Stack standardization allows WordPress professionals to streamline development.

 

Use our SOP Template to Improve WP Care Plan Performance.

Click here to Download PDF

Unlimited WP

Who is it for: Who is it for: WordPress team, WordPress management team, QA team
Prepared by: Darshan

Outcomes:

  • It will help in following coding standards for the Beaver Builder website.
  • Helps in managing and updating Beaver builder sites easily.
  • Easy for the team to identify the work of other team members and find the files easily to update.
  • Helpful for new employees and trainees.

Critical Steps:

  1. Always confirm with the manager whether to use a paid or free version of the Beaver Builder plugin, Ultimate addons for Beaver builder plugin, and Astra theme.
  2. When using the free version of Beaver Builder and Ultimate Addons, make sure 80% of the design is achievable through the free version. If not, consult with your team lead or manager and request for a paid version or other alternatives if possible.
  3. Install and activate plugins (Beaver Builder, Ultimate Addons). Pro versions of plugins will be provided by your team lead or manager. Free versions of the plugins should be removed and deleted from the site if you are using the Pro versions of the plugins. Also, use the Beaver themer plugin if the site would have a post archive and single pages. For the Beaver Themer plugin, Beaver builder PRO is mandatory.

Click here to Download PDF

Every one of your client’s sites is unique.

Part of your job as a WordPress developer is finding out what makes your client’s project special and leveraging that special characteristic to generate value.

But just because a website’s core value is unique does not mean that the technology behind it has to be. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel with every new project you take on.

Over the last couple of months, we’ve covered a variety of benefits and use cases associated with standard operating procedures (SOPs), and even given away free templates to help digital agencies make their own. Now we’re going to talk about how standardization can create competitive advantages in our industry.

One of the main places where having a core set of operating standards helps most is when you’re choosing your preferred WordPress software stack.

Choose a Versatile WordPress Stack

As a developer, it should be plainly evident that your choice of software stack impacts your ability to respond to client needs with accuracy and agility. The broader and more diverse your clients’ needs are, the more versatile your stack of themes, plugins, and other tools will need to be.

This is one of the reasons why it’s important to build a niche for yourself as soon as possible. Having clients that are similar to one another in terms of their technology requirements helps you choose tools that best resolve their most common problems. As an added bonus, it consolidates your industry reputation for solving those types of problems.

This is especially true if you want your agency to operate as a “full-stack web development agency”. If you want to handle client-side, server-side, front-end, and back-end problems for your clients in a comprehensive way, you will need to choose a technology stack that is both versatile and powerful.

WordPress itself is a PHP application, which means you’re going to need to find ways to optimize your ability to compile and run PHP applications. You may even wish to include a tool like Docker or Laravel into your workflow.

Laravel is particularly useful because it allows you to maintain and scale PHP applications easily over time. Development frameworks are hugely popular because they directly address the “reinventing the wheel” problem that developers often face when dealing with multiple clients over time.

Diving Deeper Into WordPress: Choosing Themes and Plugins for Your Stack

As a WordPress agency, your development stack goes further than PHP development frameworks. You are virtually guaranteed to use, create, or modify WordPress themes and plugins in the course of your daily work.

If you do not take the time to establish a comprehensive set of first-priority themes and plugins to use, you run the risk of over-extending your agency’s technology needs in a way that is difficult to scale.

Remember that every theme and plugin you decide to use also comes with maintenance and update requirements. If you pick a brand new set of WordPress themes and plugins for every customer you have, you will quickly find yourself spending more time updating and maintaining all of those technologies than you spend actually generating value for your customers.

On the other hand, if you stick to a relatively small number of themes and plugins that you repeatedly use for multiple customers, you will save an enormous amount of time on maintenance over time. This will help you earn greater profits from your retainer agreements and improve your quality of life immensely.

Use our SOP Template to Improve WP Care Plan Performance.

Click here to Download PDF

Unlimited WP

Who is it for: Who is it for: WordPress team, WordPress management team, QA team
Prepared by: Darshan

Outcomes:

  • It will help in following coding standards for the Beaver Builder website.
  • Helps in managing and updating Beaver builder sites easily.
  • Easy for the team to identify the work of other team members and find the files easily to update.
  • Helpful for new employees and trainees.

Critical Steps:

  1. Always confirm with the manager whether to use a paid or free version of the Beaver Builder plugin, Ultimate addons for Beaver builder plugin, and Astra theme.
  2. When using the free version of Beaver Builder and Ultimate Addons, make sure 80% of the design is achievable through the free version. If not, consult with your team lead or manager and request for a paid version or other alternatives if possible.
  3. Install and activate plugins (Beaver Builder, Ultimate Addons). Pro versions of plugins will be provided by your team lead or manager. Free versions of the plugins should be removed and deleted from the site if you are using the Pro versions of the plugins. Also, use the Beaver themer plugin if the site would have a post archive and single pages. For the Beaver Themer plugin, Beaver builder PRO is mandatory.

Click here to Download PDF

How SOPs Help Standardize Technology Stacks: An Example

At UnlimitedWP we use the Beaver Builder plugin, Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder plugin, and the Astra theme on the majority of the websites we build. 

Since we have experience with these technologies already, we are able to complete tasks that rely on them faster and more efficiently. If we used a constantly changing menu of builders and themes, we would have to dedicate time to learn how each one works at a deep level, and then spend even more time maintaining and updating them for our partners.

Since this particular stack of technologies is sufficient to set up a default website in almost all of our development scenarios, it makes sense to standardize the way we use it. This is where our website setup SOP takes a central role.

The SOP is designed so that any member of our team has all of the information and resources needed to create a default WordPress template using the Beaver Builder plugin, the Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder plugin, and the Astra theme. The finished output is ready to move onto the next part of our workflow – customization, and development.

Our white label WordPress agency’s whole value proposition relies on being able to offer unlimited WordPress tasks to agencies at a single monthly rate. We have to optimize every step of the development process in order to generate value for agencies who want to outsource WordPress tasks to our team, and standardization is a key part of that.

Standardization Helps Scalability

If you run an agency where one or two people handle almost all client requests, you may believe that there is no urgent need to create standard operating procedures. After all, you can keep track of the way you configure your technology stack to meet your clients’ needs.

However, this changes radically once your agency starts growing. If you need to offload some of your projects on a newly hired developer (or a white label partner agency), you will suddenly be faced with a dilemma. The new developer may have different configuration priorities than you do. They may operate on different assumptions or use a different set of tools to arrive at the desired outcome.

If you don’t carefully assess the way you delegate tasks to your team members and third-party service providers, you can actually become an obstacle to your own agency’s growth. Standardization means that any employee can reliably complete a given task without needing additional training beyond the established operating procedures.

In terms of overall productivity, the net gain expands at an exponential rate as your company grows. Standardization is one of the fundamental keys to achieving that kind of growth.