WordPress Development Services
Custom themes, plugin development and performance work for WordPress and WooCommerce, built by people who also have to make the site rank.
At a glance
- Focus
- Wordpress development services
- Deliverables
- 10 documented items
- Market
- United Kingdom
- From
- £350 / month
- Commitment
- 3 months, then rolling
Most WordPress sites are built by developers who will never have to rank them, and it shows. Page builders emitting forty nested divs per section, six plugins loading jQuery, sliders destroying Largest Contentful Paint, and a theme demo import that brought 200 unused post types with it.
We build WordPress the way a site that has to perform in search needs to be built: minimal dependencies, semantic markup, Core Web Vitals designed in from the start rather than retrofitted, and structured data that is part of the template rather than a plugin's guess.
Custom themes
We build bespoke themes rather than customising commercial ones. A purchased theme carries every feature every buyer might want, which means loading code for a portfolio grid, an event calendar and three slider libraries on a site that uses none of them.
A custom theme ships only what the site needs. Semantic HTML with correct heading hierarchy, structured data built into the templates, images served responsively in modern formats with explicit dimensions, critical CSS inlined, and JavaScript deferred by default. The result is typically a fraction of the page weight and a Core Web Vitals profile that passes without ongoing remediation.
Editing experience matters too. We build with the block editor and custom blocks so your team can update content without breaking layout — the most common cause of degraded page speed on otherwise well-built sites.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is capable but ships with defaults that cause SEO problems on any catalogue of size: attribute and tag archives generating index bloat, product URLs that ignore the category hierarchy, incomplete Product schema, and database queries that degrade badly past a few thousand products.
We configure it properly from the start — controlled archive indexation, sensible permalink structure, complete Product schema with GBP pricing and correct availability handling, and query and caching work sized to the actual catalogue rather than to a demo store.
Performance and Core Web Vitals
Performance work on an existing site starts with measurement against field data rather than a Lighthouse score, then follows the same sequence: audit what is actually loading, remove what is not earning its cost, optimise what remains, then cache.
In practice the biggest wins on most WordPress sites come from a small number of places — eliminating render-blocking resources, replacing heavy plugins with targeted code, converting and correctly sizing images, deferring third-party scripts that the tag manager accumulated over three years, and reducing main-thread work to bring INP inside threshold. INP is the hardest of the three thresholds to pass on WordPress and it is where most of the work goes.
Plugin development and migrations
Where a requirement genuinely needs custom functionality, a purpose-built plugin is almost always lighter and more maintainable than bending a general-purpose one. We build to WordPress coding standards, with proper hooks, sanitisation and capability checks, so the code survives core updates and passes a security review.
For migrations — from another platform, or between hosts — the SEO risk is in the redirect map. We build it from a crawl of the live site cross-referenced against Search Console performance data, so URLs that actually earn traffic are mapped one-to-one rather than swept to a category page, and we monitor coverage daily for the first fortnight after launch.
What's included
- Custom WordPress theme development, no commercial theme base
- Block editor and custom block implementation
- WooCommerce configuration and optimisation for catalogue scale
- Core Web Vitals optimisation measured against CrUX field data
- Structured data built into templates rather than plugin-generated
- Custom plugin development to WordPress coding standards
- Platform and host migrations with performance-weighted redirect mapping
- Security hardening and update policy
- Staging environment and deployment workflow
- Post-launch monitoring of coverage, rankings and field data
How we work
- 1 Scope against requirements Establish what the site actually needs to do before choosing an approach. Most bloat comes from building for hypothetical requirements.
- 2 Build lean Minimal dependencies, semantic markup, performance designed in rather than retrofitted.
- 3 Bake in the SEO Schema, heading hierarchy, and indexation control at template level so it applies everywhere.
- 4 Test against field conditions Real devices and real connections, not a lab score on a fast machine.
- 5 Monitor after launch Coverage, rankings and field data watched daily for the first two weeks, when problems are cheapest to fix.
WordPress Development Services by city
We publish city pages only where the local search intent is genuine. Each covers the districts, dominant sectors and competitive landscape of that market.
Frequently asked questions
Why build a custom theme instead of buying one?
Can you fix an existing slow WordPress site?
Do you work with page builders like Elementor or Divi?
How long does a WordPress build take?
Will the site keep its rankings after a rebuild?
Do you provide ongoing maintenance?
Related services
Not sure if WordPress Development Services is what you need?
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