Bespoke WordPress development for complex websites
We work on websites that have to do considerably more than publish pages, building custom themes and plugins, bespoke Gutenberg editing experiences, integrations with the systems behind the site and functionality that sits outside what a commercial theme offers.
A low-cost brochure site is usually better served by an off-the-shelf theme or an agency specialising in that kind of work.
- Custom blocks your editors can actually use without breaking the design
- No page builder sprawl and no plugin for every requirement
- Accessibility and performance treated as requirements
- Looked after once live, including core and plugin updates
When WordPress is the right choice
WordPress has a reputation problem among developers that its actual capabilities do not deserve. Built carefully, it gives editorial teams genuinely good tools, handles complex content structures well, and avoids the bottleneck of every content change going through a developer.
Built carelessly, it can become a site held together by too many plugins, a page builder that makes migration difficult and a theme that breaks when WordPress updates. The difference is in how much is bespoke and how much is bolted on.
- Bespoke themes written for the specific site, not adapted from a commercial one
- Custom Gutenberg blocks that give editors flexibility inside sensible limits
- Custom plugins for functionality that genuinely needs it
- Complex content architectures, taxonomies and relationships
- Integrations with CRMs, booking platforms and internal systems
- Migrations from legacy sites with thousands of pieces of content
- Page builders that lock the content into one vendor’s markup
- A plugin for every small requirement, each one a dependency
- Themes that cannot survive a core update
- Editing experiences so open that the design degrades over time
- Performance and accessibility left until somebody complains
Questions we get asked
Can you take over an existing WordPress site?
Yes. We start by reviewing what is there, which plugins are load-bearing, what state the theme is in and what would need to change before it is safe to develop on. Sometimes that leads to a rebuild and often it does not.
Can you migrate a large legacy site without losing rankings?
Migrations of thousands of pages are a normal part of this work. The parts that matter are mapping every old URL to a new one, keeping the content structure sensible for how people actually search, and not quietly dropping pages nobody noticed were earning traffic.
Is WordPress secure enough for a business-critical site?
It can be. Outdated or poorly maintained plugins are a common source of WordPress security problems, which is an argument for fewer dependencies and somebody responsible for updates. That is what an ongoing plan is for.
Discuss a complex WordPress project
Tell us about the content, integrations and custom functionality the website needs to support.