Do you need a Freelance WordPress Developer?

If you are you looking to have a custom WordPress theme or plugin developed by a WordPress expert with a track record of delivering, then contact me now for a free quote.

If first you’d like to find out more about WordPress and my approach to WordPress development then read on:

WordPress is by far and away the most popular Content Management Systems (CMS) on the Internet. It powers an ever increasing share of the market with over 43% of websites running on WordPress in 2022.

Mostly because it’s free, it’s quick to install, and can it be hosted very cheaply, and with an ecosystem offering over 9,000 themes and 59,000 plugins for free you can get a site up and running with very little tech knowledge or financial overhead. Also (as you’d expect from software that runs on millions of websites) it’s incredibly well supported and documented. It has such a large market share that most people who’ve worked with managing a website are familiar with it, and so it makes sense for most users starting a business website.

What kind of websites run on WordPress?

WordPress is extremely versatile, and can run everything from marketing sites, to news platforms, to e-commerce stores, and membership portals.

So are there any downsides?

In many ways the virtues of WordPress also provide its pitfalls: it’s easy to setup but hard to get right; it’s popularity makes it an excellent choice for malicious hackers; it’s vast ecosystem of plugins mean websites become bloated, slow, and difficult to maintain; it’s rigid backwards compatibility means it’s coding practices aren’t exactly modern; non-developers can easily hack scripts together or copy and paste code snippets without really knowing what they’re doing leading to bugs and poor performance.

In short it’s cheap but you get what you pay for. All this leads to real frustrations for growing businesses. After all you just want a website that works, not one that holds you back.

WordPress done right

The good news is that WordPress can be done right, in the hands of an experienced developer you can get the benefits of the free and easy to use CMS, but also one that is lean and well maintained, and a website that looks the way you want and performs the way it should. 

A substantial proportion of my business is from companies who are struggling with the performance of their WordPress site. Often they like the look of the original design but find their website is really struggling with performance. Usually this is due to designers they’ve hired who can get a site running using a host of plugins and script hacks, or from agencies outsourcing jobs to junior developers or overseas contractors. I can rebuild these sites from the ground up to ensure optimal performance, and I work with an increasing number of designers and agencies to ensure they get it right the first time.

How I build WordPress sites

Firstly I only build custom WordPress themes from scratch, I won’t take on maintenance jobs for existing sites (unless I rebuild first). This is because in my 10 years of working as a WordPress freelancer, I have developed a theme framework and methodology that I use for all builds. This ensures modern practices are used and evolve with each project. It also means your site has a groundwork that is optimised, secure and dependable.

How do I do that?

1. Reduced plugin bloat

I build sites that only rely on a small selection of developer centric premium plugins for complicated tasks only, such as Advanced Custom Fields and Twig Templating. I do not use plugins for run-of-the-mill task. Which means you aren’t trapped in a cycle of plugin maintenance, bloatware, and hacking attempts.

You may remember in the news in 2016 the Panama Papers Breach which brought controversy around the leaked finances of David Cameron, Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister of Iceland, and other famous public figures. It’s widely believed that this was due to a back-door vulnerability introduced by the Revolution slider WordPress plugin. If only they’d hired me they’d have saved a lot of embarrassment! But ultimately it shows why cutting corners on your WordPress site may not

2. Performance optimised

I’m optimise custom theme builds around performance at every stage in the development process. This means you’ll get advanced features such as lazy loading images, responsive images sizes (using the Low Quality Image Placeholders technique), images delivered in modern formats (such as WebP), lightweight JavaScript only frontend code (i.e. no jQuery as a dependency), CSS that is built from crafted SCSS files and post processed with cross-browser auto-prefixing, and minified for faster delivery.

3. Built in SEO as standard

My themes come optimised for SEO, with auto-generated titles and meta descriptions following best practices, open-graph tags, and structured data for rich snippets. I still recommend you perform content based SEO such as keyword analysis, but you won’t need Yoast or other bloatware plugins for onsite technical SEO.