Custom themes and block editor work
Building and maintaining your theme, block patterns and reusable templates so editors can lay out pages without a developer. Custom blocks where the editor needs them, not a page builder bolted on top.
Fractional Teammates · Development
A senior WordPress developer for part of your week
Your WordPress estate needs steady senior attention: theme and block work, plugin hygiene, core and PHP upgrades, performance and security. A fractional teammate from OlDevs gives you that on a defined slice of the week.
A senior specialist, not a junior placement You own the work and the accounts Reply within one business day
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What a wordpress developer is
OlDevs places a senior WordPress developer inside your organisation for a defined part of each week, on an ongoing basis rather than as a fixed-scope project.They look after the WordPress estate you already run: custom theme and block development, plugin hygiene and licence renewals, core and PHP version upgrades, performance work, security hardening, staging and release process, and the editing experience your content team uses daily. They work in your repository, your ticket board and your standups, and report on what changed each week. The rest of the OlDevs studio covers design, infrastructure and marketing questions when a job needs a second discipline. You own the code, the accounts and the data.
Key facts
- 01Discipline
- Development
- 02Commitment
- A set part of each week, ongoing
- 03Works in
- Your repo, board and standups
- 04Core stack
- WordPress, PHP, block editor, MySQL
- 05Typical commitment
- Half to 1 day a week
- 06Judged on
- Update lag · Uptime · Page weight
Development
What this teammate takes off your plate
What this teammate takes off your plate
Plugin hygiene and licence management
Auditing what is installed, removing what is not used, keeping licences current and replacing abandoned plugins before they become a security problem. Updates tested on staging, not pushed straight to production.
Core, PHP and dependency upgrades
Planning and running WordPress core and PHP version upgrades on a schedule, with a staging rehearsal, a rollback plan and a short written note on what changed and what to watch.
Performance and Core Web Vitals
Finding what actually slows your site: query counts, uncached calls, oversized media, render-blocking assets. Then fixing it in the theme and caching layer, and measuring the difference against your own analytics.
Security hardening and recovery readiness
User roles reviewed, admin access tightened, file permissions corrected, backups tested by restoring them, and a documented route back if a site is compromised. Incident work shared with the studio's infrastructure people.
Editor experience for your content team
Making the admin match how your team actually publishes: sensible fields, guarded layouts, clear labels and short written guides. Fewer requests reach you because the editor behaves the way people expect.
Benefits
What changes when someone is minding the WordPress estate
01
Upgrades stop becoming rebuilds
An estate that skips a few years of core, PHP and plugin releases usually ends in a rebuild nobody planned. Moving a version at a time keeps that decision with you, rather than with your host's end-of-life notice.
02
Editors stop raising tickets to publish
Patterns, reusable blocks and roles set up properly mean your marketing and comms people build a campaign page or a news post themselves, in the week it is needed, without a developer and without another page builder plugin.
03
The plugin list stops growing
Someone with standing in your organisation can refuse the next plugin found on a blog and retire the ones nobody uses. The estate stops carrying features nobody asked for and code whose author stopped maintaining it years ago.
04
You stop hoping the restore works
The question of whether you could get the site back is answered before the morning you need it: patches applied on a schedule, and a restore — database and uploads together — rehearsed on staging.
05
Rebuild pressure gets tested, not obeyed
When someone proposes replacing the whole site, the judgement of whether that is warranted comes from years of watching WordPress estates age well or badly — and few organisations have enough of that work to keep such a person busy.
06
Hosting and licences stay in your name
Hosting, registrar, repository and premium plugin licences sit in your organisation's accounts, and the reasoning behind each customisation is written where your next developer will look — in the repository, not in somebody's memory.
How it works
How the engagement runs
Estate review
We start by looking at what you actually run: sites, themes, plugins, hosting, PHP versions, backups and who has access. You get the findings written down, ranked.
An agreed slice of the week
You choose how much senior time you need and on which days. That commitment is booked and held, so the work is predictable for both sides rather than squeezed in.
Into your tools
Access to your repository, ticket board, hosting and staging. The teammate uses your branches, your review process and your release windows. Nothing important lives only on our side.
A stabilising pass first
Early weeks usually go on the unglamorous list: failing backups, out-of-date PHP, abandoned plugins, broken staging. Fixing that first makes every later change quicker and safer to ship.
Weekly demo and written note
Every week you see the work running, not a status colour. A short written summary records what changed, what is queued next and anything that needs a decision from you.
Who it's for
Who this suits
Fractional works when the WordPress work is real and continuous, but not enough to justify a full-time role. It is the wrong shape for some organisations, and we will say so early.
Associations and public bodies
A busy site, a small team, and accessibility obligations you cannot let slip. You get a senior person who learns the estate and keeps it to WCAG 2.2 AA.
Marketing teams without an in-house developer
Your developers work on the product, not the website. A fractional teammate keeps the marketing estate healthy and ships campaign pages without pulling engineers off their roadmap.
Franchises and multi-site estates
Dozens of near-identical sites drifting apart. One senior person keeps the shared theme, the update schedule and the location templates consistent across a multisite or a fleet of installs.
Where fractional is the wrong choice
If you need someone on call all day, a full replatform delivered to a hard deadline, or a single small fix, say so. A hire, a project team or a one-off suits better.
12+
Years of studio experience since 2014
Half
Typical commitment — Half to 1 day a week
EN/FR
Languages this engagement can be delivered in
Other fractional roles
Often paired with
01
Front-End Developer
Your interface layer gets an owner: components, responsive layout, state, performance budgets and WCAG 2.
Explore02DevOps & Cloud Engineer
A senior DevOps and cloud engineer from our Vancouver studio joins your team for a defined part of each week.
Explore03SEO & AI Search Specialist
A defined slice of a senior specialist's week, spent in your ticket tracker, your repository and your Search Console.
ExploreFAQ
Questions buyers ask before committing
They stay yours; they were always yours. The work lives in your repository, on your hosting, under your accounts and licences from day one, so ending an engagement is an access change, not a migration. We hand over documentation, the update schedule, open tickets and any credentials we hold, then remove our access. Nothing is held back as leverage.
You get more seniority for fewer hours, with no recruitment, benefits or bench time, but you also get less availability. A hire is there all day and absorbs your context completely. Fractional suits a need that is continuous but genuinely part-time. We will not claim it is always cheaper than hiring: that depends on your situation, and the comparison is worth doing properly before you decide.
An agency usually works ticket by ticket, through an account manager, with whoever is free that week. Here the same senior developer sits in your standups and keeps the context between jobs, with the studio behind them when a task needs design, infrastructure or marketing. If your WordPress work is genuinely occasional and unrelated, an agency retainer or a project team may fit better.
That is the normal starting point. The first weeks usually go on an estate review and a stabilising pass: backups you can actually restore, a working staging site, core and PHP on supported versions, abandoned plugins replaced or removed. The findings are written down and ranked, so you choose what happens first. Only after that does new feature work move at a sensible pace.
The studio does. Your teammate documents the estate, the access and the current queue as they go, so another OlDevs developer can take urgent work without a discovery phase. Routine work waits for their return unless you ask otherwise. This is the main practical difference from engaging an individual contractor, where an absence usually means everything stops.
Yes, and it is common. The teammate joins your repository and review process as another contributor, follows your host's deployment path, and takes the parts of the backlog you agree in advance. We do not require moving your hosting or replacing your tools. If your host manages updates, we work with that boundary rather than duplicating it.
Let’s connect
Let’s talk about the wordpress developer gap.
Tell us what is not getting done and roughly how much of a week it needs. We’ll reply within one business day with who would cover it and a tailored quote — no obligation.