WordPress website development is building a site's theme, templates and functionality to match your specific business requirements, rather than forcing your content into a page-builder template or generic multipurpose theme. I build using clean PHP and the WordPress block editor with ACF custom fields — custom post types for your content model, custom Gutenberg block patterns for your repeating sections, and proper REST API integration for any connected tools. The result is a site your team can edit, your next developer can maintain, and Google can index without fighting duplicate content or bloated scripts. Delivered on a fixed price scoped from your brief.
Who it's for
What's included
How the process works
Scope the build
We define pages, content types, integrations, and any custom functionality before any code is written — a written spec so the quote is fixed, the scope is clear, and there are no mid-build surprises.
Build on staging
Theme and all functionality built on a staging URL with your real content and brand assets, so you can review it as it will actually appear — not a wireframe approximation.
Review & revise
You review on staging with real content. I make revisions until the site matches the agreed scope in a single round — no iterative drip of change requests that extends the timeline.
Launch
Go-live with a launch checklist covering SEO (Search Console verification, XML sitemap, robots.txt, structured data), performance (Core Web Vitals), security (SSL, file permissions, Wordfence), and backups.
Common questions
Custom code by default — for most business and professional services sites, hand-coded themes with Gutenberg block patterns are lighter, faster and more maintainable than page-builder builds. A page-builder site ships 300–500 KB of builder CSS and JavaScript that your site doesn't need, which directly penalises Core Web Vitals (particularly LCP and INP). That said, if your team's primary requirement is to be able to build new pages independently without developer help using a visual drag-and-drop interface, I can build cleanly in Elementor with a performance-optimised configuration (Elementor Pro, Elementor's Asset Loading feature to minimise CSS output, and Cloudflare CDN). I'll recommend the right approach based on your team's editing needs and your performance targets — not on which tool is easier for me.
Both. If you have a finished Figma, Adobe XD, Sketch or PSD design, I build directly from it pixel-for-pixel — see design-to-WordPress conversion for the specific process. If you're starting from a brief, brand guidelines and reference sites (no finished design file), I develop the visual design and WordPress implementation together — you get a site that's designed and built as a coherent product, not two separate handoffs. For starting-from-brief projects, I develop wireframes and a visual direction for approval before build begins.
An SEO-ready WordPress build covers: semantic HTML5 with correct heading hierarchy (one H1 per page, logical H2/H3 structure for Googlebot to parse content hierarchy); structured data in JSON-LD format (Organization, WebSite, BreadcrumbList, and post-type-specific schema — Article, Product, LocalBusiness, Service); XML sitemap generated by Yoast SEO and submitted to Google Search Console at launch; correct canonical tags to prevent duplicate content; Open Graph and Twitter Card meta tags for social sharing previews; image alt text fields accessible from the WordPress admin for every image; and 301 redirects from old URLs if the site replaces an existing one. Core Web Vitals optimisation (LCP, INP, CLS in the green) is included in the launch checklist — a slow site undermines every other SEO signal.
Yes. Every WordPress website build I deliver includes content editing via the WordPress block editor (Gutenberg) with custom block patterns for your repeating page sections, and ACF custom fields for structured content — team bios, service list items, portfolio entries, testimonials — that can be updated from the WordPress admin without touching templates or layout code. Your team can: edit any text or image on any page; add new pages using the existing block patterns; update the block-pattern-based sections (hero, feature grid, testimonials, CTA) without breaking the design. What they can't do without developer help is add entirely new page layouts or fundamentally restructure the site — that's by design, not a limitation.
Yes. Many WordPress website builds include a WooCommerce store alongside the marketing and content pages. I scope the marketing site and the WooCommerce store together in a single build plan — shared design system, consistent brand, and integrated checkout that matches the main site's visual identity rather than looking like a bolted-on shop. For stores with complex requirements (subscriptions, memberships, custom product types, shipping API integration, multi-currency checkout), see dedicated WooCommerce development for the full scope of what I handle. For straightforward product catalogs with Stripe or PayPal, WooCommerce is included within a standard website development scope.