Development can be a stressful process. You have all these requirements you want and need to fulfill but also a fast-approaching deadline. It is also a process characterized by a lot of trial and error which on its own can take up a significant chunk of time. In every business, time is money, and the same goes for development.

The sooner you finish a website, the sooner it can go live and start bringing you profit through ads, sales, affiliate marketing, etc.. As a developer you have that thought in the back of your head constantly, so you spend a lot of time thinking about ways to speed up the development process which is most probably why you stumbled across this article.

 In it, we will give you exactly what you came looking for, the best tips and tools for streamlining your development process and saving as much of your precious time as possible. So let’s jump right into it.

Plan things out

Making any project a successful one requires planning. This is especially true for web development projects. Each one consists of multiple aspects like designing, building, and testing, so diving into all of that without a proper execution plan is never a smart move regardless of the size of the project. Before you even open your website builder, the smartest thing to do is to break down the project into a specific goal and milestones so it is more manageable and easier to keep track of the project’s progression.

When you plan better, you create better specifications and project guidelines which will significantly help with eradicating confusion and the emergence of bugs. Once you have devised a plan, remember that it doesn’t have to be followed to a T, it can be flexible and adaptable since development is a process is full of unexpected twists and turns.

Make your development process agile

If you know anything about the development world, then you’re aware that every good project is realized by following agile software development methodologies. Agile software development makes things a lot easier since projects aren’t delivered all at once, but in segments that each have to go through the testing, feedback garnering and mistake correction phase so when they are finally pieced together, the project as a whole has way fewer bugs, can be published sooner and is a better fit for the always-changing user requirements.

Don’t multitask

Like we mentioned earlier, development consists of a number of aspects, and doing multiple, or God forbid, all of them at the same time isn’t the best idea. If you are working on your design but also at the same time planning out your site’s functionalities neither of those aspects will be properly planned or executed since you didn’t give each of them the necessary amount of focus and effort. The only thing you might gain from this is a prolongation of your development process caused by repairing issues that could have been avoided if you simply hadn’t multitasked.

Test things out

In development, testing is your best friend. It helps you find bugs that might have been hiding within your site and lets you see how the site looks and works in action. But testing isn’t reserved only for the finished product, it is used all throughout the development process on sites dedicated just for running tests. On a testing site, you can incorporate any plugin, any theme without the risk of messing things up since that isn’t the site you will be delivering to your clients or using as your own. You do have to keep in mind that even test sites with time can get over-cluttered making it difficult to use them for deriving useful information.

Now that doesn’t mean that you need to build a new site for every round of testing, it only means that you need to reset the one you have as often as necessary. Since this article is all about spending up the development process, it is only fair that we present you with the fastest method of resetting your test site or any site you want to start things fresh on, and that method is using the WP Reset plugin.

WP Reset is a free and popular plugin that will give you a brand-new WordPress installation in seconds. It really is as simple as it sounds, with just one click allowing you to clean up your entire site from everything it has accumulated over time. It will delete all pages, posts, and media entries and disable plugins, themes, and theme mods as well.

It will also remove your media files from the media library but still keep them for you on the server. If you want to clear out the site from just one type of add-on, for example, just the plugins but leave the theme, you can, through the Selective Reset Tools feature.

If you want your site to always have the same basics reactivated after a reset, you can create collections of themes and plugins and instruct the WP Reset plugin to configure your new site just how you like it by using one or more of those collections. But if you decide you want to get rid of absolutely everything, that is also an option, an option called Nuclear Reset.

Want to see how your design and functionalities would behave on a different version of WordPress? Use this plugin to switch between them with just a click. Want to save the site, its data or tables for future use? Also not a problem. Just create a database snapshot with this plugin and restore it whenever you want. If you make a mistake while resetting, don’t sweat it, on disposal you have an emergency recovery script as well as an in-house support team ready to assist you at any time. These are just some of the features this plugin has to offer. To learn about the rest and the other ways this plugin can help you speed up your development process, visit https://wpreset.com/.

Use a page duplicator

A lot of the pages on your website will have a similar if not the exact same structure and design, so building the same thing over and over again only presents an extra hassle and makes the development time unnecessarily longer, which is something we absolutely want to avoid.

Luckily, to prevent us from having to do this, there are software tools called page duplicators that can clone existing pages within seconds as many times as you need it and with that drastically cut the time we spend on development.

Use a code generator

Another great tool that a lot of people forget about during the development process are code generators. Using code generators, a non-developer can give his/her site advanced functionalities very quickly without basically any effort. Code generators speed up development by reusing code snippets for the most commonly used functionalities and by generating custom code per your instructions for unique functionalities. A very useful tool indeed.

Stick to pre-made themes

Although having a truly unique design on your site can be a plus, it can also be a risk and something that takes up a lot of your valuable time. The reason why it takes up so much time should be obvious, creating a design that fits the latest design standards but also works for your site can’t be done in five minutes and will take a lot of effort.

 It’s also a risk because if you aren’t an experienced UX/UI designer while trying to create a custom theme you might make some pretty serious design mistakes without even realizing it. That is why it’s best for you to stick to pre-made themes, which are in abundance when it comes to WordPress. Incorporating a pre-made theme into your site is extremely easy and so is customizing it to fit your needs and liking.

All of this will take only a fraction of the time you would spend creating a custom theme and will probably give you a much better end result.

Conclusion

There you have it, some basic but very helpful advice on how to speed up your development. Although you should definitely try to cut down the time you spend developing, don’t ever rush it. Depending on the complexity of the project, it might require a bit more time than you initially thought, and that is okay. In that case, the only thing you can do is use the advice we gave you and speed it up as much as possible, but also always put in your best effort in order to end up with something you are truly proud of. 

ThemeKraft offers the opportunity to create content for us.
Guest Post

Dzenana Kajtaz

I’m a software engineering student from Bosnia and Herzegovina, currently working on my thesis. In my free time, I like to listen to podcasts and watch YouTube videos on all sorts of topics. I love anything, tech, fashion or travel-related.