25 Best WordPress Cheat Sheet for Developers

WordPress is currently the most popular content management system on the Web, empowering over 60 million websites. It is used by 28% of the top 10 million websites.

What makes WordPress more popular is its easy-to-use features, which includes clean permalink structure, automatic filter, search engine friendly articles, easy link management, standardize formatting and styling of content, and much more.

Because of its immense popularity, thousands of themes and plugins are available out there to enhance your blogging experience. Still, for many reasons you need to tackle with the coding and if you are aware of WordPress built-in files, codes and tags, you can easily do anything with your WordPress website.

We have accumulated some of the most useful WordPress cheat sheets that include, file, APIs, keyboard shortcuts, templates, code snippets, and more. It doesn’t matter if you are developing a plugin, theme, or you are an amateur, these cheat sheets will help you save a lot of time and effort.

25. Default WordPress Generated CSS Cheat Sheet

If you want to tweak multiple elements in a WordPress theme, this cheat sheet will help you by providing information about styling elements. It includes body class, post, menu, comment form, widget, and WISIWYG editor styles.

24. Basic WordPress Cheat Sheet

This simple cheat sheet should be enough to get started tweaking or developing WordPress themes. It will help you understand the basic WordPress code syntax and functions.

23. WordPress Plugin API

The WordPress plugin API cheat sheet is about add_filter(), add_action(), $wpdb, use functions, menus and options.

22. Time Saving Copy-Paste Cheat Sheet

If you are involved in creating, updating or maintaining WordPress themes, you can use this page for a quick reference. It’s a quick guide to common WordPress template functions.

21. WordPress Tips

These tips will help you learn more about blogging and WordPress every day. It includes advice and techniques, polls/surveys, and policies for blogging and using WordPress.

20. WordPress Cheatsheet by Andy Wibbels

This is a basic-branch chart showing you how WordPress structure is designed. It’s good to look at, especially if you are not familiar with WordPress platform.

19. WordPress Theme Cheat Sheet

Theme sheet is quite valuable for creating a WordPress theme or one page template. It contains items like theme structure, tag cloud, IDs and classes, taxonomy tags, post thumbnail tags, header tags and more.

18. Template Tag Reference Guide

A quick template tag reference guide that shows you a list of important functions and tags along with their implementation details. It is packed with blog, date and time, comment, category, post, shortlinks, login/logout, bookmark and other types of tags.

17. Template Designer CheatSheet

As the title suggests, it will give you information about all template files and functions required to build a WordPress template. To make your work easy and fast, it is packed with a simple template code example.

16. Theme Tag Cheat Sheet

The theme tag cheat sheet covers general tag, author tag, trackback tags, comment tags, get_option(), get_setting(), bloginfo(), and a lot of other tag categories.

15. WordPress Theme Development

This page gives you a detailed code on how to develop a theme for WordPress. It includes basic index file, post loop, custom sidebars, custom menus, custom fields, author box, list pages, categories and archives.

14. WordPress Template Hierarchy

If you are going to build custom pages for your blog, you need to have a good understanding of template hierarchy. This one will show you how WordPress hierarchy has been designed.

13. The Ultimate WordPress Cheatsheet

cheat sheet for beginners to understand WordPress platform, plugins, themes and common PHP tags. It also includes some examples for good measure.

12. Yoast SEO Cheat Sheet

This isn’t exactly the cheat sheet, but rather a valuable tutorial on how to effectively optimize the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin. If you have just started blogging and looking for search engine optimization, it will save you a lot of bother.

11. WordPress Developer Cheat Sheet

From the basic template files to functions and how the loop works, it’s quite difficult to remember every PHP tag and how to define a new theme. This handy cheat sheet includes all the files and functions you need to know when working with themes.

10. SEO Cheat Sheet

This SEO cheat sheet is developed by Moz that includes all the small and big changes in SEO. It gives you information about important HTML elements, webmasters tool, pagination, sitemap syntax, canonicalization, rich snippets and structured data, and more.

9. Cheat Sheet: SEO for WordPress

This cheat sheet is designed to help you create new WordPress blogs and make them as search engine friendly as possible. It is definitely one to bookmark and save for future reference.

8. Formatting Shortcuts Cheatsheet

The less you have to switch between mouse and keyboard, the faster you will be in writing. With these formatting shortcuts, you can add heading, block quotes, and create lists super easily.

7. Template File Hierarchy

Template files are modular, reusable files used to create web page. Some of these files are used on all of your website’s pages, while others are used only under particular conditions. This page will show you how WordPress determines which template files to use on individual pages. If you are a beginner, it will help you decide which file needs to be edited while tweaking WordPress theme.

6. Anatomy of a WordPress Theme

WordPress theme is made up of a folder of template files, each of which controls a specific piece of your theme. The infographic will show you how your blog works.

5. Advanced WordPress Help Sheet

The cheat sheet includes various snippets for homepage, styling different categories, individual posts, site page links, unique template for categories, tag cloud and dynamic page titles.

4. WordPress Visual Cheat Sheet

This one includes different tags such as blog info, login/logout, category, author, edit link, permalink, link manager, post, list and dropdown, title, and everything the visually affects your site.

3. WordPress Help Sheet

WordPress help sheet includes basic template files, PHP snippets for header and templates, quick shortcuts, and some extra need-to-know stuff that you will find handy to use.

2. Cheat Sheet for functions.php

functions.php is the small genie that lives in your WordPress file. You can tweak it to add tons of functionalities to your theme without adding plugins. This page covers some of the interesting things that you can add, such as remove trackbacks, customize footer, add PayPal option, add Google analytics code, change Gravatar, customize post excerpts, and more.

1. WordPress Mega Cheat Sheet

Read: 35 Helpful Cheat Sheets for Programmers and Developers

This is a good collection of handy WordPress keyboard shortcuts and useful PHP snippets. Shortcuts can help make functions quicker and speed up your productivity. And, snippets help you display information dynamically and customize your blog.

Written by
Varun Kumar

I am a professional technology and business research analyst with more than a decade of experience in the field. My main areas of expertise include software technologies, business strategies, competitive analysis, and staying up-to-date with market trends.

I hold a Master's degree in computer science from GGSIPU University. If you'd like to learn more about my latest projects and insights, please don't hesitate to reach out to me via email at [email protected].

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