Over the years, WordPress has gotten a bit of a bad rep with web developers, and it’s easy to understand why. We’ve all come across that one WordPress website, with 40 plugins, most of which are out of date, four which are abandoned and 6 which have security vulnerabilities. The website was probably built 10 years ago, and has a visual builder thrown in on top of a theme with outdated support available.

But what if I told you that there was another way? That you could have WordPress running on your computer with the click of a button (ok, maybe 2 buttons), with all the local dev features we know and love, like hot module replacement, scoped styles and easy to build custom components? If you want (and have the skills in house), you can even build live updating React components that integrate directly with WordPress for things like advanced search and filtering without reloading the page. And once this is all done, you can deploy your changes via continuous deployment.

So join me as I take you on a journey to rediscover what WordPress is capable of, and together we’ll build a functioning, maintainable, easy to use WordPress website, with only a handful of plugins.