From the course: Upgrading Legacy WordPress Projects: Modernize Workflows and Codebase

Auditing and assessing your project - WordPress Tutorial

From the course: Upgrading Legacy WordPress Projects: Modernize Workflows and Codebase

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Auditing and assessing your project

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- [Instructor] Before making any changes to a Legacy WordPress project, it's essential to conduct a thorough audit. This helps you understand its current state, identify key areas for improvement, and ensure that our modernization efforts are strategic rather than random. Without a proper audit, you may introduce new issues instead of fixing existing ones. An audit provides a clear picture of what needs to be improved, ensures updates align with business and technical goals, and helps measure progress over time. Some of the most common issues you'll find in Legacy WordPress projects include outdated code. Security vulnerabilities from old plugins and themes can cause big problems. Slow performance, bloated assets, and inefficient database queries can really slow things down. Technical debt. Accumulated fixes and workarounds make updates costly. By identifying these issues early, you can make informed decisions about what to modernize first. When auditing your WordPress project, focus on these four main areas. First, code quality. Look for outdated functions, inefficient coding practices and security risks. Two, performance and optimization. Evaluate page speed, database efficiency and asset loading. Three, security and compliance. Review outdated plugins, SSL settings and authentication methods. And four, maintainability and scalability. Assess your project's ability to grow and adapt over time. To efficiently analyze your WordPress project, here are some tools you might use. For code analysis, PHP code sniffer, WP debug, and PHP coding standards for detecting coding issues. For performance testing, things like Google Page Speed Insights, GT Metrics can help with this task. Security scanning, Wordfence, and security are great solutions for detecting vulnerabilities. And database and asset review. Use Query Monitor or WP Optimize to identify slow queries and clean up unused data. Once you've completed your audit, document your findings clearly. A good audit report should include key observations to highlight major issues. Severity levels. To rank problems from critical to minor. Recommended fixes. Outline the necessary updates. Supporting evidence. Use screenshots and performance metrics to justify changes. Having this information makes it easier to get stakeholder buy-in and prioritize fixes efficiently. Auditing your WordPress project is a crucial first step towards modernization. With a clearer understanding of its current state, you can make informed decisions on what to prioritize and how to proceed. In our next session, we'll explore how to create an effective modernization strategy based on audit findings. For now, take some time to conduct an initial audit using the tools we discussed today. Now it's your turn. Take some time to audit your own WordPress project. Use the tools and strategies we covered today. Document your findings and start thinking about what areas need the most improvements. Use the worksheets available in the course GitHub repository to help you along the way.

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