Your goal should be to write elegant code that expresses your intentions the most clearly. Take a look at the Validating, escaping and sanitising user data article for more information. WordPress has a bunch of functions to help you out. Make sure to use built in functions like filter_var() to check for proper values and escaping and other functions when working with databases. There are three issues with user data: we developers don’t take every possibility into account, it is frequently incorrect and it may be intentionally malicious.Ī well thought out system can protect against all of these. Always filter, sanitize, escape, check and use fallbacks. If you are unsure of the speed of a query test it and try some other variations – use the best one. When calculating averages, sums or similar numbers use SQL functions instead of PHP functions. While on the subject of SQL, know your available functions and test for speed as much as possible. This helps minimize your resource usage, protect your data and make things as clear as possible. Specify the exact columns you need and only retrieve those. In any case, don’t use wildcards in SQL queries if you can avoid them, especially if you have a database with a lot of columns. Do Not Use * in SQL QueriesĪll right, this one is more of a MySQL issue, but we tend to write our SQL code in PHP so I say it’s fair game. Join 20,000+ others who get our weekly newsletter with insider WordPress tips!
Want to know how we increased our traffic over 1000%? The best way to work these things out is to read function documentation and to use something like the Query Monitor. Subsequent calls use the cached data, not database calls. This is because when you use it for the first time WordPress actually retrieves all metadata and caches it. While get_post_meta() will grab a meta value from the database, you can use it in a loop if you’re looping through one specific post’s metadata. I then loop over the array, no need to perform queries in the process.ĭue to the way WordPress works there may be some exceptions to this. When I bump into a situation where this would be needed I can usually solve the issue with two separate queries I use to build an array of data. It puts unnecessary strain on your systems and it is likely you can achieve the same result faster outside the loop. Performing database queries in a loop is just wasteful. Instead of returning a shuffled or sorted array, they modify the original which is completely illogical to my mind. One example of why references are bad is PHP built in shuffle() or sort(). I understand that in some cases it is useful, but in many others it makes code harder to understand and follow and especially difficult to predict the result.Īpparently, people think it makes their code faster though which according to respectable PHP programmers is just not true. I personally don’t like passing by reference. It is not required by PHP and by omitting it at the end of a file you are making sure that no trailing whitespace can be added. In fact, the Zend Framework specifically forbids it. If you take a look, most core WordPress files omit the ending PHP tag when a file ends with PHP code. Do Not Use PHP Close Tags at the End of a File To understand just how important speed is and what you can do to make things better, take a look at our beginners’ guide to speed optimization article.Īs developers you should always make sure to load scripts only when they are needed, concatenate them when possible, write efficient database queries, use caching when possible and so on. Don’t be content with your site speed simply because the switch to PHP 7 made it faster. This one may be a no-brainer but it will become increasingly important because the speed increases in PHP 7 may hide some of your issues. PHP 7 will remove them altogether from core which means you’ll need to move to the far better mysqli_ functions, or the even more flexible PDO implementation. The time has finally come when you won’t just be advised to stop using mysql_ functions. PHP 7 Best Practices AKA What Not to Do in PHP 7 And don’t forget to check out our new mega-benchmark of the final version of PHP 7.2. I’ve already shared some of the upcoming features of PHP 7, in this article I thought I’d take a look at some of the bad patterns we should stop using as we switch to the lightning fast PHP 7.
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