I’ve been working with WordPress for over a decade now.
I’ve built plugins, worked with agencies, shipped products, burned out, restarted, and kept going.
But looking back, there’s one piece of advice that stuck with me more than anything else.
It wasn’t from a blog post.
It wasn’t from a course or a conference talk.
It was something simple that a senior dev told me during my early days:
“If you’re building for WordPress, build like you’re part of WordPress.”
At the time, I didn’t fully get it.
I was busy trying to make things look custom, unique, “better” than WordPress core.
I wanted to change everything — custom UIs, new dashboard layouts, fancy JS behavior that ignored WordPress conventions.
But that advice started making more sense the longer I stuck around.
What they meant was:
If you’re building something for WordPress users, don’t fight the platform.
Blend into it. Use its patterns. Speak its design language.
Make your plugin feel like it belongs there.
Because users already know how WordPress works.
They don’t want to learn a new UI just to enable one feature.
They don’t want your plugin to break every time WordPress updates.
They want something that feels native — something they trust.
And that shifted how I build.
I started focusing more on:
- Clean, native UI using WordPress components
- Logical settings that match how WordPress core does things
- Avoiding unnecessary custom code when WordPress already solves it well
- Writing code that respects hooks, filters, roles, and capabilities
That one mindset saved me hours of future maintenance, made support easier, and helped users feel at home using my tools.
It also helped me enjoy building more — because I wasn’t reinventing the wheel. I was working with the system, not against it.
It sounds simple. But it’s easy to forget, especially when you’re trying to build something cool or different.
So if you’re working on a plugin, a theme, or even just a small tweak, remember this:
Don’t try to make WordPress look like your plugin.
Make your plugin feel like part of WordPress.
That’s the best advice I ever got — and I’m still following it today.
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