Bespoke themes, custom Gutenberg blocks, and a host that doesn’t embarrass you on a Monday morning.
A project-based WordPress engagement for SMEs and small consultancies across Lancashire and the North West — hand-built where it matters, off-the-shelf where it doesn’t. No page builders, no theme frameworks, no twenty plugins doing the work of three.
Open the admin of an average small-business site and you’ll find Elementor, WPBakery, or Divi running the page; twelve plugins propping that up; a parent theme nobody owns; and a database that fights you every time you try to change a heading.
It looks fine on launch day. Six months in it’s slow, brittle, and quietly impossible to edit. Anything beyond “swap the hero image” needs a developer, the developer needs a staging copy, and the staging copy is two plugin updates behind production. The bill creeps. The site doesn’t.
I build WordPress the way it was meant to be built — a small, bespoke theme, a handful of custom Gutenberg blocks for the bits that actually repeat, and a host that doesn’t need a caching plugin to feel quick. Fewer moving parts. Fewer surprises. A site you can still edit in 2029.
Every build covers the same four scope tiers below. Smaller projects skip the last; larger ones extend Editorial. The manifest on the right is the shipping inventory.
Foundations is a bespoke parent-and-child theme written from scratch — no Astra, no Generatepress, no Underscores boilerplate left rotting at the bottom of the stylesheet. The CSS is yours, the template hierarchy is legible, and the function file is the length of a short essay rather than a phone book.
Editorial is the bit that decides whether the site survives its first content update. I build a small library of custom Gutenberg blocks for the patterns you actually repeat — team grids, pricing rows, case study layouts, FAQ sections — so the editor stays on rails and the design stays consistent without a freelancer being summoned every quarter.
Performance is the part most agencies hand off to a plugin. I do it at the host level instead: a managed UK host (Kinsta or Rocket.net, your pick), aggressive image pipelines, cached responses, and a Lighthouse score that doesn’t need an asterisk. The site loads under a second on 4G or it doesn’t ship.
Launch covers everything that lives between staging and Tuesday morning: a clean DNS cutover, a backup regime that actually runs, redirect maps for any old URLs, and a 30-minute editor walkthrough so the person who has to use the thing knows where everything is.
Too custom for a template, too small for a five-figure-a-month agency. Three signals of fit, in order of how often they actually come up.
— A / Moving off a page builder
The site loads in four seconds, the editor takes ten clicks to change a heading, and you’ve been told by three people that you need a rebuild. You do. We migrate the content cleanly, keep the URLs, and ship a site you can actually edit.
— B / Agencies needing a clean base
You do strategy, copy, or design beautifully — but the build keeps coming back to bite you. I work as a white-label development partner: your design, your relationship, my code. NDA-friendly and used to it.
— C / SMEs with real requirements
A product catalogue with 400 SKUs, a directory filtered by region, a lead form that talks to your CRM, a portal behind a login. The bit a template can’t fake. Built once, owned outright, no plugin licence to renew next April.
Week 0 · Discovery
Two calls and a short written audit of the current site — templates, plugins, content model, hosting. You get a fixed scope and a fixed quote before anything else moves.
Weeks 1–2 · Design
Key templates designed in HTML, not Figma. Block library agreed in the browser, on the staging URL, at real widths. One round of revision; second is rare.
Weeks 2–5 · Build
Theme written from scratch, blocks shipped one at a time, content migrated cleanly. Weekly Loom walkthroughs, no agency standups, no Slack channel rot.
Weeks 5–7 · Launch
QA, accessibility check, Lighthouse pass, redirect map, DNS cutover on a Tuesday morning. Editor walkthrough and 30 days of post-launch support included.
“We ended up with a website for Ormskirk Glass that we were proud of, and Rich is always on hand to help.”
Ian Higgins
2024
If yours isn’t here, send it to [email protected] and I’ll reply within a working day.
If your site is a five-page brochure you’ll edit twice and forget, a page builder is fine. For anything you intend to grow into — a catalogue, a content library, a lead engine — page builders are a tax. They couple your content to a specific plugin, slow the site, and make a future redesign cost more, not less.
The work I do is the opposite trade: a higher upfront build, a lower long-term cost, and content that survives any future redesign because it isn’t glued to a vendor.
Yes, but only at the small end. Small catalogues (up to ~250 SKUs), simple shipping, UK-only tax. Anything heavier — multi-warehouse stock, complex B2B pricing, integrations with Sage or Xero on the accounting side — is genuinely better served by Shopify, and I’ll tell you so.
Where Woo is the right answer, it gets the same treatment as the rest of the site: a small bespoke theme on top, no Storefront child theme, and a checkout that hasn’t been styled with !important.
Two things. First, the deliverable: I ship a bespoke theme and a small library of custom Gutenberg blocks; an Elementor shop ships a licensed plugin doing the page rendering for them. Second, the relationship: you talk to me, not an account manager, and the project is fixed-scope and fixed-fee rather than a monthly retainer.
The practical effect is that your site loads faster, edits more cleanly, and doesn’t need its rebuild rescheduled the day your page-builder vendor changes their pricing.
Yes. WordPress-to-WordPress is the most common path — content migrates cleanly, URLs stay where they were, and old image assets get reprocessed through the new image pipeline. Squarespace and Wix exports are coarser but workable; we usually rebuild the structured bits (team, pricing, case studies) as proper blocks rather than dumped HTML.
Every migration ships with a 301 redirect map so nothing already ranking quietly disappears the morning of launch.
On the templates we treat as priority — home, the main service or product page, the highest-traffic blog post — the contract target is Lighthouse > 95 on mobile and a green Core Web Vitals rating in Search Console within 28 days of launch. In practice most builds land at 98–100.
That’s done at the host and code level, not with a caching plugin papering over the gaps. The site is fast because it is small, not because it is compressed.
Send me your URL. I’ll send back a short, honest read on what’s holding the site back — theme, plugins, host, content model — and whether a rebuild is actually the right answer. No deck, no upsell, no obligation to hire me.