What Is Bootstrap in WordPress? | The 2021 Beginners guide

You may have heard about responsive web pages. How about bootstrap? Do you know what bootstrap is and what it does? Or how to use it in WordPress sites? We are going to provide answers to questions such as: What is bootstrap in WordPress? What is WordPress? What is a WordPress theme? What is the difference between a WordPress theme and a WordPress template? So, keep on reading to figure out the answers to your questions.

What Is Bootstrap in WordPress?

According to the latest data from GSMA intelligence, there are 5.20 billion unique smartphone users all over the world. Nearly half of these users spend more than three hours a day online surfing web pages and social media. Surely, these users expect high-quality content. On the other hand, these websites should support the various forms of operating systems to be responsive. In fact, you definitely can’t manage a site with numerous designs (e.g. one design for Android, another for iPhone, the iPad, BlackBerry, Notebook, etc.) where all screen resolutions remain compatible. Instead, you’d better design your web pages with one of the responsive frameworks such as Bootstrap.

Bootstrap is the most popular JavaScript, HTML, and CSS framework for developing responsive web pages. It was originally named Twitter Blueprint, developed by Marc Otto and Jacob Thornton at Twitter. It is an open-source and free framework aimed at mobile-first front-end web development containing a powerful toolkit that is hosted on GitHub. It contains CSS and JavaScript-based (optional) designed for creating interface components and building web pages and web applications.

Bootstrap was first released in 2011, and it quickly became popular. In 2012, the second version, named bootstrap 2, was released. This version added brand new features, the most important of which being support for responsive web design. It maintains wide browser compatibility and offers consistent design through re-useable components. In Bootstrap 2, the mobile-friendly style was added optionally. And finally, the latest version of bootstrap called bootstrap 5 Alpha was officially released in June 2020.

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Bootstrap is now used for anything from developing web applications to WordPress themes. It is very quick to learn and easy to use. It comes with built-in support for jQuery plugins that provide rich extensibility via JavaScript and additional functionalities such as carousels, tooltips, buttons, and more. It can also be used through an IDE or editor, and any server-side language from PHP to ASP.net to Ruby. As a result, some noticeable advantages of using bootstrap can be:

• Being highly responsive
• Easy to use
• Compatible with all modern browsers and Internet Explorer versions
• Having a responsive structure and style
• Frequently released updates (thanks to being open-source)
• Fewer cross-browser bugs
• Lightweight and customizable
• Including completely free professional templates, WordPress themes, and plugins
• Great grid system
• Speeding up development time

What Is WordPress?

WordPress is a free and open-source website creating a platform. This platform is a CMS (Content Management System) written in PHP and using an MYSQL database. It first appeared in 2003 for creating a website or a blog. Since then, it has become one of the most popular web publishing platforms. Today, about 60% of the entire web is powered by WordPress.

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WordPress is an excellent website platform for creating a wide variety of websites, from blogging to business to e-commerce to portfolio websites. It can be a great solution both for large and small websites. It works with a combination of components including WordPress core, the database, extra files (for themes, plugins, and uploads), and the admin screen (including dashboard, posts, pages, media, comments, appearance, and settings). This website builder and content management system has very good features that some of which come in the following:

• Free for use
• Scalable
• Having a depository of endless Plugins
• Having a large number of infinite themes
• Easy to use
• Continuous updates (since it’s open-source)
• Very good for e-commerce
• Very good for creating a blog
• Responsive design
• Ready for SEO
• User roles
• No need to know any coding
• Easy to install, control, and manage
• It powers both the frontend and backend

A content management system (CMS) can give users a good interface for modifying or adding content to a website. All content, from text to visual elements, can be created and optimized with the help of CMS. Therefore, working with WordPress is easy.

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It empowers the owners of websites with the full capability to build, publish, and manage. Whether you are tech-savvy or a complete novice, starting with WordPress may have few obstacles. After purchasing a web hosting and domain, you just need to do the following steps for setting up your first WordPress site:

1. Install WordPress with an easy-to-use one-click installation process
2. Find a WordPress theme from pre-designed and pre-coded interface templates (or maybe you want to design a theme that works better for your niche)
3. Install your WordPress theme
4. Configure your WordPress theme for a better appearance
5. Publish your first webpage
6. Setting up the menu of your web page
7. Configure the setting of your site (add a new writing post or a media, or even changing the header section)
8. Install required plugins (e.g. installing footer plugin for removing footer credit from footer section)

If you wish to have a fully responsive, attractive, and engaging WordPress website, then you’d better design the structure of the WordPress theme via a rich framework like bootstrap. Building a WordPress theme using bootstrap CSS provides developers with over 400 free bootstrap-based themes in the unique official WordPress theme folder. But, what is exactly bootstrap in WordPress? To answer this question, first, let’s explain WordPress themes in more detail. By the way, regarding VPS, The higher level of hosting solutions for WordPress hosting includes VPS and dedicated hosting.

