WordPress design, speed, security and care
A site that loads slowly, breaks on a Tuesday and nobody enjoys editing is almost never a platform problem. It is thirty-eight plugins, a page builder doing the work of a theme, and images straight off a phone. All three are fixable without starting again.
Before anybody talks to you about designs, the decisions that matter are the boring ones: how the pages get built, who can edit them without asking, what happens when a plugin is abandoned, and whether the thing will still be fast in three years.
Three minutes, twelve questions, no email needed to see or copy your result.
A typical five-year-old business site, measured on a phone. Only one of these four is a design decision.
What we run on WordPress
One senior person responsible for the site, not a ticket queue.
Where we come in
The site works, mostly. It is just slower, more fragile and more annoying every year, and nobody owns it. Usually the cause is one of these.
Most rebuilds go wrong in the first fortnight, before a single page is designed. Usually it is one of these.
They arrived one problem at a time, often from a developer who has moved on. Each one loads its own stylesheet and script on every page, including the ones that do not need it. Removing them is careful work rather than clever work, and it is usually the single largest speed gain available.
The layout is held together by a builder only one person understands, and the last time somebody changed a heading the footer moved. A site that frightens its own team stops being updated, and a site that stops being updated stops earning.
There is a plugin, it is probably running, and nobody has restored from it. Core, PHP and plugin versions have drifted apart, updates get postponed because the last one broke something, and the site is one bad afternoon from a very long week.
A demo was bought because it looked right, and then the real words, products and services had to be forced into shapes that were never meant for them. It is quicker to decide what each page has to achieve first, even when that feels like the slow start.
If the person keeping the site current is a marketing manager rather than a developer, that single fact should decide how the pages are built. Blocks and patterns they can use safely are worth more than a design system they have to ring somebody about.
It has years of search history, ranking pages and links pointing at URLs somebody is about to change. A rebuild that ignores the redirect map, the page inventory and what people currently arrive looking for can lose more traffic than the new design wins.
The load lab
Every choice here is one somebody makes on an ordinary WordPress site without thinking about it much. Set them to match yours. The weight and the wait are straight arithmetic on typical file sizes, so treat this as an argument rather than a measurement of your own site.
No account, no crawl, no report emailed to you. Four decisions and a caching switch.
How the pages are built
Images on the page
Caching and a CDN
Nothing here is stored, sent to TWV Media or used to look up your site. It is arithmetic running in your browser.
Typical figures for a business page with six images on a slow mobile connection, not a measurement of your own site. The wait counts the stylesheets, scripts, fonts and first image, because the rest arrive after the text does.
The WordPress scorecard
It scores the site as an asset rather than a design: foundations, speed, safety and whether the thing actually earns. Your answers stay in this browser and disappear when you close the tab.
What we actually do
You can bring us in for the whole site or the part currently causing the trouble. Either way, one senior person stays responsible for it rather than a rota.
Plugins, theme, hosting, PHP, page weight, search performance and the list of things everybody has quietly stopped mentioning. You get the findings whether or not we do the work.
Block themes and reusable patterns, built around what each page has to achieve. Designed so the person who edits it on a wet Tuesday can do it without breaking the footer.
Removing what is not used, loading what is left properly, resizing and reformatting images, caching at the right layer and putting a CDN in front. Measured on a mid-range phone, not a fast laptop.
Sensible logins, a firewall that suits the traffic, an update routine that runs on staging first, and offsite backups that have been restored at least once so we know they work.
Moving hosts, replatforming or consolidating several sites, with a URL inventory and a redirect map written before anything moves. The traffic comes with you or it was not a migration.
Monthly updates on staging, uptime and performance watched, small changes made without a quote for each one, and a plain report that says what changed and what it cost.
What it costs to own
Most people can tell you what their hosting costs and almost nobody can tell you what their site costs. This is arithmetic on the figures you already know, and it is as likely to tell you to leave the site alone as to change it.
A bad day is counted as four hours, which is generous to the site. Licences are taken at list price; anything you pay for a developer on retainer belongs in the hourly figure rather than here.
A rebuild is easy to sell and hard to justify. The honest question is whether the site is costing you hours, customers or sleep, and if it is none of the three, keep your money.
How it runs
Every stage produces something you own and could hand to somebody else. Nothing is held hostage, and there is no long contract behind it.
Hosting, versions, plugins, page weight, search performance, analytics and the list of grievances from the people who use the admin every week.
Staging, backups that restore, an update routine and the logins tidied. Boring, unglamorous and the reason the rest of the work is possible.
Remove what is unused, rebuild the templates as blocks and patterns, sort the images out. Measured before and after on a mid-range phone.
Monthly updates on staging first, performance watched, small changes made as they come up, and a plain report rather than a dashboard nobody opens.
For anybody who suspects the site is holding them back and wants a straight answer.
We fix what is worth fixing and rebuild only the parts that cannot be saved.
For businesses that want the site looked after without hiring anybody to do it.
Before you ask
For most businesses that publish anything, yes. It still runs a large share of the web, the hosting is competitive, the people who can work on it are everywhere and you own the thing outright. The honest exception is a shop with no editorial ambitions and no unusual requirements, where a hosted platform can be less work to own. We will say so if that is your situation.
Usually fixed. Slow pages, bloated plugins and untidy images are repairs, not reasons to start again. The genuine cases for a rebuild are a site nobody can safely edit, a theme or builder that has been abandoned by its developer, and a structure that no longer matches what the business sells. The calculator above exists because the answer is often cheaper than the person quoting for it would like.
If it is costing you more than it gives you. A builder that your team uses happily and that keeps the pages reasonable is fine. One that adds several hundred kilobytes to every page, locks the content into its own format and would take a month to leave is a liability worth planning an exit from. We will show you the weight either way.
Fast enough that a person on a phone with an ordinary connection sees something useful in under two and a half seconds and can read the page without waiting again. That is achievable on modest hosting for almost any business site. Chasing a perfect score in a testing tool past that point is usually vanity.
You do, always. The hosting account is in your name, you hold the domain, and you get the admin credentials on day one. If you ever leave us, nothing has to be recreated and nobody needs to ring us for a password.
We keep a short list of the plugins your site genuinely depends on and check that they are still maintained. When one goes quiet, we plan the replacement before it becomes urgent. Most of the emergencies we are called into began as an abandoned plugin that nobody had looked at for two years.
Yes, and often that is the sensible answer. Plenty of sites need a fortnight of specific work rather than a new agency. We are happy to hand over notes, staging access and a written plan so somebody else can carry it on.
Yes. The moment a WordPress site starts taking money the priorities change, and the arguments are different enough that there is a separate page for it, with its own checkout lab and scorecard.
No. The load lab, scorecard and cost calculator run in your browser. Nothing is sent to us, nothing looks up your site, and everything disappears when the tab closes. If you copy your score, that copy goes to your own clipboard. Our privacy notice covers the rest of the site.
Plugin, hosting and platform specifics on this page were last reviewed in September 2026. WordPress moves, so if something here no longer matches what you are seeing, tell us and we will correct it rather than soften it.
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Send us the address of your site before the call and we will have looked at it properly. You get the first thing we would change and why, whether or not you ever hire us.
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