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WordPress, done by a developer.

Most WordPress problems are not WordPress problems. They are a theme bought in 2019, forty plugins doing eight jobs, hosting chosen on price, and nobody left who knows which part does what. I build and rebuild WordPress sites the way software should be built: fast, spare, documented, and owned by you.

Live proof

This is what you get. Click around.

A finished website for a small business, running right here. Pick a trade to see the same build re-skinned for a different owner, flip between desktop and phone, and send the contact form. It works.

live demoA finished small-business website

This working build runs in your browser and needs scripts enabled. Everything on the page describes what it does; turn them on to use it.

Yours looks like this on launch day, on your own domain, in your name, with the words and photos changed to yours. Nothing on this page is a mock-up.

The work

Builds, rebuilds, repairs.

New builds

A site that loads fast, reads well on a phone, and gives Google what it needs. A lean theme built for your content rather than a bloated template bent around it, and only the plugins that earn their place. You get the keys to everything on day one.

Rebuilds

The site that made sense five years ago and embarrasses you now. Content carried over, design brought up to date, the plugin pile audited down to what is needed, and the Google rankings the old site earned preserved through the change, which is the part DIY rebuilds get wrong. More on that in website rebuilds.

Repairs and cleanups

Slow pages, white screens, broken updates, hacked installs, forms that stopped sending, that one plugin nobody dares touch. Diagnosed by measuring, not guessing, and fixed at the cause. If a repair is not worth the money against a rebuild, I will say so.

Moving off WordPress

Sometimes the honest advice is that WordPress is the wrong tool for what your site has become, and sometimes it is exactly the right one. I build on both sides of that line, so the recommendation is not a sales pitch for the only thing I know.

What you end up with

Yours, and boring to run.

  • Everything in your name. Domain, hosting, admin accounts, licences. No agency lock-in, no ransom at handover.
  • Speed you can measure. Checked with the same tools Google uses, before and after, and shown to you.
  • Updates that do not scare anyone. A tidy plugin list, staged changes, backups that have actually been restored once.
  • Notes the next person can read. What runs where, what does what, written down. You are never dependent on my memory.
  • A phone-first layout. Most of your visitors are on one, so that is the version that gets designed first, not squeezed last.
  • Straight answers. If something is out of scope, cheap to defer, or not worth doing, you hear it in plain words.

Fair questions

Before you ask.

Why is my WordPress site so slow?
Usually some mix of cheap hosting, a heavy theme, too many plugins doing overlapping jobs, and images uploaded straight off a phone. The fix starts with measuring which of those it actually is, then removing causes instead of stacking a caching plugin on top of the pile.
My site was hacked. Can it be cleaned?
Almost always, yes: isolate it, rebuild from known-good code and a clean database export, rotate every credential, close the way in. Sometimes a rebuild is cheaper than a cleanup, and you will get that comparison honestly before spending anything.
Do I really need a page builder?
Rarely. Page builders trade speed and maintainability for drag-and-drop convenience, and most business sites change too infrequently to collect on that trade. Where you genuinely need self-service editing, it gets set up deliberately, for the parts you actually edit.
What does a rebuild cost?
It depends on how much content survives, how much design is wanted, and what the old site is hiding. That is why the quote is fixed and written after I have seen the site, rather than a price list that turns into an argument later. The quote costs nothing.
Can you show me WordPress sites you have built?
What I can show publicly lives on my portfolio: live tools with public source code and a platform build you can compile. Client sites get shared privately in a conversation, with their owners' blessing, which is also how I would treat yours.