Notes from
the build.
Things I've learned fixing, rebuilding and maintaining WordPress sites for eleven years — written for the person who has to live with the site, not for other developers.
All articles
Why your WordPress site got slower after the redesign
The new design looks better and loads worse — and it's almost never the design's fault. The five things that usually change during a rebuild.
↗12 July 2026 · 8 min readCore Web Vitals in plain English
What LCP, CLS and INP actually measure, why your score moves when you didn't change anything, and which of the three is worth your money first.
↗28 June 2026 · 6 min readElementor or a custom theme? The honest answer
Neither is the right default. The actual decision tree — who edits the site, how many templates you need, and what you'll pay for later.
↗14 June 2026 · 9 min readFive plugins I remove from almost every site I inherit
Not because they're bad, but because they're doing a job WordPress already does — and each one is another thing that can break on update day.
↗2 June 2026 · 5 min readWooCommerce checkout: the fields that cost you orders
Every extra field is a chance to leave. Which ones WooCommerce shows by default that most stores don't need — and how to remove them safely.
↗19 May 2026 · 7 min readMigrating to WordPress without losing your rankings
The redirect map is the whole job. How to build one before you migrate, what to check in the first fortnight, and the normal traffic dip versus the bad one.
↗5 May 2026 · 10 min readHow to hand over a WordPress site properly
A site you need the developer for every time you add a page isn't finished — it's a dependency. What a real handover includes.
↗21 April 2026 · 6 min readACF field names your future self won't hate
Naming is the part everyone rushes and everyone regrets. A small convention that makes a three-year-old build readable when you come back to it cold.
↗7 April 2026 · 5 min readThe image pipeline most WordPress sites are missing
Uploading a 4 MB photo and letting the theme resize it is the most common cause of a slow site. What to do at upload, at render, and at the edge.
↗24 March 2026 · 7 min readWhat eleven years on one stack actually taught me
Specialising is unfashionable advice. It's also why I can quote a rescue job in an hour instead of a week.
↗10 March 2026 · 8 min read