I’ve worked with WordPress for almost a decade now, and it’s always been a major part of my development toolset. But a couple of years ago I found myself hitting the same sticking point again and again. With 30,000 plugins in the WordPress.org repository, and thousands of premium plugins, it can be hard to sort through them. I looked around, but couldn’t find any resources that helped out. So I built Tidy Repo.
In it’s original conception, Tidy Repo was a simple curated list of WordPress plugins. I would put plugins through some extensive testing, and if the plugin passed, I would put it on the site. I threw together a quick design, and started to write some articles for each plugin.
After about a year of maintaining the site, I started to look for a partner that can help me evolve the site. I found one in Jack McConnell, and together, we redesigned the site.
In the redesign, I put an emphasis on performance, converting icons to SVG, inlining a small amount of JavaScript, leaving out jQuery, and using SASS and Grunt to build critical CSS to inline.
The site is naturally built on WordPress, and keeps this performance trend throughout the back-end. I’ve made extensive use of transients, and object caching in the theme in order to keep things as fast as possible.