WordPress Development · Bath · Somerset · Based in Gravesend
WordPress Development in Bath, Somerset
Custom WordPress sites for Bath and Somerset businesses. Bespoke themes and plugins, WooCommerce stores, content-led editorial sites, performance and security hardening, and headless builds. Built properly, maintained long-term, delivered by a UK team you actually speak to.
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WordPress is for content. Here is what that means in practice.
WordPress is a content management system, and it powers a very large share of the web for one reason: it lets non-technical people create, edit, and organise content without going near code. That is its whole strength. When a site lives or dies on how easily a marketing team can publish a new article, launch a campaign landing page, or update a product description, WordPress is hard to beat. It pairs a mature editor with an enormous ecosystem of plugins, so common requirements rarely need building from scratch.
For a city like Bath, where so many organisations compete on brand, content, and reputation, that matters. A heritage attraction, a professional services firm, a university department, an independent retailer, or a hospitality group all need a site their own people can keep fresh without raising a developer ticket for every change. WordPress gives them that control. Our job is to build it so it stays fast, secure, and maintainable rather than degrading into a slow tangle of conflicting plugins, which is the fate of a great many WordPress sites left to drift.
Custom theme development
A bespoke theme built to your brand, with clean markup, fast load times, and a block editor experience your team can actually use. No bloated off-the-shelf theme carrying features you will never touch, and no fighting a page builder to get the layout you want.
Bespoke plugin development
When a plugin to do exactly what you need does not exist, or the ones that do are bloated and unsupported, we build a focused custom plugin. Tailored functionality, your own data structures, and integrations with the systems behind your business, without the licence churn of commercial add-ons.
WooCommerce stores
Online shops built on WooCommerce, from a clean catalogue and checkout to bespoke product configurators, subscriptions, and integrations with payment, shipping, and accounting. A flexible commerce platform for businesses that want control over how they sell.
Content-led and editorial sites
Magazine, news, and publishing sites where editorial workflow is the point: roles and permissions, scheduling, revisions, custom content types, and an editor your writers enjoy using. This is WordPress at its strongest, and the kind of publishing work our team knows intimately.
Performance and security hardening
Auditing and fixing slow, vulnerable WordPress sites: trimming the plugin footprint, proper caching, image and database optimisation, sensible hardening, monitoring, and backups. Speed and security are not optional extras; they affect search rankings, conversion, and trust.
Headless WordPress
Using WordPress purely as a content back end, with a separate modern front end consuming its REST or GraphQL API. The right approach when you want the editorial comfort of WordPress with the speed and flexibility of a custom front-end framework.
Migrations from other CMSs
Moving a site off a legacy or unloved CMS onto WordPress, preserving content, URLs, and SEO equity. We migrate carefully, mapping old content types to new ones, setting up redirects, and protecting the search rankings you have spent years earning.
Laravel vs CodeIgniter vs WordPress
We build in WordPress, Laravel, and CodeIgniter. We are not going to recommend one over the others just to win a project. The right platform depends on the problem, and picking the wrong one is one of the most expensive mistakes a project can make. WordPress is our recommendation for content-led sites with an editorial workflow; here is an honest comparison of when each is the right choice.
| Situation | WordPress | Laravel | CodeIgniter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Content-led site with editorial workflow | ✓ Best fit | Possible but heavy | Not suited |
| Non-technical team publishing day to day | ✓ Best fit | Needs custom admin | Needs custom admin |
| Online shop with standard commerce needs | ✓ WooCommerce | Bespoke build | Bespoke build |
| Complex application with real business logic | Not suited | ✓ Best fit | Possible |
| REST API serving mobile or third-party systems | Not suited | ✓ Best fit | Workable |
| Lean web app, fast turnaround, modest scope | Depends on content | Can be overkill | ✓ Best fit |
| Multi-tenant SaaS application | Not suited | ✓ Best fit | Possible |
| Heavy background processing and scheduled jobs | Limited (WP-Cron) | ✓ Best fit | Manual effort |
WordPress shines when content and editorial control are the priority. Once a project is really an application, with complex logic, heavy integrations, or large multi-user workflows, a framework like Laravel is usually the safer long-term choice. If you are not sure which applies to your project, describe the problem and we will tell you what we would reach for and why.
