WordPress interview questions and answers in 2022

This is one of the best WordPress interview questions to start off your interview process with. It is one of the basic questions that can set not only the tone but also put the candidate in the right mind frame. Now onto the answer -

The key difference here is - who’s hosting your website. When it comes to .com, it takes care of the hosting for you whereas with .org you host your own site. In simpler terms, wordpress.com is a service that allows you to build websites using the WordPress software (easier to start, less freedom), whereas WordPress.org is the software itself that you can use to create and maintain websites on your own.

WordPress hooks is a feature that allows you to manipulate your site’s behavior without modifying the file on WordPress core. WordPress has two types of hooks namely - Action and Filters.

With Action, you can add data or change how WordPress operates in specific places of a theme or plugin. In simpler terms, when WordPress is running Action hook is triggered at a specific time and lets you execute an action. Whereas Filters enable you to change data during the execution of WordPress Core, plugins, and themes. Basically, it allows you to fetch and modify data before it is dispatched to the database or the browser.

Everything that you post, comments, pages, settings, etc. are all stored in a database where all the information is stored in an organized manner in tables. Each table contains only specific types of data. Here is the list of default tables in WordPress -

• wp_options - stores all the settings of the site such as the URL, title, installed plugins, etc.
• wp_users - keeps all basic information of the registered users of your site like username, encrypted password, email, time of registration, display name, status, etc.
• wp_usermeta - stores additional information of the registered users.
• wp_links - stores the information about custom links added to your WordPress site. However, now it has been deprecated and is no longer in use.
• wp_commentmeta - contains comments on posts and pages.
• wp_terms - stored tags for posts, pages, and links.
• wp_term_relationships - connects tags to posts, pages, and links.
• wp_posts - contains all the content-related data on the site.
• wp_postmeta - keeps any additional information that is somehow linked to the post.
• wp_term_taxonomy - extends wp_terms and collects more categories and tags for posts, pages, and links.
• wp_termmeta - save meta values for terms.
• wp_comments - contains comments on posts and pages.

Here’s a list of 7 best practices that you must follow while creating WordPress plugins -

• Use clear coding standards
• Avoid naming collisions by giving unique names to variables, functions, or a class.
• Take security seriously.
• Prefix everything with a unique identifier.
• Make sure to access web services smartly.
• Only load things that you need for that page or section of the site.
• Avoid deprecated functions!

WordPress has got you covered with the function - _plugin_active(). You can simply pass the in the plugin basename and WordPress will do the work to see if it is active or not.

Take a look at the following code snippet -

There are several ways in which you can improve the performance of your WordPress site. Take a look here -

• Choose a good host
• Keep the WordPress core, along with the theme and plugins up to date
• Optimize images for better speed
• Optimize background process for improved efficiency
• Use a caching plugin
• Use CDN (Content Delivery Network)
• Use the latest PHP version
• Take out plugins that you don’t use
• Optimize the database
• Use third-party source for video hosting

No, WordPress only runs the activated plugins and ignores the deactivated ones.

Take a look at the following situation where WordPress cannot be used -

• If your project doesn’t require CMS
• If your project requires complex e-commerce
• If you need an enterprise intranet solution
• If your site requires custom scripting solutions

Take a look at a few of the basic steps that you must follow -

• Install security plugins like WP security
• Re-install the latest version of WordPress and check if all the themes and plugins are updated
• Uninstall any plugins or themes from any third party or untrustworthy sources
• Replace password and user-ids for all your users

There are many plugins available on WordPress that assist you in translating your site's content. That’s why the answer to this question may differ depending on the candidate. However, their answer can give insights into their knowledge of different plugins available and their advantages and disadvantages. Take a look at some of the multilingual plugins available on WordPress -

• WPML
• TranslatePress
• Polylang
• Weglot
• MultilingualPress, etc.