WordPress web design that hand-codes the theme.
WordPress for the editing screen your team logs into. Hand-written HTML and CSS for everything your visitors actually load. That split is the whole trick, and it is why these custom WordPress websites load in about two seconds while the page-builder site down the street takes eight.
I run a web studio in Aurora, IL, and most of what I build ships on WordPress, but not the WordPress you’ve been burned by. No Elementor. No Divi. No forty-plugin stack held together with annual license renewals. WordPress does the one job it’s genuinely great at (letting you edit your own content), and I write the theme underneath it from scratch, the same way I build static hand-coded sites. If you have been searching for a WordPress web design company in Naperville, Aurora, or anywhere across Chicago’s western suburbs because your current site is slow, fragile, or abandoned, this page is that work, written out.
WordPress is the filing cabinet, not the architect.
WordPress earned its reputation honestly: it’s the best content management system ever shipped for the price of free. Posts, pages, media, users, revisions: solved problems, solved well. Where WordPress sites go wrong is when a page builder is bolted on top and asked to generate the website itself. Elementor, Divi, WPBakery and their cousins spit out thousands of lines of wrapper markup, stack twenty script files on every page, and slow a simple five-page site to a crawl. I’ve written up exactly why that happens.
My builds split the job. Every layer below is doing the one thing it’s best at, and nothing else.
The front end: hand-coded.
Every template your visitors load is HTML, CSS, and JavaScript I wrote for your business, not builder output. That’s the difference between a two-second load and an eight-second one, and it’s why these sites post the Core Web Vitals numbers page-builder sites can’t reach.
A custom theme, built for your content.
The theme is the bridge: it takes what you type into WordPress and renders it into those hand-coded templates. Custom blocks and plain edit fields shaped around your actual pages (services, staff, testimonials) so editing feels like filling out a form, not defusing a bomb.
WordPress: the content layer.
You keep the dashboard you already know. Write a blog post, swap a photo, update your hours, without calling a developer and without a page builder in sight. This is the part of WordPress worth keeping, so we keep it.
Plugins in the single digits.
A form handler, an SEO plugin, caching, backups: each one earning its place, none of them overlapping. When the plugin list fits on one screen, updates stop being a monthly gamble and security stops being a subscription you’re sold.
Hosting and domain: yours.
Registered to you, paid directly to the provider, tuned by me. If we ever part ways, you keep the site, the admin, the hosting, and the domain. There’s nothing of mine to unwind.
// NET RESULT: a WordPress site that edits like WordPress and performs like hand-coded HTML, because underneath, it is.
We rebuild WordPress sites that page builders broke.
A lot of my WordPress work isn’t new builds. It’s rescues. The site was built in Elementor or Divi three years ago, the developer moved on, and now it takes eight seconds to load, nobody dares touch the edit screen, and Google has quietly stopped sending traffic. If that’s you, start with my breakdown of why WordPress sites get slow and how to fix it. Then here’s what a rescue actually looks like on the bench.
What we do, and what we won’t.
Plenty of shops will happily bill you monthly to babysit a plugin stack they installed. That’s not this studio. Here’s the line, drawn in ink, so you know what you’re hiring before the first call.
- Custom WordPress themes, hand-coded from a blank file for your business
- Custom blocks and edit fields shaped around your real content
- Rescue rebuilds of slow Elementor, Divi, and WPBakery sites
- Performance work that fixes causes, not another caching plugin on top
- WordPress as the content layer under a hand-coded front end
- A flat-rate care plan from $85/mo: updates, backups, edits, a human
- Plugin-soup maintenance mills: renting you a monthly fee to water forty plugins
- Page-builder patch jobs: stacking optimization plugins on a slow builder site
- Theme-marketplace flips: a $60 template with your logo dropped in
- License lock-in: builder subscriptions that die when you stop paying me
- Hostage hosting: your site on my account as leverage
WordPress work bills at the studio’s published flat rates.
New builds and rescues alike: a fixed number in writing before work starts, the code in your name, and 90 days of post-launch edits included. No hourly meter, ever.
Custom WordPress websites for Naperville, Aurora, and the western suburbs.
Most of the WordPress work that comes through this studio starts the same way. A business somewhere between Aurora and Naperville had a site built four or five years ago by a WordPress web design company that has since stopped answering email. It shipped on Elementor or Divi. It was fine at launch. Now it loads in seven seconds on a phone, the plugin list has grown to two screens, and nobody on staff will touch the edit screen without calling somebody first.
That is the job. Whether you call it WordPress web design, WordPress development, or just “please make our website work again,” the fix is the same shape: keep WordPress as the content layer your team already knows, and replace the generated front end with a custom theme written by hand for your business. You get the dashboard you are used to and the speed you were promised the first time.
The studio is in Aurora, IL, so the bulk of this work sits in the Fox Valley and the western suburbs: Naperville, St. Charles, Geneva, Batavia, Oswego, Plainfield, and out toward Joliet. It is not geography-locked work, though. WordPress projects run on email, screen shares, and a staging URL you can click, so a custom WordPress build for a company in Chicago proper, or three states away, runs exactly the same.
Two things worth saying plainly, because they are the questions behind most first emails. First, a custom WordPress website here means a theme written from a blank file for your content, not a $60 marketplace theme with your logo dropped into it. Second, the price is published: WordPress builds and rescues bill from the same flat rate card as everything else in the studio, starting at $750, quoted in writing before work starts. If a different kind of build fits you better than WordPress, I will say so on the first call rather than sell you a CMS you do not need.
Asked on almost every rescue call.
Hire a WordPress web design company that shows you the code.
Tell me about your site (new build or rescue) and what it needs to do. You’ll get a straight diagnosis and a fixed quote in writing, usually within a day. Prefer to talk it through? Call (331) 269-6120 and you’ll get me, not a sales team.