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What is a WordPress theme?

If you are going to change the layout or the default design of your WordPress site, then a WordPress theme is a useful tool. They can customize the appearance of your site including typography, layout, color, and other visual elements.

A typical theme includes template files, images, stylesheets, and maybe JavaScript files. You can freely download them from the official WordPress theme directory, or purchase the premium ones with more advanced features, or even create them.

They are tens of thousands of themes ready to be installed on your WordPress site. You may want to have a few customizations on your preferred theme or maybe you want to select a multipurpose theme to have a ton of customization options.

Fundamentally, themes are a way to skin your WordPress site with a collection of files that work together. These files are called template files. They produce a graphical interface with an underlying design for your WordPress site.

Sometimes, the terms WordPress template and WordPress theme are confused together. Templates are used throughout WordPress themes. In fact, a WordPress theme is made up of template files. Also, when you are building your dedicated theme, you use template files.

For example, you may use the index.php template file for loading and utilizing all of the WordPress files (you can use the index.php template file when home.php does not exist to render the blog posts index).

For creating a static webpage, we just need to use CSS and HTML. The former provides style while the latter provides the layout. Also, to present a page, WordPress uses PHP files to incorporate CSS, HTML, and many other resources. This lets users customize parts of pages. These files used for customization are template files.

Template files are reusable files used for building web pages. Some of them are used in specific situations while others are used on all of the pages (e.g. headers). It is important to note that WordPress uses several predetermined template files, the most common or frequently used of them are listed below:

• Index.php: the main template file required for every theme.
• style.CSS: the main stylesheet required for any theme. It also contains the header section related to comments. It controls the presentation of the website (visual design and layout).
• home.php: is called for the front page by default.
• header.php: it usually contains the document type of your site, Meta information, and links to stylesheets, scripts, and other relevant data.
• single.php: is used to present a single post on a webpage
• page.php: is used when visitors request individual pages. It can apply to a page section, a single page, or a group of pages determined by class.
• archive.php: is used to present the posts by a date, an author, or a category.
• search.php: is used for showing the search result of a user.

You can create a custom WordPress theme. In the past, you had to follow the WordPress codex and have basic coding knowledge. But today, anyone can generate a custom WordPress theme within an hour and with no coding know-how. When you want to create a WordPress theme, you decide how that content looks and is displayed.

For example, you decide about creating different layouts such as static or responsive or using one column or two. So, for creating a custom theme, you’d better use a framework to build one. Many theme developers choose to build a WordPress theme with bootstrap. You may ask, why are WordPress themes developed using bootstrap?

What Is Bootstrap In WordPress?

As mentioned, bootstrap is an open-source framework that offers a wide collection of reusable code for developers to let them build a responsive WordPress theme faster. The first thing that makes bootstrap better than other frameworks is being mobile-first (i.e. the code is first optimized for the smallest screen sizes, then it is scaled for the larger screens).

Another reason for developing WordPress themes with bootstrap is a collection of templates gathered in bootstrap for forms, navigation bars, buttons, and other interface components as well as scripts for dropdown, popovers, transitions, and more. Using pre-designed features, developers can add required features to the WordPress websites without any need to write a code.

Bootstrap gives you a lot of shortcuts that will save you time and energy. In fact, for building a WordPress theme via bootstrap, all you need is a basic understanding of HTML and CSS to create a theme that is mobile-first, responsive, and compatible with all modern browsers. Also, the appearance of a bootstrap-based WordPress theme can be more readable with better user experience, and load times.

You can utilize bootstrap across multiple platforms. Therefore, bootstrap and WordPress can make a perfect combination to create a responsive website with good speed. This amazing combination can help you in developing web pages. You can easily integrate bootstrap into a simple WordPress theme project with some easy steps. By adding bootstrap to WordPress, any created theme will be completely responsive and will work perfectly on any device.

How do I download and install Bootstrap?

Getting started with Bootstrap is a piece of cake.  Now with two easy ways, you can easily download and install it on your website.

