WordPress development, without the plugin bloat.

Mid-market WordPress work in the US and UK runs $125 to $185 per hour for senior engineers at boutique agencies, with mid-market Indian agencies around $75 to $125 per hour for senior work. Project shape drives total cost more than hourly rate. A custom Gutenberg theme build typically runs 6 to 9 weeks. A pagebuilder-exit migration runs 8 to 14 weeks. A headless build on Next.js plus WordPress runs 10 to 16 weeks. The Plugin Diet audit runs 2 weeks and is refundable against any engagement that follows. We send a scoped quote within 48 hours of an intro call; scope moves the price, not the conversation.

No. WordPress powers 43% of all websites and roughly 63% of known-CMS websites as of early 2026 (W3Techs). What is dead is the era of 40-plugin builder stacks held together by custom CSS overrides. The active path forward is Gutenberg with theme.json design tokens, custom blocks via block.json or ACF Blocks, and sparing use of plugins. Headless WordPress on Next.js through WPGraphQL or Faust.js is a valid path for brands that need React-level interactivity with WordPress as a content backend.

Only when one of three signals lights up. First signal, your Core Web Vitals are in the red on mobile and the pagebuilder is the biggest blocker (confirmed by a Lighthouse audit that traces waterfall to the builder's render-blocking assets). Second signal, editors cannot ship a net-new page in under 20 minutes because every template has drifted from the brand. Third signal, the maintenance cost of the pagebuilder subscription plus the plugins it requires is exceeding the annualized cost of a custom theme rebuild. Without one of those, keep what you have. The migration we run rebuilds as a native Gutenberg block theme with a before-and-after performance report.

Headless WordPress wins when you need React-level interactivity (app-like dashboards, real-time personalization, heavy client-side state), when the site shares a codebase with a mobile app or a React product, or when editorial content needs to feed multiple properties through one API. Headless loses when the site is primarily editorial, edits happen daily, and the editorial team expects to preview exactly what the visitor sees. Classic Gutenberg with theme.json is the right default for content-heavy sites. We turn away more headless briefs than we accept; the extra engineering overhead is only justified when the interactivity or reuse demands it.

Shopify wins when commerce is the entire business, checkout optimization is the daily job, and content is in service of the storefront. WordPress with WooCommerce wins when content is the reason people visit and commerce is a secondary revenue stream (publishers with a merch arm, professional-services firms selling digital products, course platforms, membership sites). The honest test is where the editorial team spends their week. If they live in Shopify's product pages and metafields, stay on Shopify. If they live in long-form articles with commerce modules inside them, WordPress wins. We run both platforms; see our Shopify development page for the counterpart.

Native Gutenberg wins the Core Web Vitals comparison for almost every site we have benchmarked. A well-built block theme ships 40 to 120 KB of render-blocking JavaScript on the homepage. Elementor and Divi typically ship 400 to 800 KB before your theme adds anything. Bricks and Breakdance are closer to Gutenberg on speed but lose on interoperability (their markup is proprietary and they lock you into their editor). Our default recommendation for a new build is Gutenberg plus ACF Blocks, with theme.json design tokens and a custom pattern library the editorial team can compose from.

The question is not plugin count, it is payload weight and security surface. That said, the sites we audit average 23 plugins; the healthy sites we ship run 8 to 12. A brand-new content site should launch with under 10. A publisher running WooCommerce plus membership plus editorial plugins should sit between 15 and 20. Past 25, you are almost certainly paying plugin tax (duplicate features across three plugins, abandoned plugins still active, trial plugins never removed). Our Plugin Diet audit names each plugin's weight, overlap, and status so the pruning decisions become clear.

By tier. For sub-$1M revenue marketing sites, Kinsta or Rocket.net gives you modern managed WordPress with Cloudflare Enterprise, Redis object caching, and PHP 8.2 for $35 to $115 per month. For $1M to $50M brands with traffic spikes, WP Engine or Pantheon offers staging, global CDN, and a proper development workflow. For Fortune 500 and publishers, WordPress VIP is the defensible answer despite the cost. We set up the stack we recommend; migration off bad hosting is usually the single biggest performance win we deliver in week one.

A twelve-point hardening pass every new build runs through. Disable XML-RPC, lock wp-config.php permissions to 600, disable file editing via DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT, enforce 2FA on admin and editor roles, rotate the admin URL away from /wp-admin, rate-limit REST API endpoints, remove unused user accounts, enforce strong password policy, install a WAF at Cloudflare or Wordfence Premium, set up malware scans on a schedule, subscribe plugin vulnerability alerts through Patchstack or WPScan, and keep automatic background updates on for minor WordPress core releases. We ship this checklist with every engagement.

Six to nine weeks for a standard 20 to 60 page custom block theme with ACF Blocks, theme.json, a pattern library, and editorial training. Ten to sixteen weeks for a headless WordPress build on Next.js with WPGraphQL. Eight to fourteen weeks for a pagebuilder exit migration (more or fewer depending on how much of the source site is salvageable versus rebuilt). The Plugin Diet audit adds 2 weeks before code and is refundable against the build that follows. Rush timelines are possible but we refuse to compress editorial QA; the timeline moves, not the standard.

Yes. We run every migration with the same three-layer safety net. A full source-platform URL crawl, URL-by-URL 301 map built in a spreadsheet the client reviews, and redirect chain length capped at one hop. A structured-data preservation pass so Article, Product, and BreadcrumbList schema survives the move. And a 90-day post-launch ranking watch in Google Search Console where any URL that drops more than 5 positions gets a same-week remediation pass. 99% URL preservation is the target we publish on every migration. Short-term volatility in weeks 1 to 4 is normal; long-term loss is a process failure, not a platform limitation.

You do. The theme and any custom plugins live in a private GitHub repository under your organization from day one. The hosting account is on your billing. The WordPress admin is on your domain under your user, with DH engineers added as named users that you remove any time. Design assets (Figma, brand library, screenshots) ship to a shared workspace you own. On exit, we transfer the repository, hand off a documented editor training, record a Loom walkthrough for your team, and leave a 30-day support tail for questions. We do not gate access to force retention; if we are the right partner, you will renew because the work is good, not because the code is hostage.