AI ERP with agents inside the systems you run
AI phone and voice agents for real calls
LLM.coPrivate, self-hosted LLM deployments
Legal AI infrastructure for firms
AI RFP discovery and response drafting
Automatic.coBusiness process automation
CyberAttack.aiThreat detection and defense
Secure AI virtual data rooms
10 business days
To start a WordPress engagement
Scoping through first sprint
100%
Senior engineers, US-based
No offshore handoff on your codebase
Every sprint
Working software on a preview URL
Not a status deck between milestones
100%
Code and hosting access you own
From the first commit
What we build
WordPress work that goes past the default theme
WordPress is a content platform with a plugin architecture underneath it, and most of what separates a custom build from a templated one happens in the parts a visitor never sees directly — the theme's structure, the plugin conflicts that got resolved instead of ignored, and the admin experience an editor actually has to use every day.
Custom theme development
A theme built around your design and your content model, not a page builder skinned to look custom. That means faster pages, fewer plugin dependencies to keep patched, and an editing experience that matches how your team actually writes and publishes, whether that's the block editor or a simpler custom set of blocks built for non-technical editors.
Custom plugin development
When an off-the-shelf plugin almost does what you need, or does it in a way that creates security or performance problems, a purpose-built plugin usually costs less over the life of the site than working around a generic one. We build plugins that integrate cleanly with core WordPress hooks and filters instead of fighting them.
Enterprise and multisite builds
WordPress Multisite lets one codebase run several related sites or brands from a single install with shared plugins and shared updates. It's the right architecture when the sites genuinely share infrastructure and editorial workflow — and the wrong one when they don't, which is a decision worth making before the network is built, not after.
Headless WordPress
WordPress as a content API — via the REST API or WPGraphQL — behind a separately built front end, usually Next.js. This is the right call when the front end needs performance or interactivity a themed WordPress site can't easily deliver, and the wrong one when a themed build would have gotten there faster and cheaper.
Migrations onto and off WordPress
Moving an existing site onto WordPress from a legacy CMS, or moving a WordPress site to a different platform, with URLs, redirects, and search rankings preserved rather than rebuilt from scratch after launch. Content migration and URL mapping are usually the part a rushed migration skips, and the part that costs the most to fix afterward.
Existing site customization
Most of the work that comes to us isn't a greenfield build — it's an existing WordPress site that needs a custom plugin, a theme modification, or a fix for functionality a stock plugin doesn't quite provide. We'll work inside your existing setup rather than insisting on a rebuild that wasn't actually necessary.
The build decision
Custom theme, block theme, or page builder — and when each is right
This decision shapes the cost of every future change to the site, and it's the one the legacy pitch for this page skipped entirely in favor of generic claims about being 'custom.' Here's how we actually decide.
A hand-coded custom theme
Built from your design files with no page-builder runtime in the page at all. It's the fastest-loading, most maintainable option, and the right call for a marketing site, a publication, or anything where page speed and long-term maintainability matter more than letting a non-developer rearrange sections freely.
A block theme built on full site editing
Modern WordPress lets an entire theme — headers, footers, templates, not just post content — be edited in the block editor, using theme.json to define the design system a client can work inside without breaking it. It's the right middle ground when editors need real layout flexibility but you still want one coherent design system enforcing itself.
A page builder (Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder)
Fast to get a first version live and genuinely useful when a team without developers needs to build new landing pages constantly. The trade is performance — page builders ship more CSS and JavaScript than a page actually needs — and a harder migration later if you ever want to move off the builder's proprietary markup.
When the honest answer is to stay generic
A brochure site with five pages that will rarely change doesn't need a bespoke component library. Spending custom-development budget on flexibility nobody will use is the most common overspend we see on smaller WordPress projects, and we'll say so before scoping more than the site actually needs.
None of these are free to reverse. Migrating a page-builder site to a hand-coded theme later is close to a rebuild, which is why the decision belongs in the first week of scoping, not somewhere around the point a client asks why the homepage takes four seconds to load.
