WordPress expert for business sites, Elementor, Divi and the fixes nobody else will touch

A page builder such as Elementor or Divi lets your team change layouts by dragging blocks around. That freedom has a cost. Builders add their own markup, styles and scripts to every page, and a site can end up tied to the builder for good. For most small business sites the trade is worth it, because edits happen in minutes and nobody needs to call a developer.

A custom theme goes the other way. I write only the templates the site needs and register custom post types for content such as services, locations or team members. Editors get plain fields to fill in. The pages come out lighter, and the design cannot be broken by accident. I recommend this route for content-heavy sites, sites where speed is a priority, and teams that publish often but rarely change layouts.

I measure before I change anything. I run the key pages through PageSpeed Insights and note which requests take the longest. Then I check the hosting: the PHP version, the server response time and whether any page caching is active. Many slow sites I see run an outdated PHP version with no page cache at all. Fixing those two things often does more than any optimization plugin.

Next comes the plugin list. I look for plugins that load scripts on every page but are used on one, plugins that duplicate each other, and plugins nobody remembers installing. Images get resized and converted to modern formats. Fonts get trimmed to the weights in use. The database gets cleared of old revisions and expired transients. All of this happens on a staging site first, so the live site never breaks in the middle of a fix.

Hacked sites I am asked to clean usually share the same causes. There is a plugin abandoned by its author, a pirated premium theme, a weak admin password or an old developer account nobody removed. Cleaning means replacing WordPress core files with fresh copies and reinstalling plugins and themes from their original sources. I also remove unknown admin users and check the database and uploads folder for injected code.

Hardening is what stops the repeat. I change every password and the security keys in wp-config, turn off file editing from the dashboard and limit login attempts. Admins get two-factor login, and the site moves to a supported PHP version. I set up off-site backups and a security scan on a schedule. If you want this watched every month instead of once, my website maintenance plan covers it.