Backend WordPress Optimization & Enhancements

Our WordPress site has grown steadily and now needs a capable backend developer to keep it fast, reliable, and ready for the next round of features. I’m looking for someone who lives in the world of PHP, MySQL, and WordPress core APIs—someone who can read a complex custom plugin, spot the bottleneck, and patch it without breaking a thing.

Here’s the current situation: a handful of bespoke plugins, a heavily-tweaked child theme, and traffic that’s starting to expose the cracks. I need you to audit the codebase, fix any functionality bugs you uncover, and streamline load times by tightening database queries, caching, and asset delivery. When an improvement calls for a new custom plugin or a hook into functions.php, you’ll own it end to end, documenting your work along the way.

Once the site is running lean, I also want incremental feature work—think user-facing tools such as refined search or account-level options—built the “WordPress way,” so future updates stay hassle-free. Clean, well-commented code is non-negotiable, and every change should pass through a staging environment before going live.

To help me choose, please share two or three links to recent backend-heavy WordPress projects, highlighting challenges you solved around performance or custom functionality. If you’re comfortable with Git version control and WP-CLI deployments, that’s a big plus.

I’ll review portfolios as they come in and aim to kick off as soon as I find the right fit. Looking forward to collaborating!