What's involved
WordPress engagement types
What moves the scope here isn't page count — it's how much of the build is custom theme and plugin work versus configuring an existing stack, and how much of an existing site's plugin and content history has to be untangled before anything new gets built.
| Engagement | Commitment | Timeline | What's included |
|---|---|---|---|
| Custom theme build | Fixed scope | 4 – 10 weeks | A hand-coded or block theme built from your designs, with a content model and editing experience matched to how your team publishes. |
| Custom plugin development | Fixed scope | 2 – 8 weeks | Purpose-built functionality that integrates with WordPress core rather than working around a generic plugin's limitations. |
| Site migration | Fixed scope | 2 – 6 weeks | Content, URLs, and redirects moved onto or off WordPress with search rankings preserved, not rediscovered after launch. |
| Security & maintenance retainer | Ongoing retainer | Ongoing | Core and plugin updates, backups, uptime and malware monitoring, and a real response plan if something does get compromised. |
| Dedicated WordPress developer | Ongoing retainer | Ongoing | A senior WordPress developer working inside your team and your backlog, for teams that want capacity added rather than a project delivered. |
Ranges assume US-based senior engineers and include the plugin-conflict debugging and content-migration work a cheaper quote often strips out. A migration or theme build that skips the redirect mapping step tends to show up later as a sudden drop in organic traffic, which costs far more to recover than the mapping would have.
Security and performance
Maintenance is a job, not a checkbox at launch
WordPress's size and its plugin ecosystem are exactly why it needs ongoing attention — a popular platform with tens of thousands of third-party plugins is a target, and most WordPress compromises trace back to an outdated plugin or a weak admin credential, not a flaw in WordPress core itself.
Core and plugin updates, tested before they ship
WordPress core updates itself automatically for minor releases; plugins generally don't, and an update applied blind to production is how a compromise gets traded for a broken site. Updates get tested on staging first, on a schedule, not batched up and applied in a panic after a vulnerability disclosure.
Backups that are actually restorable
A backup nobody has restored from is a hope, not a plan. Backups need to run on a real schedule, store off-server, and get test-restored periodically — the first time you find out a backup is corrupted shouldn't be during an actual incident.
Hardening beyond the default install
Limiting login attempts, disabling file editing from the admin dashboard, enforcing strong credentials and two-factor authentication for admin users, and a web application firewall in front of the site all close off the most common attack paths without touching a line of your theme or plugin code.
Uptime and malware monitoring that reaches a person
Monitoring that only produces a dashboard nobody checks isn't monitoring. Alerts need to reach someone who can act on them, and a malware scan needs a defined response — not just a notification that something changed.
Staging environments for anything that touches production
A plugin update, a theme change, or a PHP version bump tested on a copy of the site first catches the conflict before a visitor does. Skipping staging to save a step is the most common cause of the 'the site's been down since this morning and nobody knows why' ticket.
Performance as part of the same job
Caching, image optimization, and database cleanup (stale revisions, spam comments, orphaned plugin data) all drift as a site ages, and a slow WordPress site is very often a maintenance gap rather than a platform limitation. Performance work belongs in the same retainer as security, because both degrade the same way — quietly, over time, if nobody's watching.
Hiring a WordPress developer
What a WordPress developer actually does, and what to look for in one
'WordPress developer' covers a wide range of actual skill, from someone who can install plugins and adjust a template to someone who can build a plugin from scratch and debug a fatal error in an unfamiliar codebase under time pressure. The gap between those two matters more on WordPress than on most platforms, because a shallow fix on WordPress is very easy to ship and very easy to miss until it breaks something else.
The actual day-to-day work
Building and customizing themes, developing plugins, troubleshooting conflicts between plugins that were never tested together, optimizing database queries and page load, and keeping a site patched and secure — not just picking a theme and installing a form plugin.
PHP and database fluency, not just the WordPress admin
WordPress is a PHP application on top of MySQL, and a developer who only knows the admin dashboard will hit a ceiling fast. Look for someone comfortable reading and writing PHP, understanding the WordPress hook and filter system, and querying the database directly when the admin UI doesn't expose what's needed.
Security discipline as a habit, not an afterthought
A developer who defaults to sanitizing input, escaping output, and checking plugin code before installing it prevents most of the incidents a reactive developer spends time cleaning up later. This is a harder thing to interview for than a portfolio, which is why a trial task or a code sample matters more than a list of past clients.
