WordPress Specialist
WordPress Development & SEO Engineering
WordPress builds engineered for performance, SEO, and long-term maintainability — not page-builder shortcuts that you regret in eighteen months. Custom themes, blocks, WooCommerce, headless, and ongoing senior oversight.
What's Included
Comprehensive solutions tailored to your specific needs
Custom themes & blocks
Lean custom themes with Gutenberg blocks tailored to your content model — no page-builder runtime cost.
WooCommerce engineering
HPOS, Redis, B2B, multi-currency, Stripe/Mollie, subscriptions, and headless storefronts where justified.
Headless WordPress
Next.js or Astro front-ends backed by WordPress via REST or WPGraphQL — when it is genuinely the right call.
Performance engineering
Custom-theme builds aimed at sub-two-second LCP from day one, with CWV in the green on launch.
Multilingual & international
Polylang or WPML, hreflang done properly, locale-specific SEO, and EU compliance.
Security & maintenance
Hardening, audit logs, staged updates, malware scanning, and an ongoing maintenance retainer.
Problems I Solve
Symptoms this engagement is built to fix
A site built in Elementor or Divi that loads 1.4MB of CSS before the first paint.
A plugin stack of 47 plugins that nobody dares update in case checkout breaks.
WooCommerce stores stuck above 4-second LCP regardless of how many caching plugins ship.
A theme that ranks for the brand and nothing else because the template SEO is amateur.
Multilingual setups duct-taped with auto-translate plugins that destroy crawl budget.
A WordPress install that has been hacked once and is one bad plugin away from happening again.
Why WordPress is still the right call — when it is built properly
WordPress powers roughly 43 percent of the web because it is genuinely the right tool for content-led marketing sites, multi-author publications, and most small-to-mid e-commerce stores. The problem is that the path of least resistance — premium theme, Elementor or Divi, twenty plugins — produces sites that are slow, fragile, and impossible to maintain. The path I take is different. A lean custom theme based on a tiny starter (Sage, Underscores, or a minimal block theme), Gutenberg blocks for editorial flexibility instead of a heavyweight builder, only the plugins that genuinely justify their weight, and code that a senior developer can still understand three years later. The result is a WordPress site that is fast, secure, and a pleasure to maintain — which is what most clients thought they were buying the first time.
Custom themes, Gutenberg, and the page-builder problem
Elementor, Divi, and WPBakery all share the same fundamental issue: they store presentation as serialised metadata and re-render it on every page load through a JavaScript runtime that ships whether you use it or not. This is great for marketing teams who want to build pages without engineers, and terrible for performance, SEO, and long-term portability. Gutenberg has matured enough that custom blocks now do everything a page builder can do, with semantic HTML, no runtime, and full editorial flexibility. My standard build is a custom block theme with five to fifteen custom blocks tailored to your content model, full FSE (Full Site Editing) support where the team will use it, ACF Pro for the structured fields that Gutenberg does not handle natively, and a styleguide page that documents every block for editors. This is the build that ages well.
WooCommerce engineering that does not melt under traffic
WooCommerce gets a bad reputation for performance, mostly because most WooCommerce stores are running on shared hosting with twenty plugins, no object caching, and the default storage engine. A properly engineered WooCommerce store on a tuned VPS with Redis object cache, HPOS (High-Performance Order Storage) enabled, Action Scheduler tuned, and edge caching in front for anonymous browsing will comfortably hold thousands of concurrent users at sub-two-second LCP. I have rebuilt stores doing eight-figure annual revenue on exactly this stack. Specialist work includes B2B pricing rules, multi-currency, GDPR-compliant checkout flows, Stripe and Mollie integration, subscription engineering with WooCommerce Subscriptions or Surecart, and headless WooCommerce via the Store API for Next.js or Nuxt storefronts.
Headless WordPress and when it is actually worth it
Headless WordPress — using WordPress as the CMS with a separate Next.js, Astro, or Nuxt front-end — is fashionable, sometimes warranted, and often the wrong call. It is the right call when you need extreme front-end performance with content edited by non-technical staff, when you are integrating WordPress with a larger multi-app product, or when your team genuinely will pay the operational overhead of two stacks. It is the wrong call when you want it because a Twitter thread said so, when you are losing editorial features like preview and revisions, or when nobody on the team can debug both layers. I will tell you honestly which side of that line your project is on and build accordingly, including hybrid approaches like Faust.js where they make sense.
Technical SEO baked into the build, not bolted on
Most WordPress agencies treat SEO as a Yoast checkbox at the end of the project. I build SEO into the template layer: semantic HTML5, proper heading hierarchy enforced by the templates themselves, structured data emitted directly by the theme (not by a plugin that may break), canonical handling that survives the trailing-slash and parameter chaos, hreflang for multilingual sites done properly with Polylang or WPML, schema for Articles, Products, FAQs, BreadcrumbList, and Organization as appropriate, and Open Graph that does not depend on three competing plugins. The result is a site that does not need a remediation project six months after launch — which is how most agencies generate their second invoice.
What You Receive
Deliverables & expected outcomes
- Custom theme and Gutenberg block library
- Plugin stack reviewed and trimmed to essentials
- Performance baseline with all CWV in the green
- Technical SEO baked into the template layer
- Editor styleguide and block documentation
- Optional ongoing maintenance and oversight retainer
Illustrative Engagement
A representative scenario
The problem
A European publisher's WordPress site, built in Divi with 38 plugins, was scoring 31 on PageSpeed mobile and losing organic traffic after every algorithm update. Article pages were taking 5.4 seconds to LCP.
The approach
We rebuilt the article template as a lean custom block theme, replaced fifteen plugins with theme-native code, moved hosting to a tuned VPS with Redis and a CDN, and shipped proper Article + Organization schema in the templates instead of via plugins.
The outcome
PageSpeed mobile moved to 96, LCP to 1.5s, indexed article count rose by 22 percent, and the next core update recovered roughly 40 percent of the lost organic traffic within the following CrUX cycle.
Composite scenario based on typical engagements. Replace with a real, attributed case study once published.
My Process
A proven methodology for delivering exceptional results
Discovery & content model
Stakeholder interviews, content audit, content model definition, and a written technical SEO and performance brief.
Design & block library
Design system, custom Gutenberg block library, and an editor styleguide so the team can use the build correctly.
Engineering & integration
Theme build, WooCommerce or membership integration, third-party services, multilingual setup, and pre-launch QA on staging.
Launch & handover
Staged launch, redirects, indexation monitoring, editor training, and an optional maintenance retainer.
Why Choose Me?
With 7+ years of experience and a track record of delivering results, I bring expertise, reliability, and a results-driven approach to every project.
- Custom theme that ages well — not a builder you will replace in two years
- Performance engineered in, not retro-fitted
- Technical SEO baked into templates, not bolted on by plugins
- Honest advice on headless vs. traditional WordPress
- Senior developer delivering directly — no agency overhead
- Ongoing maintenance available with a real human, not a ticket queue
Starting at
€1,497
Custom WordPress development with performance and technical SEO engineered in. Themes, blocks, WooCommerce, headless, and maintenance retainers available.
Frequently Asked Questions
Related Services
Further Reading
Related articles from the blog
Ready to Get Started?
Let's discuss your project and create a custom strategy for success.