Dots United WordPress Boilerplate

A barebones, clean and minimalist WordPress Boilerplate, developed at Dots United as a foundation for modern, maintainable and lightning fast WordPress based projects.

Gutenberg ready.

A Demo is available here.

Features

• Maximum possible PageSpeed Insights score
• Bun for fast all-in-one JavaScript runtime
• Vite for asset bundling
• Composer for PHP dependency management
• Tailwind CSS for utility-first CSS
• Clean, maintainable and scalable project structure
• No bloat

Setup

Create a new project with:

composer create-project dotsunited/wordpress-boilerplate my-project

Docker

Adjust the docker-compose.yml to your needs using a docker-compose.override.yml file (https://docs.docker.com/compose/extends/).

You can add a database dump using a dump.sql.gz or dump.sql file which will be imported on the first run. If a database dump is present, a new user with the following credentials will be automatically added:

Username: `localAdmin`
Password: `localPassword`

⚠️ Remember to remove or change the credentials in a production environment!

Multisite subfolders can be be configured by setting the WORDPRESS_MULTISITE_PATHS environment variable to e.g. 2=blog2,3=blog3, resulting in the following URLs:

• http://localhost:8080/
• http://localhost:8080/blog2/
• http://localhost:8080/blog3/

If nothing is set, the ID of the corresponding blog will be used as a path, resulting in the following URLs:

• http://localhost:8080/
• http://localhost:8080/2/
• http://localhost:8080/3/

Start the Docker containers with

docker compose up -d

Plugins

ℹ️ Automatic updates for plugins, themes and major core versions are disabled by default. You can enable them by removing or commenting the corresponding module inside wp-content/mu-plugins/wordpress-boilerplate/wordpress-boilerplate.php.

If you uncommented sentry lines in docker-compose.yml install WP Sentry

Be careful when using plugins which depend on jQuery.

Gravity Forms for example will enqueue jquery once a form is embedded into a post or page.

In this case, you might include the form via an iFrame. You can use the gravity-forms-iframe plugin for easier integration.

Webfonts

It is recommended to use local webfonts and not from external CDN's like Google Fonts.

You can use google-webfonts-helper to download webfonts from Google Fonts.

License

Copyright (c) 2015-2025 Dots United GmbH. Released under the MIT license.