The SmartAcre Way: Best Practices for WordPress CMS and Themes

Jonathan Au

If you’re building or managing a website, understanding the roles of tools like WordPress(a Content Management System) and WordPress themes is essential. This article breaks down how these tools work together to simplify content updates, streamline design, and ensure your site is scalable for future needs. Whether you’re a marketer looking for flexibility, a developer seeking best practices, or a business owner wanting to optimize your site, you’ll find actionable insights to help you create a website that balances performance, usability, and growth potential.

What is a CMS(like WordPress)?

A CMS, or Content Management System, is software that makes it easy to create, edit, and manage website content without needing advanced technical skills. It allows users to add and update pages, blog posts, images, and other media through a simple interface.

With a CMS like WordPress, you don’t have to code(taking into consideration the limitations of your theme and setup). Everything is set up for you to manage your site’s content efficiently. It’s a user-friendly way to run a website.

What is a WordPress theme?

From a developer perspective: a WordPress theme is a package of files that dictates the design, layout, and edibility of a WordPress site. It includes PHP templates, CSS stylesheets, JavaScript files, and images, all working together to define how content is presented. Developers can create custom themes or modify existing ones, leveraging WordPress’s template hierarchy and hooks to enhance functionality. This flexibility allows for easy customization and scalability while adhering to best practices for performance and security.

From a non developer perspective: a WordPress theme is a collection of templates and styles that define the visual appearance and layout of a WordPress website. Themes control how content is displayed, including colors, fonts, and overall design elements, allowing users to customize the look and feel of their site without altering the core functionality.

How does SmartAcre unite them?

A strategic harmonious dance of Technical Requirements, and Best Practices contained within a set of Guardrails that suites the front end user as well as the marketers and engineers working in the backend of the website.

1. Technical Requirements

Our goal is to build a website theme that helps marketers maintain brand consistency building better looking pages easier. We attach that theme to a CMS built on core functional requirements based around best practices in Accessibility, Page Speed, and SEO. As well as any additional functional requirements defined in the discovery and strategy phase of the project. In other words the unique per case needs of you, the client.

We take these requirements and build a system that takes the future both near and far into consideration. Whether that includes day to day marketing actions, a future rebrand, a restructure of materials, a site migration, and more.

2. Best Practices

A lightweight, well structured CMS

Plugins

We like to build websites with the least amount of plugins needed, here are some reasons why:

• Too many WordPress plugins can slow down your website, as each plugin adds additional code that needs to be loaded.
• It also increases the risk of security vulnerabilities, especially if plugins aren’t regularly updated or are poorly coded.
• Managing a large number of plugins can become complicated, leading to potential conflicts between plugins, which can cause functionality issues or crashes.

Keeping the plugin count minimal helps improve performance, security, and ease of maintenance. Oftentimes we find that plugins are installed to provide solutions that could be built natively inside the website theme without the need for any outside extensions. Below are the core plugins we use with our WordPress boilerplate theme and CMS when beginning a website project for a client.

Imagify
Image file size is often overlooked, an easy mistake. With today’s high resolution imagery it’s important to remember that every file that is needed to build a web page requires time to load. A basic image compression tool, whether local on your computer prior to uploading into your CMS, or a lightweight plugin like Imagify in your CMS can handle compressing files down to more manageable sizes.

Redirection
Ever land on a 404 error page? Every wonder how on earth a successful well managed business could have led you into such a situation? It’s easier and more common than you think! This issue encompasses two best practices in one, database cleanliness, and creating and managing redirects. We’ll dive more into database cleanliness shortly, but managing redirects through a simple clean plugin is essential whenever deleting, or changing the url of a webpage that has already been published and more importantly indexed on the internet.

WP Rocket
It’s fall, the foliage is foliaging(I made that up), you’re sitting in a quaint little cafe out in rural Pennsylvania(or whichever state you prefer). You have no cell service, so you’re connected to their wifi. It isn’t great. Trying to load a website page, watching it struggle with the internet connection. Yes while this may be an extreme case of the page speed blues it’s moments like this that we can lose users, or worse google judges us for.

WP Rocket is a popular WordPress plugin designed to speed up your website. It does this by implementing caching, which stores static versions of your pages to reduce load times. It also optimizes various performance aspects like file compression, lazy loading of images, and minimizing CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files. The plugin can significantly improve website speed, which is crucial for both SEO and user experience.

Yoast SEO
I mean what can I say here, one of the more popular SEO wordpress plugins on the market. Of the countless client websites I’ve worked on over the years most came to us already utilizing this plugin. For good reason, it does the job you need it to do. It offers tools like keyword optimization, readability analysis, and meta tag management to improve your site’s SEO and make it easier for search engines to find and rank your content.

