Reaction’s Approach to WordPress Development

We’re Reaction Digital, a remote website and branding agency based in Alberta, Canada.

We understand that a robust online presence is essential for businesses to grow and thrive in today’s digital world, and that’s why we’ve made it our mission to help companies make big things happen online using the WordPress platform.

But why WordPress, you ask? Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to dive into!

Our WordPress strategy revolves around custom themes with minimal plugins and harnessing the power of ACF Pro, Custom Post Types, and Gutenberg. We believe in staying as close to the WordPress core as possible, and we think you’ll be amazed by the results you can achieve with this approach, all while streamlining your website management and driving business growth.

Unleashing Your Brand’s Potential with Custom Themes

Custom themes are essential to reflect your business’s unique identity and provide a tailored user experience. They offer a level of flexibility and control that pre-built themes just can’t match. You’ll have the freedom to showcase your products or services in the best possible light without being constrained by cookie-cutter layouts or design elements. Plus, a custom theme can help boost your search engine rankings, as they’re typically faster and more optimized for SEO.

Understrap combines the power of the popular Bootstrap framework with the user-friendly features of the WordPress platform, providing a solid starting point for our custom website theme.

Using Understrap, we can create responsive, mobile-first designs that look great on any device, ensuring that your website always puts its best foot forward, no matter how your visitors are accessing it. Additionally, Understrap’s well-documented codebase and active community support make it an excellent choice for future-proofing your website, as it’s easy to update and maintain over time.

As we design and develop your new custom WordPress theme, we’ll work closely with you to understand your business goals, brand identity, and target audience, ensuring that our designs not only look awesome but also serve a clear purpose.

By prioritizing both form and function, we can create websites that not only impress your most ideal customers but also keep them engaged and encourage them to take action.

Steering Clear of Page Builders is Our Approach

Page builders have become popular due to their drag-and-drop functionality and the perceived ease of designing a website without any coding knowledge. While page builders like Elementor, Divi, and Beaver Builder may seem like a convenient solution for building a website, we have our reservations about using them due to several drawbacks that can negatively impact your website in the long run.

These builders are notorious for generating excessive and inefficient code, which can significantly slow down your website’s loading times. This leads to a poor user experience and can harm your search engine rankings.

Additionally, despite offering numerous pre-built elements, page builders can limit your creative freedom, resulting in a less-than-ideal design that doesn’t align with your brand identity or business goals. Compatibility issues are another concern when using page builders. They often rely on shortcodes and proprietary code, which can create conflicts with other plugins or themes. This can lead to functionality problems and make it difficult to switch to a different builder or theme in the future.

At Reaction, we believe there’s a better way to build and maintain WordPress websites using Gutenberg, CPTs, and ACF.

A Winning Strategy for WordPress’s Content Management System

ACF Pro is a powerful plugin that allows us to create custom fields tailored to your website’s specific needs. This level of customization empowers you to easily manage your site’s content and structure, without having to dive into the code.

With ACF Pro, we can build intuitive, user-friendly interfaces for you to edit and update your website’s content, ensuring that maintaining your site is a breeze. It’s like having a bespoke content management system (CMS) built just for your business.

Custom Post Types (CPTs) are an awesome way to keep your website’s content organized and easy to manage. By creating CPTs tailored to your unique content needs, we can help you streamline the process of adding, editing, and organizing various types of content on your site, such as blog posts, products, testimonials, or team members.

CPTs make it simple to manage specific types of content, keeping your website’s backend clean and efficient. This means you can spend less time wrestling with your CMS and more time focusing on what really matters – growing your business.

Gutenberg, the modern WordPress editor, brings a whole new level of flexibility and control to your website’s front-end development process. With its block-based editing system, you can easily build and customize your site’s pages, without any coding required.

We’ll leverage Gutenberg to create custom blocks tailored to your website’s design and functionality, providing you with a seamless, user-friendly editing experience. This allows you to take full control of your site’s content and presentation, ensuring your website stays fresh, engaging, and aligned with your brand.

Balancing Functionality and Efficiency with Fewer Plugins

Plugins can add awesome functionality to your WordPress website, but it’s crucial not to go overboard. The core functionality of WordPress is remarkably robust, and frequently, plugins contribute to site bloat with excess code, redundant libraries, and a complex web of dependencies. By minimizing the use of plugins, we can build a lean, efficient, and well-organized website that effectively supports your business objectives.

Overloading your site with plugins can slow down its performance, create security vulnerabilities, and even lead to compatibility issues that can cause your site to crash.

We believe in using only the necessary plugins that genuinely add value to your website and help you achieve your business goals.

There are a few tried-and-tested plugins that we install on every custom website we build for our clients. These plugins include ACF Pro, Ninja Forms, The SEO Framework, and Redirection. Yeah.. that’s it! There may be one or two more plugins added for something specific or unique to the site, but you don’t need 37 plugins to make a simple marketing site.

ACF Pro offers a powerful toolkit for creating custom fields with intuitive content editing, while Ninja Forms makes it easy to create custom forms for lead generation and customer inquiries. The SEO Framework optimizes your website for search engines, and Redirection helps manage and monitor redirects, ensuring a seamless user experience.

When unique functionality is required, we prefer to build custom plugins tailored to your specific needs or code features directly into the WordPress theme. This approach not only helps us avoid plugin bloat but also ensures that your website remains streamlined, secure, and optimized for performance.

By creating custom solutions and integrating features directly into WordPress, we maintain better control over the final product and can quickly address any potential issues, further enhancing your website’s stability and user experience.

Embracing Continuous Improvement for Your Online Presence

In the fast-paced digital landscape, regular maintenance is essential to ensure your website remains secure, up-to-date, and optimized for performance. Outdated software, security vulnerabilities, and unaddressed bugs can have a significant impact on your website’s functionality, user experience, and search engine rankings.

At Reaction, we understand the importance of keeping your website in top shape. That’s why after your new website is built, we offer a complete website management & hosting solution to support the success of your business.

Our commitment to maintenance and innovation ensures that your website remains a valuable asset for your business, both now and in the future.

Our commitment to upgrades and innovation through our on-demand service ensures that your website remains a valuable asset for your business, both now and in the future. 

Once your website is fully managed by Reaction, you can get on-demand access to our team of talented designers, skilled developers, and strategic thinkers to enhance and add new features to your site that move your business forward. 

You’ll pre-approve a monthly or annual budget, sign off on all projects, and only get billed for the actual time spent working on your website. It’s a simple and transparent process of working together.

At Reaction, we firmly believe that our relationship with our clients extends far beyond the website launch. We see ourselves as your long-term digital partner, dedicated to helping you succeed in the dynamic and constantly evolving digital world. It’s our promise to provide ongoing support and expertise, ensuring that your online presence remains strong and effective.

The consequences of an underperforming website can be severe – lost customers, damaged reputation, and missed opportunities for growth. It’s time to take control of your online presence and make big things happen online!