How we approach a WordPress project
A WordPress site is only as good as the thinking that goes in before the first plugin is installed. WordPress will not save a project that was scoped badly, built on a bloated theme, or stuffed with plugins to avoid writing a few lines of clean code. Here is what we pay attention to, and the stages a build actually moves through.
Understanding the real requirement
Most briefs describe a solution someone has already half-designed. We dig into the underlying goal first, because the right content model and the right plugin decisions follow from what the business and its editors actually need, not from the first feature list.
A deliberate content model
Custom post types, taxonomies, and fields are decisions you live with for years. We design the content structure deliberately so editors find it intuitive and so the data is clean enough to power navigation, search, and any future headless front end.
A disciplined plugin footprint
Every plugin is code you do not control, a potential security hole, and a performance cost. We choose plugins carefully, prefer well-maintained ones, and build small custom plugins where that is cleaner than bolting on something heavy.
Built to be fast
Caching, optimised images, minimal bloat, and a lean theme are part of the design, not an afterthought. Core Web Vitals and page speed affect both search rankings and conversion, so performance is a first-class concern from the start.
An editor your team will use
We build the block editor experience, custom blocks, and patterns so your non-technical team can publish confidently without breaking the layout. A site nobody on the inside can update is a liability, however good it looks at launch.
Security and updates built in
Sensible hardening, least-privilege user roles, managed core and plugin updates, monitoring, and backups are part of the plan from day one, not a panic after the first compromised login or out-of-date plugin causes a problem.
From first conversation to long-term maintenance
We run WordPress projects in clear stages so you always know where things stand, what is being decided, and what comes next. Because you deal directly with Rob and Jason rather than an account manager, there is no layer of translation between what you ask for and what gets built. This is the same process whether you are in Bath, London, or anywhere else in the UK.
- Discovery and scopingWe get to the bottom of what the site needs to do, who edits it, who reads it, what it integrates with, and what success looks like. The output is a clear scope and a fixed-price proposal based on what we actually find, not a placeholder estimate.
- Content model and designWe design the content types, taxonomies, and templates, and the editor experience your team will work in every day. This is where the decisions that determine long-term usability and performance get made deliberately rather than by accident.
- Theme and plugin buildWe build the custom theme and any bespoke plugins against a staging environment you can access throughout, so you see real progress rather than waiting for a single big reveal. Feedback happens while it is still cheap to act on.
- Performance, security and testingCaching, image and database optimisation, hardening, and thorough testing across the devices and workflows your users actually follow, including the awkward editorial edge cases, not just the homepage that always demos well.
- Migration and go-liveA controlled launch with content migrated, URLs preserved, redirects in place to protect your SEO, and a clear rollback plan. Going live should be an event you have rehearsed, especially when an existing site is being replaced.
- Handover and ongoing maintenanceEditor training, documentation, and a straightforward handover, followed by whatever ongoing support arrangement suits you, from occasional changes to a managed care plan that keeps WordPress, plugins, and security current for the long term.
CoreCRM has run in production since 2011.
We do not just build sites and walk away. CoreCRM, our own CRM product, has been in continuous production use since 2011. It is direct evidence that we build software designed to be maintained and depended upon for well over a decade, not just for the length of a single project. That same discipline, around data integrity, maintainability, and long-term support, is what we apply to WordPress work and to the integrations that connect a WordPress or WooCommerce site to the systems behind it.
A Kent team trusted with national publishing and commerce work
Telegraph Media Group, Hearst Communications, CDS Global, AX Paris, Motel Rocks
These are not the typical clients of a regional web agency. They are the kind of businesses that usually work with large London firms. They work with us because the technical depth is there and the overhead is not, and because they get the founders directly rather than a managed account. Distance has never been the issue: most of our work has been delivered remotely for years.
