Custom theme development
A custom theme exists to do one thing a template cannot: give the people who edit the site a set of tools that produce your design and nothing else. That constraint is the point. A page builder hands an editor infinite freedom and, six months later, a site where every page has drifted into its own layout and the brand has quietly dissolved.
We build against the block editor rather than around it, because that is where WordPress is going and because editors already know it. Layout options become defined block patterns. Repeating content becomes ACF flexible content or custom blocks with sensible field validation. Custom post types and taxonomies are designed against how the content is actually organised, not bolted on once the structure has already gone wrong.
The test we apply at handover is simple: can someone who was not involved in the build add a new page that looks like it belongs, without asking a developer and without being able to break the design? If not, the theme is not finished.
Custom plugin development
Most WordPress sites accumulate plugins the way a desk accumulates paper — each one solved a real problem on the day it was installed, and nobody has audited the pile since. The result is overlapping functionality, four plugins loading their own copy of the same library, and an update cycle where any given release might break something.
Custom plugin work goes in two directions. Sometimes it is building something genuinely new: a booking flow, an integration with a client's internal system, a WooCommerce behaviour that no extension covers. Just as often it is consolidation — replacing several plugins with a focused piece of code that does exactly what the site needs and nothing more.
- Written as a plugin, not dropped into the theme, so a redesign cannot delete it
- Uses core hooks and APIs rather than editing core or theme files directly
- Namespaced and scoped so it cannot collide with anything else installed
- Documented for the next developer, who will not be the one who wrote it
- Tested against the PHP and WordPress versions the site actually runs
Headless and decoupled WordPress
Headless WordPress keeps the admin your client already knows and replaces the front end with something faster — usually Next.js, connected through the REST API or WPGraphQL. Done well, it produces a site that loads in a fraction of the time and a front-end codebase that is pleasant to work in.
It is also a genuine trade-off, and it gets recommended far more often than it should be. You give up live preview unless you build it back. Plugins that assumed they controlled the front end stop working, which includes a lot of form, SEO and caching plugins. You now deploy and maintain two systems instead of one. For a content-heavy site where performance carries commercial weight, that cost is worth paying. For a marketing site a client updates twice a year, it is a maintenance burden bought for nothing.
WordPress performance and Core Web Vitals
Slow WordPress sites are usually slow for boring, findable reasons: a page builder shipping unused CSS on every page, images uploaded at full camera resolution, a dozen plugins each loading their own scripts site-wide, render-blocking fonts, and a database that has been collecting post revisions and orphaned metadata for six years.
Caching hides some of that, which is why so many performance engagements stop there. It does not fix Largest Contentful Paint for a first-time visitor, and it does nothing for Interaction to Next Paint. We measure against field data where it exists, find what is actually costing the time, and fix it at source — then use caching to make a fast site faster rather than to disguise a slow one.
Migrations to and from WordPress
Migrations fail in predictable places, and none of them are the content export. They fail at URL structure, where a changed permalink pattern quietly discards years of accumulated rankings. They fail at media, where the library moves but the references inside post content do not. They fail at custom fields, at redirects nobody mapped, and at the forms and integrations that were never inventoried before the switch.
So a migration starts with a full inventory of URLs, content types, fields, media, forms, integrations and third-party scripts, and a redirect map built before anything moves. The new site is proved on staging against that inventory, and we watch crawl and error data after the cutover rather than declaring it finished at launch.
What WordPress development costs
We do not publish rates, and it is fairer to explain why than to leave you guessing. WordPress covers a range wide enough that any single published figure would mislead most of the people reading it — the same five-page brief costs very differently depending on whether the design is supplied, whether content needs migrating, and whether anything has to talk to a CRM.
What we can be specific about is what moves the number, so you can estimate the shape of a project before speaking to anyone: how much of the design is bespoke rather than templated, how much custom functionality sits behind the pages, whether an existing site is being migrated and how much content it holds, how many third-party systems are involved, and whether the site needs an ongoing maintenance arrangement afterwards.
A standard four to five page build typically turns around in 48 to 72 hours once designs and content are with us. Anything with custom functionality, ecommerce or third-party integration takes longer, and we give you a specific date and a fixed figure after scoping rather than a range before it.
