Oh neat a workflows section! I’d love to talk about my workflow and see if anyone has some comments or ideas for streamlining it further. My biggest hiccup with new WordPress sites is usually the initial setup, it’s never very hard, but it’s often a little time consuming. So I wanted to share my workflow for getting new sites up and running really fast by utilizing the Blueprints feature.
Spinning up new sites on my local machine is pretty easy, but there’s a few things that I prefer doing for all of the site that I make. For example, I dance around between a few themes, but regardless of which I pick there are always a handful plugins I end up using across all of my sites such as Advanced Custom Fields and BackWPUp. I could create my own personal WordPress starter theme to encompass them, but it’s not always the correct solution, which is why I looooooooove the Blueprints feature.
Here’s what I do. I spin up a new WordPress site on Local, then do the initial setup that I usually do such as:
- Install the plugins that I will more than likely be using
- Create a page called “Home”
- Set the static front page to “Home”
- Remove the Tagline
- Set Permalinks to /post-name/
- etc.
After I’ve got the site to a place where I’m ready to install whichever theme I need, I go back over to Local, then right click on the site I just setup and do “Save as Blueprint” and give it a name like “Starter Blueprint”. Such a neat feature, easily my favorite.
Now when I make a new site I can set “Starter Blueprint” as my template during creation and I’ll have all of my default settings out of the box. Ah! It feels so good to remove that extra little bit of setup that always gets in the way so I can get back to actually building out the website.