17+ Years of Experience
Orlando WordPress Development Services
- Custom WordPress Website Development
- Custom Web Design
- Custom WordPress Theme Development
- Limitless Functionality
- Powerful Content Management
- Easy-to-use and accessible
- SEO Friendly and Optimization-Ready
- Performance Optimization
- WordPress Best Practices
- WordPress Security Hardening
- Secure, Reliable, and High-Performance Hosting
We plan ahead for website maintenance
Often times a design agency will create a website without a plan for maintaining the site for their client. They hire designers who don’t understand web development, and they hire freelance web developers who are not invested in the project. At the end of the project, they give the client a WordPress website full of plugins that cannot be updated due to missing or unpaid license keys.
We plan ahead to reduce how many plugin licenses you have to deal with. Our maintenance plans include common plugins and themes, so you don’t have to worry about tracking additional bills, license keys, and renewals.
WordPress Development Best Practices
We use best practices to build great digital experiences
Custom and Stable
Your unique brand and content inform a custom website design. We build custom WordPress websites and do not use off-the-shelf themes that inevitably break down. We also do not convolute your site by white-labeling plugins, themes, or your WordPress Dashboard experience. One of our core values is transparency, and that extends throughout our work.
Only Quality Plugins
With over 17 years of WordPress experience, we can tell you that plugins aren’t the problem. It’s developers who don’t choose the right ones or install too many to count, that’s the problem. Not all plugins work as intended. We only use plugins built by trusted third parties and cleared through our WordPress plugin screening process. We look for trustworthy, secure, and easy-to-use WordPress plugins and avoid plugins with poorly designed marketing sites, mascots, and gimmicky sales tactics.
Intutitive and powerful site management
Our solutions provide a customized and intuitive interface. It is easier to understand content editing than the standard confusing block editors. That’s why we stay away from third-party page builder plugins that are difficult to use or have a history of problems. The management capabilities we build give you exactly what you need, and we often remove what you don’t need in order to simplify and improve the user experience for content managers.
Performance and Speed
Fast loading websites perform well in search engines, leading to better user experiences. Our custom WordPress themes are optimized for speed. Don’t settle for a slow website using a theme that is loaded with errors and unused code.
WordPress Optimized Hosting
We recommend the best WordPress hosting plans. We select your hosting based on your needs and priorities, such as storage, security, traffic, resources, and stability. We avoid shared hosting companies no matter how good their reputation is and prefer to work with the best of the best-managed WordPress hosts such as Kinsta, Flywheel, WP Engine, Cloudways, and SpinupWP.
WordPress Website Security
We take security seriously and understand how it can impact your business if your website goes down or is infected with malware. That’s why we take extra steps to keep your site secure. We use defensive coding practices, use SSL, configure HTTP response headers, install website firewalls, two-factor authentication, and more.
Custom WordPress Website Options
Custom Web Development Services
Option 1: Custom design and custom WordPress theme
We design your site, and build a custom WordPress theme from scratch.
This option gives you complete control over the look and feel of your website, its functionality, and capabilities. This option is best for you if you prefer more control, no limits, a more consistent look, and extended functionality. This option does not use third-party page builders and keeps content and code separate. Separating content (the database) from code (the theme) allows you to redesign your site anytime without moving all of your data.
We take additional time to learn and understand your company, goals, audience, and branding. Having control over the complete development of your website allows us to maximize performance, accessibility, on-page SEO, and user experience. Choosing this option will evolve your brand because your new design assets can be applied to your online presence. We create a website that is scalable and sustainable with proper maintenance. Most custom WordPress websites we build last between 5 and 8 years, with site audits every 2 years and at least one homepage refresh.
Option 2: Custom design plus a WordPress Block Theme
We design your site, and build it within WordPress.
Get powerful page-building features and a custom design without compromising. Our WordPress Block Theme uses the WordPress Block Editor (formerly known as Gutenberg) to provide predesigned #nocode site layouts for you to control. We provide design mockups created for your unique needs before building your site. We create a custom design using the WordPress Block Editor and powerful block editing features from the best WordPress theme frameworks. Unlike most off-the-shelf themes still using clunky and outdated page builders, block themes are ultra-fast and do not cause performance issues. If you’re building a brochure-style site, this option is perfect.
“They listen to the needs of their customer and place a huge emphasis on taking care of them. The improvements Afteractive made have streamlined our processes for maintaining the website, freeing up time for us.”
Why our clients ask us to develop custom WordPress themes and WordPress Block themes instead of the classic WordPress off-the-shelf solutions
Reason #1: Lack of Optimization
Optimization is difficult with marketplace WordPress themes
Using a classic WordPress theme may sound like a great way to save money on WordPress development costs. It can be for those who need a website and are just starting. But if you rely on internet traffic for your leads and need to be competitive, you need to optimize your site.
Because WordPress theme developers don’t always pay attention to performance, SEO, and Accessibility, marketplace WordPress themes block site owners from being able to optimize their sites. Overrides to the core programming of the theme are not easy to maintain. Most of the time, if you use a marketplace theme, your provider is not an experienced WordPress developer with those capabilities. These are often designers, marketers, or less-than-professional developers wrangling themes and plugins to build a site. We provide experienced WordPress development that won’t leave you stuck.
Reason #2: WordPress page builders can be a disaster
WordPress themes from marketplaces come with proprietary page builders that lead to inaccessible and disappearing content
Page builders have been known to have security vulnerabilities. Blocks created by page builders often stop working after updates. Often, these blocks will no longer accept edits, forcing you to create them all over again. These layouts often look terrible on mobile devices because they only guess at the spacing. Page builders need to be maintained, and the complexity of testing these features makes it impossible for this software not to have ongoing bugs and issues. As an experienced custom WordPress developer, we can create a much better WordPress page-building experience for you.
Reason #3: Page building is now a standard part of WordPress
Classic WordPress themes and templates are not taking advantage of the best page builder: the WordPress Block Editor
If page builders from marketplace themes don’t meet your needs, you may consider the WordPress Block Editor (known in the WordPress community as the Gutenberg editor ). You can visit the new Gutenberg editing experience for WordPress and learn about it while interacting with the editor. Most people need to be a pro at it to build with it, but editing is a breeze. If you’re like most website owners, you would rather have an easier experience updating and adding your content. You may also want the flexibility it provides for quickly building out new pages, designs, and layouts.
For most of our small businesses in Orlando, the WordPress Block Editor works great. It allows for content variety in your posts. However, if you have many pages, more dynamic content, and multiple editors, you may want a completely different WordPress development approach with a custom theme to guarantee consistency.