WordPress Developer

2021 – your friendly, local WordPress web developers.

Since wordpress is used for over 30% of websites on the internet, its important to know what it actually is. Essentially, WordPress is a framework. At its core is a URL rewriting system, a user registration and login system and as it started out, a blogging system. That’s about it. It comes wrapped with loading systems, useful functions and features that can all be utilised in your chosen theme.

Your theme and plugins are what turns the bare bones of the wordpress core into your fancy e-commerce, portfolio, booking or whatever you want system.

Do you buy a theme? or have one custom built?

In our experience, a bought theme is normally very flexible, with everything from colours, layouts, fonts and styles to change as you wish. This, however, can slow your site down considerably because commercial themes are designed to be all things to several thousand people. They have built in layouts often for multiple business types and all that code sits there waiting to be loaded. By coding these settings into your theme, we reduce the number of calls your page has to make to the database and data it has to return and process.

Some settings are useful to be able to change regularly, but most – such as layout, logo, fonts and colours rarely change.

• A custom built theme can be extremely slimline and quick. Think 2 second loads instead of 10. Google hates slow sites so your SEO rank will improve.
• A hybrid, such as modifying the template can help with server efficiency and load time, but there are risks of detaching the template from its author and losing out of future updates and security patches.
• A fully featured template, using all its customizable options can be the quickest way to develop, but results in the slowest performing website. Then requiring a faster more expensive server to run.

Sure, you can add templates and plugins yourself,  just like you could maintain your car yourself, or tile your own bathroom… if you want to make sure the job is done properly to maximise the end result you’re going to need someone who knows what they’re doing.

That’s where we can help. We’ve been working with wordpress since 2003  We know what it likes and what it doesn’t like. We know not to stuff it full of every plugin under the sun. We know what its capable of natively and how to harness that into something useful instead of bloating it out into something that takes half a decade to load.

We know wordpress well enough to advise you of when it’s not a suitable solution as well (although this is rare).