Freelance WordPress developer for brochure and editorial sites

Performance, SEO and security: the invisible work

You often hear that WordPress is slow or insecure. That's false when it's done well, and true when it's neglected — so everything comes down to execution. On speed, I start from a lightweight theme, set up serious caching (most often WP Rocket), compress and serve images in the right format, and load only what's strictly necessary. The goal is simple and measurable: Core Web Vitals in the green, verified in the browser and not just on some forgiving testing tool.

Performance also depends on where the site is hosted, and that's a point too often overlooked. Cheap shared hosting drags down even the best settings; conversely, decent hosting (a dedicated WordPress plan, or a properly configured and secured VPS) changes everything in how the site feels. I advise you based on your real traffic and your budget, without selling you an oversized infrastructure you don't need. The idea is for the machine to match the site, no more and no less.

Technical SEO is part of the work, not an option billed separately. Clean heading structure, readable URLs, structured data (schema.org), Open Graph tags, a sitemap, careful redirect management when taking over an existing site. WordPress remains one of the best foundations for editorial SEO: it's designed for content, and content is what gets you ranked. I use Yoast or Rank Math to give writers clear guidance, without turning every article into a chase for green dots.

If you're targeting a local audience in Martinique or the Caribbean, local SEO is something you work on concretely: well-targeted pages covering your areas and your services, a business listing connected to the site, local business structured data, consistent contact information. WordPress lends itself perfectly to this kind of groundwork, because it lets you create and maintain as many useful pages as your business calls for, without depending on me for every addition.

Security, finally, is mostly a matter of rigour. I harden the admin area, disable what serves no purpose (XML-RPC in particular), keep PHP and the plugins up to date, and add a layer such as Wordfence or an application firewall depending on the context. The field truth is that almost every hacked WordPress site is hacked because of an abandoned plugin or a weak password — not the WordPress core itself. Regular maintenance costs far less than an emergency restore.

How I work, and what comes next

I always deliver with a handover: a short video showing you how to publish and edit your content, a written guide, and 30 days of support included after launch for adjustments and questions. My goal is for you to be self-sufficient day to day — not for you to stay tied hand and foot to your provider. If you want to manage your site on your own afterwards, perfect. If you'd rather hand the maintenance to me, we set up light ongoing support (updates, backups, monitoring).

That maintenance is the cheapest insurance you can take out on a WordPress site. In practice: I keep the core, the theme and the plugins up to date, I check that backups are running and can actually be restored, and I keep an eye on security and speed. Ninety percent of the compromised sites I recover got that way for lack of this kind of follow-up. A few minutes of regular checks are far better than a day of emergency repairs with the site offline the whole time.

I'm honest about the tool's limits, because choosing the right foundation from the start saves months of frustration. If your project is really a business application with strong logic — a complex client area, automations, calculations, fine-grained access rights — WordPress isn't the best choice and I'll tell you so: we'll go with Laravel instead. For an online shop, WooCommerce extends WordPress very well up to a certain volume. The right tool depends on your real need, not on what I'd rather sell.

For e-commerce, the line is fairly easy to draw. As long as you're selling anywhere from a few products to several hundred, with a standard checkout flow, WooCommerce is an excellent choice: you keep WordPress's autonomy, with no commission on your sales. Beyond that, with very large catalogues or genuinely unusual e-commerce rules, we look together at whether a custom stack or another platform would be a better fit. Either way, we talk it through frankly before you commit, so we don't build on a foundation that will hold you back a year from now.