Our roots in publishing and ecommerce are directly relevant to WordPress work. Editorial platforms, content workflows, and online stores are exactly the territory where WordPress and WooCommerce earn their place, and exactly the kind of work this team has delivered at national scale for demanding clients.
- Telegraph Media Group: custom operational and publishing software, maintained and extended over years
- Hearst Communications: bespoke systems development for a global publishing operation
- CDS Global: multi-year development engagement on business-critical operational software
- AX Paris: bespoke back-office connecting an ecommerce store to warehouse and despatch workflows. Case study.
- Motel Rocks: integration middleware connecting an ecommerce store to Oracle NetSuite and 3PL providers. Case study.
Working with Bath and Somerset businesses
Bath is a World Heritage city built on tourism, heritage, culture, and a strong professional and creative economy, with two universities and a thriving hospitality and independent retail scene, set within a wider Somerset of agriculture, food and drink producers, and visitor attractions. That mix produces exactly the kind of organisations that live or die on content and brand: attractions and festivals that need to publish constantly, professional firms that compete on reputation, retailers and hospitality businesses that sell online, and education and culture bodies with real editorial teams. That is the work WordPress is built for, and it is the work we do.
We are not local to Bath, and we are not going to pretend otherwise: Gravesend is around 150 miles away. What we offer instead is a genuinely senior UK team, working entirely in-house with no offshore arm, available to you directly rather than through layers of account management or the price tag of a Bristol or London agency.
In practice that distance changes nothing about the quality of the work. Most of our projects, including for national clients, are delivered remotely with regular video calls and a shared staging environment you can see progress on. We come down to Bath for a kick-off workshop or a key milestone when being in the room genuinely helps, and otherwise we keep the overhead, and your costs, sensibly low.
Related WordPress pages
How to choose a WordPress developer in Bath
Whether you end up working with us, a local Bath agency, or a freelancer, these are the questions worth asking before you commit. The answers tell you a lot about what you are actually buying.
Who actually builds the site?
Some agencies pitch with senior people and deliver via juniors or offshore teams you never meet. Ask directly who will build your site and who you call when something breaks. At Dev Partners it is the founders and an in-house UK team, with no offshore.
Custom theme or off-the-shelf?
A cheap build is often a marketplace theme stuffed with plugins. It looks fine at launch and becomes slow and fragile within a year. Ask whether they build custom themes, how they keep sites fast, and how they limit the plugin footprint.
Is the platform choice honest?
A developer who recommends WordPress for everything is selling, not advising. The right partner will tell you when your project is really an application that wants Laravel, or a lean build that suits CodeIgniter, and will explain why.
How do they handle security and updates?
Most WordPress breaches come through out-of-date plugins and weak hosting. Ask how they harden sites, how they manage updates and backups, and what their care plan covers. Vague answers here become an expensive incident later.
Will your team be able to edit it?
A site only your developer can update is a trap. Ask to see the editor experience, how custom blocks and content types work, and what training and documentation you get. Editorial control is the whole point of choosing WordPress.
How do they scope and price?
A low headline figure that grows through change requests is not a bargain. Ask how they scope, whether you get a fixed price, and what is and is not included. We scope carefully and quote a fixed price based on what we actually find.
What our clients say
20 clients. A few of their words.
A well-rounded team, ensuring a full suite of expertise & resource is always available. CDS Global have seen the successful completion of major projects over the years where Dev Partners' ability to grasp the underlying business needs to provide a future-proof solution has been invaluable.
We have worked with Jason & his team to develop our Shopify store, and the experience was outstanding from start to finish. The design is clean, modern, and perfectly aligned with our brand identity, while the build is fast, responsive, and easy to manage on the backend. They clearly understood our vision and delivered a store we're genuinely proud of. Highly recommend to any brand looking for a top-quality Shopify partner.