• Download Bootstrap from the URL getbootstrap.com
• Include Bootstrap from a CDN(Content Delivery Network)

<!-- Latest compiled and minified CSS --> <link rel="stylesheet" 
href="https://stackpath.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.4.1/css/bootstrap.min.css" 
integrity="sha384-HSMxcRTRxnN+Bdg0JdbxYKrThecOKuH5zCYotlSAcp1+c8xmyTe9GYg1l9a69psu" 
crossorigin="anonymous"> <!-- Optional theme --> <link rel="stylesheet" 
href="https://stackpath.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.4.1/css/bootstrap-theme.min.css" 
integrity="sha384-6pzBo3FDv/PJ8r2KRkGHifhEocL+1X2rVCTTkUfGk7/0pbek5mMa1upzvWbrUbOZ" 
crossorigin="anonymous"> <!-- Latest compiled and minified JavaScript --> <script 
src="https://stackpath.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.4.1/js/bootstrap.min.js" 
integrity="sha384-aJ21OjlMXNL5UyIl/XNwTMqvzeRMZH2w8c5cRVpzpU8Y5bApTppSuUkhZXN0VxHd" 
crossorigin="anonymous"></script>

Note: If you want to load Bootstrap from the CDN, there is no need to download the source files from the website. After the BootStrap download, you can install it using these three ways.

• Install with Browser: $ bower install bootstrap
• Install With npm: $ npm install bootstrap@3
• Install with composer: $ composer require twbs/bootstrap

How to use Bootstrap in WordPress?

Using Bootstrap in WordPress is easy. If you have never done it before, do not be worried, there are only four steps:

Step1: First, you need to a web hosting before installing the WordPress

• Go to file manager navigate to WP-Content and then Themes;
• Create a new folder and then upload the Bootstrap unzipped files

Note: Footer.php, header.php, index.php, and style.css to are the main files that work for WordPress

Step2: Open the theStyle.css file in the new folder to configure it and make it your website theme. This instruction will let you decorate your website by personalizing your theme. Do this step by copying the below code from  bootstrap.min.css

/*
Theme Name: MyTheme
Theme URI: (Your website address)
Description: Bootstrap theme
Version:1.1
Author: (Your website name)
Author URI: https://XXX.com

Step3: Set up your Website HTML Template. Go to header.php and paste the below codes 

<html>
<head>
<title>Bootstrap WordPress Theme </title>
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0>
</head>

Then go to footer.php and paste this code 

<?php get_header(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

Step4: Import the bootstrap stylesheet in header.php. Using the following WordPress function will do that:

echo get_stylesheet_uri() 

Now, import the style.css into the website. Import the target template Js files in the footer.php.

<script src=”../wp-content/themes/(name of the template folder/js/bootstrap.min.js”></script>

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What are the advantages and disadvantages of Bootstrap?

Bootstrap Advantages 

1. It is easy to use
2. It offers strong support
3. It releases regular updates
4. It is light and customizable
5. It has a consistent framework
6. It has a responsive style

Bootstrap Disadvantages

1. It includes bulky styles
2. It has many unuseable plugins
3. It doesn’t have neat HTML classes
4. It is a difficult task to change the framework design
5. It causes to miss valuable network connections

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Conclusion

Both bootstrap and WordPress are highly popular. They both have great advantages and features that some of them are listed in this guide. This amazing collection is designed to hide a lot of under-the-hood technical stuff in a user-friendly framework or interface.

We also explained what Bootstrap is in WordPress, and learned about WordPress themes as well as template files. Now, you can develop your theme more quickly and easier than before. If you have any questions or any related experience, we will be glad to read your comment.

FAQ

Can Bootstrap Be Used With WordPress?

Bootstrap and WordPress can be integrated to build a mobile-responsive WordPress theme. By adding Bootstrap to WordPress, you can increase the performance of the created theme.

Is Bootstrap a CMS?

Bootstrap is not a CMS. It is a series of HTML/CSS files that help you to create a theme faster. You can use this framework with some CMS platforms like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla to build mobile-responsive themes.

Who is Using Bootstrap?

Thousands of companies like Twitter, Spotify, Udemy, LinkedIn, Walmart, Alibaba, Rainhood, Indeed, Z-shadow info, and millions of startups use bootstrap in their tech stacks.

What Is Bootstrap Framework and How Do You Use It?

Bootstrap is a front-end framework used for creating responsive themes, modern websites, and web applications. It is free and open-source with a perfect set of HTML and CSS user-interface elements. It can also support JavaScript extensions.

Does WordPress Use Bootstrap?

Although the bootstrap framework is not designed for WordPress compatibility, it can be integrated into WordPress to build custom WordPress themes. This integration will result in adding all the CSS styles of bootstrap to WordPress.