A track record with your kind of build
Ecommerce on WooCommerce, membership sites, multisite networks, and headless builds all draw on different parts of the WordPress ecosystem. A developer who's only built brochure sites can still be excellent at brochure sites and a poor fit for a complex WooCommerce catalog — ask specifically about the kind of build you need, not just years of experience.
A dedicated WordPress developer working inside your team, rather than a project handed off and forgotten, is often the better fit for a site that changes constantly — a content-heavy publication, an active ecommerce catalog, or a product marketing site with a fast release cadence.
Related
Related services
What WordPress projects usually connect to.
Questions
Common questions about WordPress development
What teams ask before a first call.
WordPress is an open-source content management system built on PHP and MySQL. It handles the parts every content-driven site needs — pages, posts, media, user accounts, and an admin dashboard for editing — and a plugin architecture extends it with everything from ecommerce to membership systems to custom functionality nobody's built yet.
That plugin architecture is also why WordPress needs active maintenance rather than a one-time setup: plugins are built by many different teams at different levels of quality, and an outdated one is the most common way a WordPress site gets compromised. A dedicated developer or maintenance retainer exists mainly to manage that surface area, not to reinvent the CMS underneath it.
It depends on scope more than almost anything else: a custom theme build, a purpose-built plugin, a full site migration, and an ongoing maintenance retainer are different-sized engagements with different timelines, and a dedicated developer added to your own team is priced differently again from a project delivered end to end.
What moves a quote the most is how much of the build is genuinely custom versus configuration of existing plugins, and — for an existing site — how much plugin conflict and content cleanup has to happen before new work can start. A short scoping call is the fastest way to get an actual number for your project.
Day to day: building and customizing themes, developing plugins for functionality a stock plugin doesn't cover, debugging conflicts between plugins that were never tested against each other, optimizing database queries and page load, and keeping the site patched and secure.
It's a broader job than picking a theme and installing a contact form, and the gap between a developer who can do all of the above and one who can only use the WordPress admin dashboard is usually the difference between a site that stays reliable and one that accumulates small breakages nobody has time to trace.
Three things have to happen before a site is live: a domain name registered somewhere, hosting set up to actually serve the site, and WordPress installed against that hosting — most hosts offer a one-click install, though a custom build usually starts from a clean install rather than a host's default theme and plugin bundle.
After that, the real work is the theme, the content model, and whatever custom functionality the site needs — the installation itself is the easy part, and it's rarely where a custom project actually spends its time.
The block editor is WordPress's native way to build pages and posts from reusable content blocks — text, images, galleries, embeds, and custom blocks a developer builds specifically for your content model. Organizing content with clear titles, headings, and categories matters for both readability and search visibility, and previewing before publishing catches formatting issues before a visitor sees them.
If a client-facing team needs a simpler editing experience than the full block editor offers, a custom set of blocks or a page template built around exactly the fields they need to fill in is usually worth the up-front build cost in reduced support requests later.
WordPress core itself is actively maintained and reasonably secure; nearly every real-world compromise traces back to an outdated plugin, a weak admin password, or a hosting environment that wasn't hardened, not a flaw in WordPress itself.
That's exactly why ongoing maintenance matters more on WordPress than on a smaller, more contained platform — the attack surface is the plugin ecosystem, and it only stays small if someone is actually keeping it patched and reviewed.
A page builder gets a first version live fast and lets a non-developer build new pages without help — genuinely valuable for a team publishing landing pages constantly. The cost is performance: page builders ship more CSS and JavaScript than the page actually needs, and moving off a builder's markup later is closer to a rebuild than an edit.
A hand-coded or block theme costs more up front and loads faster, stays easier to maintain, and is the better choice when page speed and long-term maintainability matter more than letting anyone reshuffle sections freely. The right answer depends on who's actually going to be editing the site day to day.
Yes, in both directions. Moving an existing site onto WordPress from a legacy CMS, or moving a WordPress site to a different platform or to a headless architecture, involves mapping every existing URL to its new destination and setting up redirects — skip that step and search rankings built over years can drop within weeks of launch.
We treat the migration plan as its own piece of scoping before any content actually moves, specifically because the redirect and URL-mapping work is the part a rushed migration skips, and the part that's most expensive to fix after the fact.