After ongoing issues and delays with our previous developers, we brought in Rob & Jason at Dev Partners to take over all our websites and bespoke software. What a breath of fresh air, fully focused, excellent pre-launch designs and clear communication throughout. Highly recommended.
BPC Energy Ltd turned to Dev Partners for a complete turnkey solution, and they exceeded our expectations. The team handled everything from project management to development and support with real care and attention. They understood what we were aiming for, stayed on top of every detail, and always delivered on schedule with excellent quality.
Working with Dev Partners to redesign and modernise our WMS system: the whole process has been thoroughly professional from the outset and a delight to work with. Cannot recommend enough.
Great agency. Have used Dev Partners for several years and they have built 20+ sites for us, in addition to taking on our legacy websites, upgrading and maintaining. Easy to work with and some great practical ideas to improve our digital offerings.
Jones Hire have been working with Dev Partners on several projects, which have been very successful. They linked our catering database to a new improved website so clients can easily place and update orders, created a custom warehouse picking app to fulfil all our challenging requirements, and are currently developing a custom transport app to streamline our loading and delivery process.
We have been trying to reinvent our website for over 5 years, trying to make it convert and failing each time. Spoke to Rob at Dev Partners, the team helped create our new site and the improvement was instant.
We have been working with Rob and the team for about 10 years now. Dev Partners helped us build a completely bespoke CRM from scratch which manages our daily business and is always well maintained. We have been able to use the system and roll it out in our new franchise branches.
We collaborated with Dev Partners on the front end of a fairly complex telemarketing platform. Rob and Jason took the time to properly understand the moving parts, asked the right questions, and delivered a clean, intuitive interface that's made the system far easier for our team to use.
I have been working with the team at Dev Partners for the last 3 years and we have always been impressed with the speed in which they act on things for us, along with the honest open communication. The team are a valuable and vital part of our supply chain.
We've had a program for our business in the electronic security sector that Dev Partners developed and keep up to date. They've never let us down, always there when needed. Thanks Rob and the team.
Dev Partners have been working with us for just over 2 years. They have significantly upgraded and redesigned our existing web platforms, and always deliver a first class service.
Dev Partners helped us build an event website. The team were very knowledgeable, easy to work with and quick to deliver a high quality product.
Working with Dev Partners has been an exceptional experience. Their team is highly skilled, professional, and committed to delivering results. What truly sets them apart is their communication and transparency; we always felt informed, supported, and confident.
We've worked with Dev Partners a few times to support us on bespoke web build tasks. They're very easy to work with, approachable, and explain the detail in a way that's understandable. A great partner for technical issues at sensible prices.
Excellent customer service backed up with solid experience. As a media business we have had five websites built by Dev Partners. I would certainly recommend them.
Found Dev Partners and they were great, nothing too much trouble. They managed to help us with integrating our old existing system with Shopify.
I've worked with Rob and his team off and on for many years and have always found them to be professional, knowledgeable, and best of all, they listen to their clients and deliver what is required.
We have worked with Dev Partners for 7 years and can highly recommend them for their expertise and excellent customer service.
WordPress development in Bath: questions answered
The questions Bath and Somerset businesses ask us most often about WordPress projects.
Yes. Dev Partners is based in Gravesend, Kent, and we work with businesses across the whole of the UK, including Bath and the wider Somerset region. WordPress development is delivered remotely as standard, and the distance makes no difference to the quality of the work.
You deal directly with the founders, Rob and Jason, throughout the project. We travel to Bath for a kick-off workshop or key milestones when it genuinely adds value, and otherwise keep the overhead low.
WordPress is a content management system that powers a large share of the web. It is our recommendation when a project is content-led: a site where non-technical people need to publish, edit, and organise pages and articles through a friendly editor, where editorial workflow matters, and where a mature plugin ecosystem can cover common needs. It is also a strong fit for WooCommerce stores.
For complex application logic, REST APIs, or multi-user operational software, a framework like Laravel is usually the better choice. We will tell you that honestly rather than forcing your project onto the platform that happens to suit us.
