WordPress + Bootstrap = Crazy Delicious

by Jason Unger, Founder

Insights / Website Development / WordPress + Bootstrap = Crazy Delicious

We’re always investing in making ourselves smarter and making our work better, whether that’s attending industry trainings, testing out new software or looking at what our peers are doing that can inspire us.

Over the past year, we’ve refined our process of integrating one of the most popular mobile-first frameworks, Bootstrap, into our day-to-day WordPress development.

Bootstrap, a front-end framework originally developed by folks at Twitter, has become one of the best ways to build responsive design, mobile-first websites. With clean code, generally good backwards browser compatibility, and plenty of reusable components (like buttons, navigation bars and big picture jumbotrons), it’s an extremely powerful tool that, quite frankly, we love to use.

(If you’re not totally sure what a framework is, read this post; long story short, it’s essentially a set of code you build your site off of that provides consistency across devices and browsers and pre-built styles for your HTML code.)

Bootstrap Design, WordPress Development

If you work with talented designers (like I do), they’ll be able to base their designs off of Bootstrap’s built-in grid system. There’s plenty of grid layouts available online, with the page widths and breakpoints optimized for Bootstrap – one less thing for designers to worry about.

Consistency in sizes and layouts translates into easier cutting and development once the designs are good to go.

What’s great about using Bootstrap is that it integrates incredibly smoothly when developing a WordPress theme. WordPress is obviously our content management system of choice (along with 22% of the entire Internet), and all it takes to integrate Bootstrap is a few stylesheets and a couple of Javascript files.

Your theme’s stylesheet is going to be smaller, thanks to Bootstrap’s built-in styles, and you don’t need to waste time re-inventing the wheel defining paragraph tags, underordered lists, and other generic styles. Of course, you can replace the Bootstrap defaults, but in all the development we’ve done, we tend to keep more than we replace.

WordPress Menus? Easy.

Thanks to the open-source nature of both WordPress and Bootstrap, there’s a great custom walker function that integrates the built-in Bootstrap navigation with WordPress’s built-in menus. Get it here.

What does it mean? The menu items you manage in WordPress will automatically be responsive, adjusting for mobile, tablet and desktop environments.

The Power of WordPress and The Standards of Bootstrap

The purpose of using a framework is to provide compatibility across browsers and devices, especially in today’s mobile-first environment, and to make development easier and more time-efficient. You’re getting great quality and great ease-of-use.

We use and advocate for WordPress because it’s the easiest, most extensible content management system. You’re getting the highest quality tool on the market that can do just about everything.

Combining these two has been a winner for us. Reach out and let’s see if it’s right for you. (Spoiler alert: it probably is.)