Resume Website
TL;DR Built this site with Wordpress. Custom coded theme with Underscores as a starter theme to provide the boilerplates. Here's the link to the repo of the theme if you're interested to take a look.
This website is proudly powered by WordPress. Wait no, don’t go yet! I have my reasons.
Laggy UI, terrible page metrics score, lack of customization, etc. WordPress and other website builders get a lot of hate in the community. Is that the case? Most of the time, yeah. With the sheer amount of drag & drop builders, plugins and themes available, the WP community is filled with a shocking amount of amateurs, many of whom haven’t written a single line of code in their life. Freelancers charging hundreds or even thousands after a day of learning how to install plugins and themes certainly doesn’t help with the situation. It’s not fair to blame WP for the lag if you have a list of plugins longer than the items in my Shopee shopping cart.
WordPress suck, but not always. Don’t trust me? Do a page speed test on this site right now, it’s actually pretty decent. Provided you are near the Malaysia/Singapore region since this is where the server is hosted and I’m too cheap to pay for CDN.
I used Underscores as the base starter theme to code the custom theme I am running on right now. No page builders were used and only 5 plugins installed. Since the theme is custom-coded, there are no unnecessary features like most of the themes available out there for the common users. Here’s the GitHub repo to the custom theme if anyone is interested.
So why WordPress?
The market is huge. Go Upwork or Freelancer and you’ll notice they are FLOODED with listings looking to hire WP devs. I don’t do any freelancing work now at the time of writing, but WP would be a good tool to start with if I were to.
I don’t need much customization. I need a simple resume website and share my past projects with posts that resemble a blog post. Pretty much what WP does best.
It’s simple and easy. I WAS WRONG. I’ve spent more time learning the WordPress ecosystem than on coding. My bad habit of jumping into coding right away without reading the documentation surely didn’t help in my case. To be fair, experience would speed things up but some things can’t be compared to modern frontend frameworks. Take the projects list on the front page for example. I wanted to display and paginate my projects, but I want viewers to able to browse the pages without reloading the page. I had to use AJAX, JS and PHP, with probably 5x lines of code and time needed with VueJS or ReactJS.
Not all plugins are evil.
Unless trying to learn the concept, no one should reinvent the wheel. Tons of plugins may slow a site down but not all plugins are evil.
Fail2Ban – Prevent bots from brute-forcing into my admin panel. Does not affect the performance as users will not be interacting with this.
WP Mail SMTP – Allows my WordPress to send emails. Does not affect the performance as users will not be interacting with this.
UpdraftPlus Backup/Restore – Automated backup into my Google Drive. Does not affect the performance as users will not be interacting with this.
Contact Form 7 – Contact form that integrates easily with Recaptcha V3. Minor performance impact as it needs to load the scripts for Recaptcha, but since the scripts are loaded at the end, it does not actually affect the time it takes for the website to be interactive to users.
SEO Framework – To better manage the SEO. To be honest, I don’t think this is actually necessary for me as I do not actually expect anyone to search for me and come to my website via Google. However, I still did it so I get the sweet 100% on Lighthouse page score. Minor if not negligible performance impact.
Even though only 5 plugins were installed, they would have easily saved me hours if not days of development compared to building a website from scratch with frontend frameworks and a headless CMS.
Should everyone use WordPress?
NO! I wouldn’t use WP for anything other than blogging or simple e-commerce functionality. If you need a simple landing page that can be done in HTML CSS JS, WP is pretty much overkill. For a simple and small e-commerce website, I’d actually choose Woocommerce due to its simplicity, but problems may arise when the shop needs to scale. If you need an e-commerce website with tons of customizations and flexibilities, STAY AWAY from Woocommerce!
I haven’t done anything impressive in this theme so I doubt you’d want the code to my theme but here is a link to the repo if you’re interested. https://github.com/junyongxlee/resume-site-wordpress-theme