Development
WordPress development and maintenance
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, write 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 the workaround has quietly become the 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 get restore-tested rather than just switched on
- 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 and the reason the hosting bill went up.
None of this means the site was built badly. It means it has been in service for a few years without anybody being paid to own it, which is the normal fate of a website. 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.
The figures here are meant to make that arithmetic checkable. A new site starts at DKK 15,000, which is 25 hours at DKK 600 an hour ex. VAT, delivered in 2–3 weeks. Upkeep starts at DKK 2,400 a month for 4 hours. Anything outside a package is billed at the hourly rate. If a quote you are comparing this against is one number with no hours behind it, the question worth asking is what year two costs.
Common questions
- What does WordPress work cost?
- Hourly work is DKK 600 an hour ex. VAT. A new site starts at DKK 15,000, which is 25 hours, and ongoing upkeep starts at DKK 2,400 a month. Freelance WordPress rates in Denmark are commonly quoted between DKK 650 and 850 an hour. The rate here is an introductory one, and an agreed rate follows the customer — start now and yours stays where it is.
- 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 at DKK 6,000 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 — ripping out a builder a client knows how to use is rarely worth what it costs them. For a new build I would rather use blocks and a light custom theme, because builders add page weight you then pay me to remove later.
- Can you build a custom plugin?
- Yes. That is usually the honest 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 budgeted at 25 hours and delivered in 2–3 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 rather than something only I can read, and the notes on what changed are written for whoever comes next. Switching supplier should take an email.
- Do you handle hosting too?
- 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. Reselling hosting at a margin is a common arrangement and I would rather not have it, because it quietly 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 worth treating as two jobs rather than one. 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 in March. Emergency work is billed at the hourly rate of DKK 600; 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 from DKK 9,000.
- 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.