Harness the power of pre-processed CSS and minified JS in your theme or plugin, without any complicated installs or build tools.
As of April 2026, WP Compiler is a WordPress less plugin with 1.0K+ active installations and a 5/5 rating from 6 reviews. It has been downloaded 4.5K+ times in total. Requires WordPress 4.8+ and PHP 5.6+. Available on WordPress.org since 2018. Last updated 7 years ago — may have compatibility concerns. Downloads are up 26% this week. Top alternative: Less PHP Compiler.
Harness the power of pre-processed CSS and minified JS in your theme or plugin, without any complicated installs or build tools. Simply tell WP Compiler where to find your source files and where to put the compiled results, then throw your install into Dev Mode. WP Compiler watches your source folders for you, and recompiles your CSS and JS on any file change. WP Compiler supports both SCSS and LESS precompilers for CSS, to suit anyone’s preference.
When you’re ready to launch a new site, just turn off Dev Mode, and your styles and javascript will be compiled & minimized and comments & source maps will be removed. With Dev mode disabled, Compiler will stop watching source directories, so there is no effect on site performance, but you can still apply a quick change at…
I was looking for a way to compile scss directly on the server and have a compilation there without installing Gulp on the server. From today I don’t have to watch and send files locally.
Plugin works very good, Thanks!
I use this plugin successfully. Good job! It has a wide application for me.
I have only one problem – if I use ‘production mode’, sass is compiled and compressed correctly, but JS (using js.manifest) generates an empty file.
I will note that in the “development mode”, everything works fine!
I look forward to new releases and hope to implement transpilation from ES6 to ES5 in the near future 🙂
I used this with the understrap theme to compile a customized bootstrap along with my own SCSS.
This plugin is focused om it’s task to help you during development with the excellent auto-compilation when you turn on DEV MODE. You can just forget about it and edit your files and they will be compiled on save. The plugin has no impact on a production site.
Thank You!
I have been manually compiling my LESS style-sheets for a few years now, then tried a few other automatic compilers from other sources with no luck. Many other methods are slow, and do not include the “Dev Mode” which this plugin includes. This plugin is simple to use, and does what it should without error. The Dev Mode feature is very nice when you need to test style-sheet changes to live site without deploying a staging site.
Thank you again!
I use UIKit, and this plugin makes it incredibly easy to incorporate the .less source files into my own stylesheets and compile it all on the fly when changes are made. Thank you for making a great plugin.
| WordPress | 4.8+ requiredTested up to 5.0.25 |
| PHP | 5.6+ required |
Plugin data sourced from WordPress.org. Analysis and metrics by PluginSift.