E-commerce and WordPress solutions

A discount code that applies twice. A confirmation email that stopped sending after an update nobody logged.

Those are the messages that arrive here, and they are never about the design.

A shop runs on other people's plugins. Each one is a dependency, an update, a permission and a small bet that its author is still interested next year.

The failure that matters is checkout. It arrives at the moment somebody has decided to pay you, and it usually follows an update nobody connected to the till.

That is the first problem.

The second is speed. It is easier to measure and harder to argue about, because the page either meets the thresholds a browser reports or it does not; the number is the same one your customers are living through.

Anybody can run that check against your shop without asking you for access.

This is somebody else's platform, and that is the constraint.

WordPress has an update cycle, a plugin ecosystem and a hosting bill that are not mine to redesign, so the work happens inside decisions made before I arrive.

There is a second thing the platform decides for you. A theme built as blocks can be rearranged by the person running the shop; a theme built as rigid templates can only be changed by whoever wrote it, which is a maintenance bill in disguise.

This is also the one service on this site where paid third parties are structural. A payment provider takes a percentage. A hosting plan has a monthly number on it.

The house rule elsewhere is that nothing paid sits in the critical path, and a shop cannot honour that. So the rule becomes the next best thing: every paid piece is named, priced and agreed before it is built rather than discovered on an invoice.

It is the one place in this catalogue where an honest answer includes a monthly number that is neither mine nor yours to remove.

What an engagement of this shape covers is settled before it starts.

Custom themes and blocks. Plugin development and extension, including the unglamorous kind that repairs somebody else's plugin rather than replacing it. WooCommerce checkout and payment wiring.

Performance and Core Web Vitals. And migration from an existing shop.

That last one covers migrating away from WordPress when that is the right answer. It is written here rather than raised in month two, because it is the part of this service that argues against itself.

Checkout is where most of the care goes. A payment that fails has to fail visibly, keep the basket, and say what to do next, because the alternative is a customer who assumes it worked and finds out days later.

Payment wiring is its own piece of work. A provider's sandbox is not the provider, so the last check before launch is a real transaction rather than a sandbox one.

PHP is the language here rather than TypeScript. My name is Ahsan Mahmood, and the standard I hold it to is the one applied everywhere else on this site.

Performance work carries a cost people do not expect, and it is a social one. Making a shop fast usually means removing something.

A plugin somebody chose. A script marketing added. Each of those has an owner, and the conversation about removing it takes longer than the change itself.

Every removal gets written down with what it did, so nobody has to reconstruct the reasoning a year later.

Migration has a different cost. It needs a content freeze, a redirect map from every old URL to a new one, plus a day when orders are watched rather than assumed. A redirect that gets missed is a page a search engine already knew about, and it is gone the morning you launch.

Neither of those is technically hard. Both need a decision from you, on a date. The work stops until they arrive.

There is a third cost, and it is the quiet one. A shop with fewer plugins is a shop with fewer features somebody once asked for, and that trade is yours to make rather than mine.

The exclusions here are the catalogue's, with one addition. Visual design as a standalone deliverable. Native iOS. Blockchain work.

Copywriting and content, which on a shop means the product descriptions, and those are the words that actually sell, so budget for somebody to write them.

The addition is this. I will tell you when WordPress is the wrong platform for what you are describing, and that answer loses me the project more often than it wins one.

Third-party subscriptions, hosting and payment fees are yours. Thirty days of bug fixes at no charge, and after that nothing is automatic.

The plugins you keep are the ones you will still be updating long after I have gone.