helps the entire site load faster. This will have a major impact on your SEO ranking.
Additionally, the organised code provides more time to focus on other technical and on-page SEO factors on your website. This can support improving SERP positioning and drive more organic traffic to your website.
The power of boilerplates and WordPress
Using boilerplate code is a great approach to building a website. This works particularly well when you pair it with the power of WordPress. Appeal Digital has worked incredibly hard to design its own boilerplate code so that website development can be as smooth as possible.
This ensures that every customer gets a first-class website that’s fast, clean, and efficient. The best part about this is that regular maintenance and support are even easier. This means that if you want to update your website in a few weeks, it can get done in the blink of an eye.
Build your B2B WordPress site with Appeal
Boilerplate WordPress development provides benefits that will make your project simpler, and deliver a better outcome. Using this framework creates better-quality code that’s easier to maintain. It also creates a consistent design and user experience for visitors.
At Appeal Digital, we’re focussed on continually optimising and improving our boilerplate and our processes to drive consistent returns and results for our clients.
Not sure where to start?
Get in touch to learn more about our boilerplate, our process and how we can help you to grow your business.
Data on WordPress website usage from TechJury: https://techjury.net/blog/percentage-of-wordpress-websites/