Custom theme development, bespoke plugin development, WooCommerce stores, content-led and editorial sites, performance and security hardening, headless WordPress builds with a separate front end, and migrations from other content management systems onto WordPress. We also take over and rescue existing WordPress sites.
Bath has a strong tourism, heritage, professional services, higher education, and creative sector, and much of that work is exactly the content-led, brand-led publishing WordPress is built for.
Yes. We take over existing WordPress sites regularly. We start with an audit of the theme, the plugins, the hosting, and the security posture, give you an honest assessment of the quality and any technical debt, and then work to whatever scope makes sense. Some inherited sites are well-built and just need extending or speeding up. Others are a tangle of conflicting plugins and out-of-date code worth addressing before building further. We tell you which one you have before committing to any work.
It depends on the complexity. A focused custom theme or a well-scoped content site starts from a few thousand pounds. A larger editorial platform, a WooCommerce store with bespoke functionality, or a headless build costs more. We scope carefully and give you a fixed-price proposal based on what we actually find in your requirements, not an estimate designed to win the work and adjust later. We do not pad a project with plugins or features you do not need.
It depends on what the project needs and who will maintain it. For content teams that want to compose pages themselves, the block editor with well-built custom blocks or carefully chosen patterns is usually the right answer. For brand-critical or performance-critical sites we build custom themes so the markup stays clean and fast.
We avoid stacking heavy page builders that bloat pages and become a maintenance liability. We will recommend the approach that gives your team control without sacrificing speed or security.
Almost all of our project work is delivered remotely, and that has been true for years across our entire client base, including national names. The quality of a WordPress site has nothing to do with where the developer is sitting when they build it.
We run regular video calls, share progress on a staging environment you can access, and stay reachable directly. Bath is around 150 miles from Gravesend; we travel down when a workshop or milestone genuinely benefits from being in the room, and otherwise keep the overhead, and your costs, low.
No. Dev Partners has been a 100% UK in-house team since we were founded in 2008. There is no offshore arm and no subcontracting of the build. The people who scope your project are the people who write the code and the people you can call when something needs attention.
For Bath clients that means you get a genuinely senior UK team without the cost structure of a large London or Bristol agency.
WordPress is the most attacked CMS on the web precisely because it is the most popular, and most breaches come through out-of-date plugins, weak credentials, or poor hosting rather than WordPress core itself. We harden sites with sensible configuration, keep core, themes and plugins updated on a managed schedule, minimise the plugin footprint, and put monitoring and backups in place.
Staying secure is a routine we manage for you, not a problem that builds up silently until something goes wrong.
Usually, yes. Slow WordPress sites are almost always the result of bloated themes, too many plugins, unoptimised images, no caching, and cheap hosting. We audit what is actually causing the slowness, then fix it: trimming the plugin footprint, implementing proper caching, optimising the database and assets, and moving to hosting that suits the traffic.
For Bath businesses competing on search and conversion, Core Web Vitals and page speed are not vanity metrics; they affect rankings and revenue.
CoreCRM is our own CRM product, built on Laravel and in continuous production use since 2011. It is relevant because it is direct evidence that we build and maintain serious software over the long term, not just for the length of a project.
The same discipline we apply to our own software, around data integrity, maintainability, and long-term support, is what we bring to WordPress work, including the integrations that connect a WordPress or WooCommerce site to the systems behind it.
WordPress project in Bath or Somerset? Talk to us.
Describe the project and we will tell you whether WordPress is the right tool and what it would involve.
New site, custom theme or plugin, WooCommerce store, or taking over something that already exists; we give you an honest view on approach and cost before any work starts. You speak directly to the founders, not an account manager, and the team building it is fully UK-based and in-house.
We can also help with:
- Custom WordPress themes and bespoke plugins
- WooCommerce stores and bespoke commerce features
- Content-led and editorial site builds
- Performance and security hardening of existing sites
- Headless WordPress and CMS migrations
- Ongoing WordPress care plans and development retainers
We reply to all enquiries within one working day.
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