Ajax in WordPress

Last week, I talked about how to implement Slick Slider into your website to create an image gallery carousel. This week, I am going to talk about Ajax in WordPress. AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML, and it is a combination of HTML, CSS, and Javascript. AJAX is extremely helpful because it allows the users to send data to a script and processes that response without having to reload the page. When users travel through websites they do not want to be refreshing the page so much. AJAX helps with that and brings us faster load times. This way, we are not clogging up the data that we are retrieving from the backend. Everything becomes efficient and quick.

Most developers use AJAX to help with the loading of forms on websites. When you are creating a page on your website where users can modify their profile, you could use AJAX to update a user’s profile without needing to constantly reload the page whenever they submit the form. When the user clicks the button, the data they have entered into the form is sent via AJAX to the processing script, which saves the data and returns the string “data saved.” You can then output that data to the user by inserting it onto the page (link).

AJAX is not that much different from what developers do in HTML because it talks to the server in the same way. The only difference between this and AJAX is how the information that the user inputs get to the script and back to the user, but everything else is the same. The great thing about WordPress is that AJAX is already used in WordPress’s back end, it has been basically implemented for developers to utilize. All we need to do is use the functions available. By utilizing Ajax in WordPress, we are able to load pages faster and make responsive web pages.