Development
WordPress developer in Vejle: new sites, handovers and upkeep
WordPress runs a large share of Danish business websites, and a good many of them sit on a theme nobody has opened in two years. I build new WordPress sites, take over existing ones, build the plugin when a setting will not do, and keep the whole thing patched and fast.
When this makes sense
- The site works, but nobody left in the company can safely update it
- The agency or developer who built it has stopped answering
- A theme or a plugin is fighting you, and a workaround has become the standard process
- Each release is a little slower than the one before and nobody can say which plugin did it
- You are paying for plugin licences you cannot match to anything the site visibly does
How it works
- 01
Access
Read access to the site, the hosting and the admin. I go through what is actually installed, which is rarely the same as what the handover document says.
- 02
Work
A new build, a takeover, or a specific fix. Changes go onto a staging copy first, so nothing reaches the live site untested.
- 03
Handover
You keep the logins, the hosting and the code. I write down what changed and how to do it again without me.
What the work covers
- Theme and plugin work, including custom plugins where configuration runs out
- Updates, security patches and PHP version upgrades
- Speed: caching, image handling, and cutting the weight the page actually ships
- Backups that are tested with a real restore
- Moving the site to different hosting, including the DNS and certificate work
- A staging environment, on the sites that turn out not to have one
- Editor handover, so writing a page stops requiring a developer
- Danish and English kept in step where the site runs in both
- Technical SEO and GEO: structured data, crawler access and an /llms.txt, so Google and the AI assistants can both use the site
What usually turns out to be wrong
The complaint arrives in more or less the same sentence every time: the site is slow, or the site is stuck. What is behind it is rarely what the owner suspects. In roughly the order I find them — a page builder rendering four nested containers where one would do, photographs uploaded straight from a phone and served at full resolution to a mobile, a caching plugin that was installed and never configured, and somewhere between eight and forty plugins of which a third are inactive and two are doing the same job.
The other recurring finding is a theme edited in place. Somebody needed one change years ago, made it in the theme files rather than a child theme, and that change is now one update away from vanishing. It is usually the reason nobody dares run updates, which is in turn the reason the site is two PHP versions behind.
It is rarely a sign that the site was built badly. It has been in service for a few years without anybody responsible for it, which is what happens to most websites. I write down what I find before quoting anything, so you can decide what is worth money now and what can wait.
Taking over a site somebody else built
A takeover starts with access rather than an estimate: the WordPress admin, the hosting control panel, the domain registrar, and the repository if one exists. About half the time some part of that has to be recovered from a former supplier, and it is worth starting on day one because it is the step measured in calendar days rather than hours.
Then comes the inventory: PHP and WordPress versions, the plugin and theme list annotated with what is abandoned upstream, how backups are actually taken, and whether anything has been edited directly on the live server. That inventory is the first deliverable, and it is yours to keep whether or not the work continues with me.
After that the work is ordinary — a staging copy, updates applied there first, the site put on a maintenance footing. The one condition I hold to is that the accounts stay in your name. A supplier who holds your domain or your hosting login has leverage over you, and I would rather not have it.
What a WordPress site costs to own
A WordPress site has a running cost whether or not anybody has budgeted one: hosting, a handful of premium plugin licences, and the hours it takes to keep PHP and the plugin stack current. Left alone for two years none of that disappears. It accumulates into an upgrade project, which costs more than the maintenance would have and arrives at a worse moment, usually the week something breaks.
That is why you get two prices from me: a fixed price for the site itself, which is usually delivered in 1–3 weeks, and a fixed monthly price for the upkeep. Anything outside a package is priced individually before it starts. If a quote you are comparing this against is one number with nothing about running costs, the question worth asking is what year two costs.
Common questions
- What does WordPress work cost?
- The price of a new site depends mostly on the number of pages, and on whether it needs a shop or integrations. Ongoing upkeep is a fixed monthly price. We agree both in writing before I start, so write a few lines about the site and ask for a price.
- Will you take over a site somebody else built?
- Yes, and it is most of what comes in. It usually starts with a technical review, so we both know what is in there before I promise to keep it alive. If the review turns up nothing serious, that is a good result and I say so.
- Do you work with page builders like Elementor or Divi?
- Yes, when that is what the site is already built in. Replacing a builder a client knows how to use is rarely worth what it costs. For a new build I prefer blocks and a light custom theme, because builders make pages heavier and slower to load.
- Can you build a custom plugin?
- Yes. That is usually the right answer when a client is about to buy their fourth plugin to approximate one thing they actually need. A small purpose-built plugin is less code on the site than three general-purpose ones.
- How long does a WordPress site take?
- A small business site is typically delivered in 1–3 weeks. In practice the build is rarely the long pole — the content is. If the text and the photographs are ready when we start, that estimate holds; if they are going to be written as we go, say so at the beginning and we plan around it rather than discovering it in week three.
- What happens if I stop working with you?
- You keep everything, because it was never held anywhere else. The domain, the hosting account and the WordPress admin are in your name from the start, the code is standard WordPress that any WordPress developer can take over, and the notes on what changed are written for whoever comes next. Switching supplier should take an email.
- Do you handle hosting too?
- Yes, either with a host you choose or on HostStack, which I run myself, with email, uptime checks, error tracking and analytics in the same place. I will set it up and look after it as part of upkeep, but the account is yours and the invoice comes to you from the host directly. I do not resell hosting at a margin, because that makes moving away from me expensive at exactly the moment you might want to.
- The site has been hacked. Can you help?
- Yes, and it is two jobs. First the cleanup: find the way in, remove what was planted, force a credential rotation and get the site out of any blocklist it has landed in. Then the actual fix, which is almost always an out-of-date plugin or a shared password, and which is what stops it happening again. Emergency work is priced as soon as I have seen what happened; the second half usually belongs in ongoing upkeep.
- Can a WordPress site end up in AI answers?
- Yes, and WordPress starts from a good place, because pages are served as finished HTML. What usually gets in the way was added afterwards: a security or cache plugin that turns unknown bots away, a firewall in front of the site doing the same, content buried in a PDF or an image, and an SEO plugin whose markup describes something other than what is on the page. Prices, services and opening hours need to be text with markup around them, and an /llms.txt can go on top. That sits inside the technical SEO and GEO engagement.
- Is WordPress still the right choice?
- For a site whose content you want to edit yourself, often yes, and I say so more readily than most developers do. Where it stops being the right answer is when the site has to carry real application logic — a portal, a calculation, a workflow — and you end up bending a publishing system into a shape it does not want. That is the point to build it properly instead.
Other stacks I work in
Not sure which one to pick?
Send a couple of lines about what you are trying to achieve. You get a reply within 24 hours, and an honest yes or no.