Web Development
WordPress Development
WordPress powers a large share of the web and has an unfair reputation for being slow. What is slow is what people build on it.
WordPress development done properly means a hand-built theme, few plugins and a site your marketing team can edit without breaking the layout. The Nexclick builds without page builders, because the markup they generate is the reason most WordPress sites end up slow and unmaintainable.
Is this you?
What usually prompts the call
- Your site runs Elementor or Divi and every page takes four seconds to load.
- You have thirty-eight plugins and cannot say what nine of them do.
- Updates are avoided because the last one broke the layout.
- Editing a page means fighting a builder interface that undoes your changes.
What we do
The actual deliverables
Things that appear on an invoice, not adjectives.
- Hand-built theme, no page builder
- A custom theme or block theme written for your design. Page builders generate deeply nested markup that is slow to render, hard to maintain and impossible to migrate away from.
- A content model built with ACF or native blocks
- Structured fields matching how you actually think about content, so editors fill in fields rather than assembling layouts by hand every time.
- Plugin audit and reduction
- Every plugin justified on what it does against what it costs in load time and attack surface. Most sites we inherit can lose a third of theirs with no loss of function.
- Performance work at theme level
- Asset loading, image handling, caching and database queries. WordPress performance is mostly a theme and hosting problem rather than a platform one.
- Security hardening
- Login protection, file permissions, update discipline and removal of the abandoned plugins that are the most common entry point for a compromise.
- Editor experience design
- The admin configured so your team sees what they need and not the rest. An editor who is afraid of the interface stops updating the site.
- Update and backup discipline
- Updates tested on staging rather than auto-applied and hoped for, with off-site backups and a documented rollback.
Comparison
The plugins we remove most often, and what replaces them
Plugin sprawl is the main cause of slow, fragile WordPress sites. These are the ones we most commonly find and remove, with what to do instead. Run it against your own list.
| Plugin category | Why it is a problem | What replaces it |
|---|---|---|
| Page builders (Elementor, Divi, WPBakery) | Nested markup, heavy CSS/JS on every page, vendor lock-in | A custom theme with ACF or native blocks |
| Multiple SEO plugins installed together | Conflicting canonicals and duplicate schema | One SEO plugin, configured properly |
| Slider plugins | Heavy JS for a component that rarely converts | A static hero, or CSS if motion is genuinely needed |
| Contact form plugins with builders | Loads assets site-wide for one page | A lightweight form, or a server-side handler |
| Social sharing plugins | Third-party scripts on every page load | Static share links — no JavaScript required |
| Related posts plugins | Expensive database queries on every view | A cached query in the theme |
| Multiple caching plugins | Conflict with each other and with host caching | One caching layer, aligned with your host |
| Image optimisation plugins | Often duplicating what the host or CDN already does | Host-level or CDN image processing |
| Analytics plugins | Inject scripts you cannot control or gate on consent | Tag Manager, loaded after consent |
| Abandoned plugins (no update in 2+ years) | The single most common route into a compromised site | Remove, or replace with a maintained equivalent |
How it works
Step by step, with timeframes
Timeframes are typical rather than guaranteed, and they assume we get account access and approvals when we ask.
- 01Week 1–2
Audit or scope
On an existing site, what is there and what should go. On a new build, requirements and content model. Both end with a fixed price.
- 02Week 2–6
Build the theme
Custom theme and content model on staging, with fortnightly demos. Editors get access early so the editing experience is tested by the people who will use it.
- 03Week 6–8
Migrate and test
Content migration, redirect mapping where URLs change, cross-browser and accessibility testing.
- 04Week 8–10
Launch and monitor
Launch with daily monitoring for a fortnight, then handover with documentation and a recorded walkthrough.
What you get
Reporting and ownership
- A custom theme in your repository, with no licence fees payable to anyone.
- A plugin register listing what each one does and why it is there.
- A recorded walkthrough for editors, plus written documentation for developers.
- Staging environment retained after launch, so updates are tested rather than gambled on.
- Before-and-after performance figures from field data, not a lab score.
Tools and platforms
- WordPress (block themes / classic)
- Advanced Custom Fields
- WP-CLI
- Query Monitor
- Git-based deployment
- Managed UK hosting
- Lighthouse CI
Timeline
How long this actually takes
Eight to ten weeks for a marketing site including content migration. Rebuilding an existing site takes longer than it looks, because untangling what a page builder produced is slower than starting fresh — and where that is true we will say so and quote the rebuild instead. One thing worth being direct about: moving off a page builder means the content has to be rebuilt in the new structure. There is no clean automated migration from builder markup to a proper theme, and any quote that assumes otherwise has underestimated the work.
Pricing model
Fixed-price project
Fixed price against a written specification. Ongoing updates, backups and support are a separate maintenance retainer with no obligation to take it.
Questions
WordPress Development questions
Is WordPress actually slow?
No — what people build on it is. A lean custom theme on decent hosting scores well on Core Web Vitals routinely. The slow sites are page builder markup, thirty plugins and shared hosting under load. Blaming the platform lets the actual causes off the hook.
Why do you refuse to use page builders?
They generate deeply nested markup that is slow to render and difficult to maintain, they load their own CSS and JavaScript on every page, and they lock the content into a proprietary format that cannot be migrated cleanly. The convenience is real and the long-term cost is higher.
We already use Elementor. Can you work with it?
We can maintain and fix an Elementor site, and we will not build new ones on it. Where you are committed to it, we will optimise what can be optimised and be honest that there is a performance ceiling we cannot get past without rebuilding the theme.
How many plugins is reasonable?
It depends on what they do rather than the count. A well-built site might run ten to fifteen. The questions worth asking are whether each is actively maintained, whether it loads assets on pages that do not use it, and whether anyone can explain what it is for.
Should we use Gutenberg or ACF?
Both, usually. Native blocks work well for flexible editorial content; ACF is better for structured data like team members, case studies or product specifications. Which suits you depends on how your team edits, and that comes out of scoping.
How do you handle updates safely?
Tested on a staging environment before production, never auto-applied to a live site. Off-site backups run daily with a documented rollback. Auto-updating a live WordPress site is how a Tuesday morning becomes a bad day.
Last reviewed 28 July 2026.
Tell us what you are trying to fix
A 20-minute call, no pitch deck. The Nexclick will tell you what we would do, roughly what it costs, and whether we are the right people for it.