Advanced Custom Fields
One could say Advanced custom fields are our bread and butter when building themes for wordpress. It’s what allows us to build modular themes that are editable by all of you. Just about every editable field on the websites we build are using Advanced Custom Fields. As developers it allows us to build the unique editing experiences defined by our gathered technical requirements. While also being the backbone of our foundational theme elements.

Database Management/Cleanliness

This one is close to my heart, it soothes the neurotic need for organization that lives in my soul. Dramatic I know, but for real, have you ever watched an episode of Hoarders? Has your website become that “marketing junk drawer” in your kitchen collecting the years worth of executed ideas? Is anyone keeping track of all this stuff? Who bought this dinosaur shaped taco holder?

With great power comes great responsibility. Sure, your marketing website might not be the One Ring(IYKYK) but it represents your business. Think of it like your office space, are there files strewn about? Does anything ever get thrown out or retired, we’ve got stuff accumulating dust that provides no value. Does anybody know where the hole puncher is?

Cutting down the number of pages in a WordPress site is a win for both users and site managers. It speeds up managing content on the back end. It also tends to lead to higher quality content on the pages that do exist. A streamlined structure reduces the risk of outdated material piling up and keeps the site more organized. Plus, when it comes time for redesigns or big updates, a simpler structure keeps things affordable and hassle-free. It’s all about keeping things organized for smoother growth in the future!

Now I’m not saying more content isn’t valuable. I’m saying ask yourself, is all the content I have that is publicly accessible still relevant? Do we have an internal process for creating and management content over time? Can I find what I need in this drawer? Wait who made half this stuff? We’ve found some pretty surprising stuff during website audits that when presented to clients sometimes elicits a response something like “Well, hot dog, I had no idea that was a thing”.

A Lightweight theme

If you’ve made it this far then you have read about the pros of using less plugins, and keeping a clean database. It’s only natural that our theme itself follows this philosophy of “less is more”.

We rarely need to add extra plugins beyond what’s listed above unless they’re specifically requested by a client. For our boilerplate theme, Advanced Custom Fields is the only plugin required to ensure everything runs smoothly.

It’s uncommon to find a modular WordPress theme that doesn’t require multiple complex plugins. These plugins often come with so many settings and configurations that they can be difficult for a typical marketer to manage efficiently.

What’s easier to manage, manipulate, and give adequate attention to over time? A tool that is built for the size of the problems you are looking to solve.

Growth in Mind

As web developers, our job isn’t just about creating a great front-end experience for users visiting the website. Equally important is making sure the back-end editing experience is smooth and efficient for the people managing the content. It’s our responsibility to bring our learned experience to the table, we’re engineering a tool to facilitate not just known requests and requirements, but also the unknown. The “well one day we might….”.

At times this can look like we’re asking more questions than seems necessary but the Growth in Mind approach benefits all of us. It streamlines development requests, allowing us to execute them more quickly, which (drum roll, please) leads to lower costs—both for immediate execution and future updates or implementations.

3. Guardrails

The problem with themes and plugins that promise to do everything—and more—is that they often try to do too much.

Our developers have been building or working inside of well over 150 client websites for over 16 years, with the majority of that time spent working closely with marketers. We’ve seen firsthand what works and what doesn’t—what’s user-friendly enough for users and what’s so complex it gets avoided or misused. We’ve encountered countless websites originally set up with tools like the DIVI builder and managed by a rotating cast of individuals with varying levels of experience in CMS or website management. Time and again, we’ve observed both the right and wrong ways to use these tools.

The flexibility of these tools often leads to a few common challenges:

• A steep learning curve, requiring significant time for training and mastery(which sometimes leads to abandonment of training)
• No clear internal processes for effectively managing such a complex system(standard operating procedures)
• Inconsistent styling and layout throughout the site(am I on the same website?)
• Global styling and layout adjustments take longer to implement
• Troubleshooting becomes more time-consuming

I’m a big fan of analogies, one that comes to mind here is a municipality with no building code. Imagine buying a 100 year old home in an area with lax building regulations, 5 prior owners, all of which loved DIY. Now tack on hiring a contractor to come in and do any kind of legitimate work. I hear cash registers ringing, do you?

A value of ours is to help save people from themselves. Provide  just enough flexibility to be effective, but not dangerous.

Final Thoughts

If we’re strategic, and thoughtful with our ideas and actions we can do more, with less. This kind of thinking saves time in the long run, for most of us time means money.

As marketers here at SmartAcre we understand the value in being agile. Trends shift, goals change, technologies reframe their preferences and requirements(cough cough google) so on and so forth. We have to be able to adapt on an ongoing basis. It is imperative that we keep the tools we use, our toolbox, as light and clean as possible.

By the way, we build in Hubspot too, questions about building in Hubspot, give us a ring.