Custom WordPress websites
Custom WordPress websites
WordPress the way it should be built: a custom Kadence theme, native blocks you can edit yourself, no page-builder bloat, and a hardened stack that stays fast and secure for years. Built by hand, not bought as a theme.
Klondike Air, Orange County CA. Custom WordPress on Kadence, designed and built by Web Design by Mark.
The problem
Why bought themes turn into expensive websites.
The site is usually the first thing a customer sees and the last thing the business had time for.
Forty plugins to do six things
A premium theme ships with a page builder, a slider, three form plugins, and a dozen add-ons. Every one is an update to run, a hole to patch, and a second on the load time.
It only looks right in the demo
The demo had a photographer and a copywriter. Yours has a phone photo and a paragraph from 2019. The template was never designed for your content.
Nobody can edit it
Change one line and the layout breaks, so nothing gets changed. A site nobody dares touch goes stale in a year.
It is slow, and Google notices
Bloated themes fail Core Web Vitals on a phone. That is a ranking factor and a reason people leave before the page draws.
How it works
Five steps, in this order, every time.
You approve the design before the build starts, and nothing goes live until you have seen it on your own phone.
Scope
Which pages, which forms, what has to integrate, and what you want to edit yourself. Fixed price comes from this.
Design
Mark designs on a working staging site, in the real theme, so what you approve is what ships. No Photoshop mockups that never match.
Build
A child theme on Kadence, native blocks only. Headings, buttons, forms, galleries, and tables are all editable in the standard WordPress editor.
Harden
Security headers, login protection, a firewall on the login form, nightly backups, and every unused plugin removed. The same stack on every site we run.
Hand over
You get the logins, a short recorded walkthrough of editing your own pages, and the option of a care plan for the parts you do not want to do.
The part that matters in year two
A theme you bought is somebody else’s product. A theme built for you is an asset.
A purchased theme
Page builder plus 20 to 40 plugins
Layout breaks when you edit text
Demo content shapes your content
Updates to a theme you do not control
Slow on phones, fails Core Web Vitals
A custom Kadence build
Native blocks, a handful of vetted plugins
Every block editable in the standard editor
Designed around what you actually have
A child theme you own, updates that do not break it
Measured on a slow phone before launch
What you get
What a custom WordPress build includes.
Custom Kadence child theme
Palette, type, header, footer, and every section drawn for you. No demo import, no leftover template CSS.
Native, editable blocks
Text, images, tables, galleries, and FAQs you can change yourself in the WordPress editor without anything breaking.
The hardened stack
SEOPress, Gravity Forms, UpdraftPlus, LiteSpeed Cache, and our schema plugin. The same set on every site we care for, so nothing is a surprise later.
Fast by measurement
Images sized for the screen, fonts hosted locally, caching tuned, and a Lighthouse run on a throttled phone before you see it.
Search-ready structure
Titles, descriptions, schema, sitemap, clean URLs. Marketing at SyncShepherd builds on top; nothing has to be rebuilt first.
Yours, documented
Your domain, your hosting, your logins, and a written handoff. Leave any time and take it all.
Recent work
Two of the sites this page describes.
Cyclone HVAC
HVAC repair, Forney TX
Custom Kadence build with per-city service pages and the client’s own CRM forms kept intact.
NW Salmon Smokehouse
Cafe and artisan market, Chehalis WA
A full refresh on Kadence with self-hosted video, galleries, and a native menu the owners edit themselves.
Also from Web Design by Mark: Web design and development · E-commerce · SEO and marketing · Website care plans
Questions
What people ask before they start.
Get an estimate
Tell us what the site has to do.
A real reply from Mark within one business day, with a fixed price once the scope is clear.