The most valuable WordPress projects we ship are integrations. Someone has data in one system, a process in another, and a spreadsheet in the middle holding it all together. Here is our approach.
Start with the data, not the plugin
Before writing code, we map the objects: what a customer is, what an order is, what creates an update. Integrations fail when nobody agrees what a “subscription” means in each system.
Pick the right direction of travel
- WordPress as source of truth — read from WordPress, write to the other system.
- WordPress as a consumer — fetch from the other system and cache it locally for speed.
- Two-way sync — only when the business genuinely needs it, because conflicts are expensive.
Secure it properly
Application passwords or OAuth, never a shared admin account. Every request validated, every response scoped to what the caller should see, and every outbound call logged with enough detail to debug it at 2am.
Make failure boring
APIs time out. Rate limits exist. Webhooks arrive twice. Build for the unhappy path: queue, retry with backoff, make operations idempotent, and surface failures somewhere a human will actually look.
Ship it documented
Every integration we deliver comes with a written map of endpoints, auth, rate limits and a runbook for common failures. Your next developer should not need to reverse-engineer it.