How to Add Custom Code Snippets for WordPress Site

Code snippets are small blocks of code linked to a site to improve personalized functionality. Anyone can utilize a personalized code snippet to induct changes in a web design. Also, anybody can expand a website’s features, such as installing customized messages to the site, making some adjustments to CSS, improving the caching speed of the WordPress site, or hiding the WordPress version numbers to make it unknown to attackers.

Adding personalized functionality is possible with any neutral or outsourced code snippet WP plugin. Moreover, you will find it hard to find a plugin that fits your requirements. Plugins controlled by 3rd parties can become a risk in case of failure in updation.

Code snippets have the capacity to be developed from ground zero. Alternatively, there are tutorials available on WordPress. The WordPress tutorials can be uploaded to any WordPress website.

Here, we are covering three secure ways of inserting personalized code snippets into your WP site. 

What is Code Snippet

A code snippet is a small block of reusable code that you can insert into a code file through hotkeys or right-click menu (context menu) commands. Normally, they contain commonly used code blocks like if-else or try-finally blocks. However, code snippets can be used to install entire methods or classes.

Code Snippet provides a graphical user interface (GUI) to manage snippets, similar to the Plugins menu. You can activate and deactivate snippets just like plugins. The snippet editor includes:

· a visual editor-enabled description,

· fields for a name,

· tags for enabling categorizing snippets, and

· a whole featured code editor

You can export snippets to transfer to another site, either in JSON for importing by the Code Snippets plugin later or in PHP to create your theme or plugin. 

Benefits of Featured Snippets

1. Graph of Website Traffic Goes Up

To gain more traffic on your website and get better visibility, there is no better way than to use Google snippets. Through a featured Google snippet, small businesses and digital marketing agencies can easily observe a shoot-up in website traffic graph through a snippet. By dissecting which webpage web developers applied or users used to get the highest number of searches, anyone can find out which keyword was the reason behind the appearance of the snippet.

2. Conversion Hike

One of the advantages of snippets that every website wishes to get is to see the graph of organic traffic and eventually, conversion goes up and up. By answering queries, any business website can entice users and the best way to do this is to get your answer on the Google snippet. This can be extremely helpful to increase sales conversion.

For example, if you are a legal firm residing in Houston. If you answer a certain legal query regarding the applicable criminal law in Houston, you can easily attract customers in Houston. As a result, you can attract legal clients in the same state. 

3. More Brand Awareness 

Organic results through keyword search have a plethora of benefits. If you want users to search your brand through organic search, there is no better way than to appear on Google snippets. It will amaze you in terms of traffic increase as well as your brand awareness. 

You have to be tactful as users remain unsure about their search queries. In this digital era, people are known to double-check the website and credibility of a business. So, if you want more and more people to know your brand, you have to ensure that your website content is engaging and flawless. This will help to enhance the CTR of your site and help them to know inside out about your business.

4. Enhances Website Authority

For Google, one of the primary factors is the domain authority of a website as it reflects Google’s trust ranking. There are certain factors that Google takes into account to determine a website's authority. It includes Avg. time spent by a user on the site and the total number of user visits. Every aspect is crucial.

So, it’s all about how you enforce users to stay on your website for maximum time. Moreover, link building is another aspect that helps you build your website’s authority and Google snippets help you to achieve all these advantages.  

5. Improvement in Keyword Rankings

The best part about Google snippets is that it helps you fix things in a jiffy. Once your website gets into Googe’s snippet, it helps you improve your website’s authority, and enhances visibility on the web along with keyword rankings.

Appearing on Google’s featured snippet is a common thing for digital marketing companies and they see significant improvement in Google analytic reports. The magic of Google code snippets helps businesses to be found out easily. However, getting found out is only possible if your site is SEO-optimized and provides visitors with the information they are looking for.   

Customized Code Snippets - Best Practices 

There can be a conflict between a WP site and some particular plugin if you insert customized code snippets into your website. So, in the case of conflict, the WP code snippet plugin should be deactivated or the custom snippet code should be altered.

Therefore, follow the following best practices and guidelines to add customized code snippets:

Check The Source Code Can Be Trusted

If you are following any YouTube tutorial or taking guidance from a website, ensure the source. Because a minor mistake in copying or following the code can damage your WordPress site.

Your website’s backdoors would be in danger if you write malicious code snippets. If the hacker gets succeeded, he would get all the admin access and can:

-do all unauthorized alterations

-abuse the WP site to incorporate malware; and 

-completely take down the website  

Hackers can also make your website ransom and ask for payment for website access restoration. Taking the website back is a tedious process. To keep yourself away from worries, make sure you know from where you are copying the code snippet. Also, make sure you are following the right social media learning sources. Whenever you feel any doubt, change the source of learning. 

While writing the code, make sure you have all the appropriate tools to combat malicious codes before it damages your site. Using tools such as static application security can analyze your websites and applications while you are continuing working. 

Make a Backup 

Making a site backup should be your habit. You should make a backup before applying any changes to the WP snippet code. A website backup always ensures you have the previous settings restored because anything can go wrong. Backup helps you to save time for troubleshooting. 

You have different ways to make a WordPress site backup. Manual backup and plugin-led backup are the two mainstream options. Making a backup once a week is a feasible idea apart from backing up before adding code. 

How to Add Custom Code Snippets - 3 Ways 

We are sharing some of the recommended methods for inserting code snippets into a WP site or using any plugin. However, it is important to make a backup of your site before making any changes. 

Inset a Child Theme

The child theme is an add-on to its parent theme. This theme enables you to insert customized code. The files of the add-on and the parent theme are kept apart, and you cannot overwrite without updating the parent theme. Without the CSS coding knowledge, you cannot add a child theme.

Make Your Own WP Plugin

Write code for a plugin that you can alter afterward and it's possible. This will help you grasp the working of a plugin and you can save money to hire a 3rd party developer. The code you will write would remain unchanged irrespective of the upgrades or changes in templates. Moreover, you need to develop a plugin for code snippets with some programming knowledge.

Use the Code Snippets WordPress plugin

You can insert an organized and simple-to-use custom code snippet through the captioned plugin. Although you can directly make changes to the source code; however, it's risky. This saves you time and it's an easy way. 

You can add code snippets individually and you can activate/deactivate them like a plugin. Therefore, organization, log keeping, and service maintenance are easy compared to incorporating different code groups into the functions.php file.

The best part of the code snippet plugin is that it can identify syntax errors. Also, you have no risk of typos that can potentially impact your WordPress site. Your coding remains safe after switching and updating themes. Further, it is possible to import/export snippets between WP installations.

Code Snippet plugin automatically catches syntax errors. Thus, there is no risk of a typo affecting your site. You can rest assured your code is safe even after theme updates and switching. It is also possible to import or export snippets between various WP installations. 

Final Words

Custom code snippets are an effective and simple way of tweaking the website’s features. All you require is to take care of your site’s backup and security threats. Make sure you are informed regarding your code’s path and what the code can do before you write and install it.