WordPress

WordPress Development Isn’t What It Used to Be — Here’s My Stack

Justin

Justin

— 3 min read
WordPress Development Isn’t What It Used to Be — Here’s My Stack

Over the years, I’ve dialed in a WordPress stack that’s modern, fast, and production-ready — designed for flexibility, easy collaboration, and repeatable success across every project. Whether I’m working on a small business site or a complex custom build, this setup helps me stay efficient and focused on performance.

🧱 Foundation: Bedrock

I start every site with Bedrock, which brings a modern structure to WordPress with:

  • Environment-based configuration
  • Composer-based dependency management
  • Cleaner folder organization and better security

It makes managing code and deployments way more predictable and scalable.

💻 Local Development with DDEV

All development starts locally in DDEV, which gives me a consistent, containerized environment across projects.

Once a site is live, I can pull the latest database and uploads from production with a single command:

ddev pull prod

That command is configured in .ddev/providers/prod.yaml, allowing me to automate syncing without manual SSH work. Here’s what it looks like — but for this to work, you’ll also need to create a .env file at .ddev/.env.web with the following variables:

PROD_SSH_HOST=
PROD_SSH_USER=
PROD_FILES_DIR=
PROD_BACKUP_DIR=
PROD_DB_NAME=
PROD_DB_HOST=
PROD_DB_PORT=3306
PROD_DB_USER=
PROD_DB_PASSWORD=

And here's the contents of the prod.yaml config:

environment_variables:
  dburl: ${PROD_SSH_USER}@${PROD_SSH_HOST}:${PROD_BACKUP_DIR}/${PROD_DB_NAME}.sql.gz
  filesurl: ${PROD_SSH_USER}@${PROD_SSH_HOST}:${PROD_BACKUP_DIR}/uploads.tar.gz

auth_command:
  command: |
    set -eu -o pipefail
    ssh-add -l >/dev/null || ( echo "Please 'ddev auth ssh' before running this command." && exit 1 )
  service: web

db_pull_command:
  command: |
    set -eu -o pipefail
    ssh ${PROD_SSH_USER}@${PROD_SSH_HOST} "mariadb-dump -u ${PROD_DB_USER} -p${PROD_DB_PASSWORD} ${PROD_DB_NAME} | gzip > ${PROD_BACKUP_DIR}/${PROD_DB_NAME}.sql.gz"
    rsync -az "${dburl}" /var/www/html/.ddev/.downloads/db.sql.gz
    ddev import-db --src=/var/www/html/.ddev/.downloads/db.sql.gz
    ssh ${PROD_SSH_USER}@${PROD_SSH_HOST} "rm -f ${PROD_BACKUP_DIR}/${PROD_DB_NAME}.sql.gz"
  service: web

files_pull_command:
  command: |
    set -eu -o pipefail
    echo "Syncing files from remote server..."
    rsync -avz --delete --exclude=".gitkeep" ${PROD_SSH_USER}@${PROD_SSH_HOST}:${PROD_FILES_DIR}/ /var/www/html/web/app/uploads/ || { echo 'Failed to sync files'; exit 1; }
  service: web

This gives me a painless way to pull fresh production data into my local dev environment.

✨ Hosting & Deployments

  • Hosting: DigitalOcean droplets
  • Server Management: RunCloud
  • Deployments: Atomic deployments triggered by pushes to GitLab — I use main as the production branch and develop for active development
  • DNS & Security: Managed through Cloudflare
  • Media Clouding: DigitalOcean Spaces
  • Caching: Redis, for fast and efficient object caching
  • Monitoring: Uptime Kuma (self-hosted on a 2011 Mac mini at my house) connected to Pushover for instant downtime alerts

Everything is optimized for performance, scalability, and ease of use.

🔌 Core Plugin Stack

These are my must-haves for nearly every project:

  • Advanced Custom Fields Pro — for flexible content modeling and block editor enhancements
  • Gravity Forms — powerful and extensible form builder
  • WP Environments — environment-aware development inside the WP admin
  • The SEO Framework — lightweight SEO that doesn’t get in the way
  • Media Offload — automatically pushes uploads to DigitalOcean Spaces (works great alongside EWWW Image Optimizer with built-in compatibility settings)
  • EWWW Image Optimizer — compresses and converts images to WebP for faster load times
  • Flying Scripts — delays JavaScript execution for better performance scores
  • Mailgun — transactional email delivery
  • Google Site Kit — quick integration for Analytics, Search Console, and more

All plugins sourced from the WPackagist repository are managed via Composer. For custom or premium plugins, I include them directly in the repository so everything is version-controlled and deployable.

🧩 MU Plugins & Customizations

I use the default MU plugins that come with Bedrock, along with a few custom ones I’ve built for:

  • Branding the login screen
  • Disallowing specific plugins
  • Disabling email notifications for core/plugin/theme updates

These help enforce consistency and reduce client-side clutter.

🔐 Media Offload Configuration

Here’s an example of how I configure Media Cloud credentials within config/application.php:

/** DigitalOcean Spaces */
// @link https://support.mediacloud.press/articles/advanced-usage/environment-variables/cloud-storage-variables/
Config::define( 'MCLOUD_STORAGE_PROVIDER', 'do' );
Config::define( 'MCLOUD_STORAGE_S3_ACCESS_KEY', '' );
Config::define( 'MCLOUD_STORAGE_S3_SECRET', '' );
Config::define( 'MCLOUD_STORAGE_S3_BUCKET', '' );
Config::define( 'MCLOUD_STORAGE_S3_ENDPOINT', 'nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com' );
Config::define( 'MCLOUD_STORAGE_PREFIX', '@{date:Y/m}' );
Config::define( 'MCLOUD_STORAGE_UPLOAD_DOCUMENTS', false );
Config::define( 'MCLOUD_STORAGE_CACHE_CONTROL', 'public,max-age=31536000' );
//Config::define( 'MCLOUD_STORAGE_CDN_BASE', '' );

EWWW and Media Cloud pair well together — I fine-tune settings in Media Offload to ensure that images are properly optimized, offloaded, and cached.

This workflow keeps things fast, clean, and scalable. Whether it's performance tuning, building custom themes and plugins, or maintaining long-term client sites, this stack helps me ship high-quality WordPress work without friction.

If you have questions about any part of the setup — or want a deeper dive into how I structure deployments, manage local dev, or streamline performance — feel free to reach out!