Everything you need to know

WordPress is the better choice when you need to own your site outright, extend it later, or do serious SEO work, and it powers roughly 43% of all websites for that reason. Hosted builders like Wix and Squarespace are genuinely fine for a simple five-page brochure site, and I’ll tell you if that’s all you need.

The difference shows up in year two. On WordPress you can export your content, move hosts, add a booking system or a custom plugin, and edit the technical layer directly. On a closed platform, if the feature you need doesn’t exist, you wait or you rebuild from scratch somewhere else.

A standard five to eight page business website takes three to four weeks from kickoff to launch, assuming content is ready. Larger builds with WooCommerce, custom post types, or bespoke plugin work run six to ten weeks.

The variable that actually controls the timeline is content. Copy, photos, logo files, and product data. Projects that go long almost always go long because we’re waiting on text, not because of development. I ask for content up front for exactly this reason.

I use Elementor Pro for layout and custom PHP, JavaScript, and CSS for anything Elementor can’t do properly. The goal is a site you can update yourself without breaking it, backed by code that doesn’t slow it down.

Page builders get a bad reputation from bloated builds, and that reputation is partly earned. I handle it by keeping widget nesting shallow, self-hosting fonts, deferring non-critical scripts, and writing custom snippets instead of stacking plugins. When a client needs functionality no plugin does well, I build one. I’ve written custom WordPress plugins for booking integrations, resource libraries, and technical SEO auditing.

Yes, and I usually recommend it. If your site has traffic, rankings, or existing content, keeping the URL structure and rebuilding the front end preserves the SEO equity you’ve already paid for.

I start with an audit covering performance, technical SEO, security, plugin bloat, and mobile experience. Then you get a prioritized list of what’s actually costing you money versus what’s just untidy. Sometimes the answer is a full rebuild. More often it’s a redesign of four key templates and a serious cleanup of what’s running under the hood.

You own everything: the domain, the hosting account, the site files, the database, and every license purchased for the project. All accounts are registered in your name and your email from day one, not mine.

At handover you get admin credentials, a documentation file, and a walkthrough video for the parts you’ll update yourself. If you ever want to work with someone else, you can hand them the site and nothing is locked to me.

Yes. Monthly maintenance covers WordPress core, theme, and plugin updates, offsite backups, uptime monitoring, security scanning, and a set amount of small edit time each month. It starts at $150 per month.

Maintenance is optional and I’ll say plainly when a site doesn’t need it. A simple brochure site on managed hosting can run for a year untouched. A WooCommerce store with payment gateways and twelve plugins cannot, and an unpatched WordPress site is the most common way small businesses get compromised.