A theme built for your site
A purpose-built block theme containing what your site needs and nothing else. No bundled page builder, no demo importer, no features carried along for a layout you will never use.
WordPress
WordPress development without the plugin sprawl
We build WordPress sites on purpose-built themes and a properly configured block editor, so your team can publish freely without the site slowing down every time they do.
How WordPress sites decay
WordPress powers an enormous share of the web and deserves its position. The trouble is rarely WordPress itself — it is the accumulation. A multipurpose theme arrives with a page builder and a dozen bundled plugins. Each addition solves one problem and adds its own stylesheet, its own script and its own update cadence. Two years later the site loads forty assets before anything appears, a plugin update breaks the layout, and nobody can say which of the installed plugins are still doing anything.
The second failure is the editing experience. The site was handed over with a page builder nobody was trained on, so the marketing team stopped touching it. Content goes stale, publishing stops, and the site's search performance declines quietly for reasons that have nothing to do with SEO settings.
Both are avoidable at build time and expensive to unwind afterwards.
How we build WordPress
A block editor your team can actually use
Custom blocks and patterns matched to your content, with editorial constraints so pages stay on-brand. The measure of success is that marketing can build a landing page unaided and it looks right.
Plugins chosen deliberately
Each one justified, kept current and reviewed periodically. Where a plugin adds a large footprint for a small feature, we implement the feature in the theme instead.
Performance as part of the build
Server-level caching, responsive AVIF and WebP images, deferred non-critical assets and a curated set of third-party scripts. Done during the build rather than as a later optimisation pass.
SEO fundamentals wired in
Clean permalinks, editable per-page titles and descriptions, correct canonical handling, XML sitemaps and Article and Breadcrumb schema generated from the content. The controls belong in the editor, where the person writing the page can reach them.
Maintained properly
Staged updates, off-site backups, security hardening and uptime monitoring. WordPress is a frequent target precisely because it is popular, and an unmaintained installation is a liability.
Technologies we use for this
WordPress
- Block themes
- Custom blocks
- ACF
- WP-CLI
Headless
- Next.js
- React
- WPGraphQL
- REST API
Commerce
- WooCommerce
Platform
- PHP
- MySQL
- Docker
We choose from these based on what the project needs and what your team can maintain after we hand over — not on what we most enjoy working with. Where an existing stack is already in place and sound, we work within it.
What we are asked for
Replacing a multipurpose theme
Rebuilding on a lean custom theme while keeping the content, the URLs and the search equity. Usually the largest single performance improvement available to an older WordPress site.
Speed and Core Web Vitals work
Auditing what is actually loading, removing what is not earning its place, and addressing the specific field metric that is failing rather than chasing a lab score.
Headless WordPress
Keeping WordPress as the editorial interface your team knows while serving the front end from Next.js. Worth doing when you need front-end capabilities the template layer cannot provide — and unnecessary overhead when you do not.
Rescue and maintenance
Taking on a site that has been neglected, compromised or abandoned by a previous developer: updating safely, cleaning it up and putting a maintenance routine in place.
Questions we are asked about this
Is WordPress still a sensible choice?
For content-led sites where a non-technical team publishes regularly, yes. The editorial experience is familiar, hosting is inexpensive and the ecosystem is vast. It is a weaker fit for applications with complex state or heavy authenticated interaction — that is not what it was designed for, and bending it that far usually costs more than building the right thing.
Why avoid page builders?
They trade build speed for a permanent performance cost and a lasting dependency. The markup they generate is heavy, they add stylesheets and scripts on every page, and migrating away later means rebuilding every page. Native blocks with custom patterns give editors comparable flexibility without the overhead.
Can you make our existing WordPress site faster?
In most cases, substantially. We audit what loads on a typical page, identify the largest costs — usually images, a page builder, and third-party scripts — and address them in order of impact. Where the theme itself is the main constraint, we will tell you that rebuilding is the better investment rather than charging for optimisation that cannot get far.
Do you do headless WordPress?
Yes, with WPGraphQL or the REST API behind a Next.js front end. It is genuinely useful for some projects and unnecessary complexity for others. We will only recommend it where the front-end requirements justify maintaining two systems.
Will we be locked into you?
No. Standard WordPress, a documented custom theme, hosting in your name. Any competent WordPress developer can pick it up — which is rather the point of building it this way.
Thinking about wordpress?
Send us the problem and any constraints you already know about. We will come back with what we think it needs, an approach, and a realistic range — or tell you it is not work we are right for.
Related services
eCommerce
An online store has two jobs that pull in different directions: be found, and sell to whoever arrives. We build for both, and we are specific about the trade-offs.
Web Development
We build websites and web applications in React and Next.js — server-rendered, measured against Core Web Vitals, and structured so Google can index every page you care about.
UI/UX Design
We design interfaces around evidence: what people are trying to do, where they currently fail, and what the build can realistically support.