What does a custom WordPress build give you that a theme does not?
A marketplace theme gives you someone else's design plus every feature its author thought might sell, loaded on every page. A custom WordPress build starts from your content instead: custom post types for the things you publish, such as case studies, locations, courses or products; ACF field groups so editors fill in structured fields rather than styling text by hand; and Gutenberg blocks designed for your own layouts.
Functionality lives in a plugin and the look lives in the theme, so a redesign never takes your content structure with it. In practice that means a custom theme, one or more custom plugins, a short list of maintained third-party plugins, and a staging site where your team signs off before anything goes live.
When is WordPress the right choice, and when is it not?
WordPress fits when content is the product or drives the sales: marketing sites, blogs, documentation, membership and course sites, and WooCommerce stores. Non-technical editors can publish on their own, the plugin ecosystem already covers SEO, forms, multilingual and payments, and almost any PHP developer can maintain the site after handoff.
It is the wrong base when the product is really an application - per-user dashboards, real-time data, complex permissions or heavy calculations. Forcing that into WordPress means fighting the posts and postmeta tables on every feature. We say so on the first call and point you to a custom web app, or to headless WordPress if the content side still matters.
How does WooCommerce plugin development work?
A WooCommerce plugin extends the store through its action and filter hooks, the Store API and the WooCommerce REST API - never by editing WooCommerce core files, which the next update would overwrite. Typical custom work covers pricing and discount rules, shipping by weight or zone, subscriptions, B2B catalogs, product importers, and sync with an ERP, CRM or warehouse system.
Two details separate a store that survives updates from one that breaks. The plugin must be compatible with High-Performance Order Storage, the dedicated order tables WooCommerce now uses by default on new stores. And it must support the block-based Cart and Checkout, where many hooks written for the classic checkout template no longer run. Miracuves builds and tests against both.
Should you go headless with WordPress?
Headless means WordPress stays the editing back end while a separate front end - usually React or Next.js - fetches content through the REST API or WPGraphQL and renders the pages. You gain front-end speed, full freedom over the interface, and one content source that can feed both a website and a mobile app.
You also give things up. Post previews, plugin-driven output such as forms and SEO tags, and some editor conveniences have to be rebuilt on the front end, and you now run and host two applications instead of one. Headless pays off for high-traffic or app-like front ends; for a typical marketing site, a well-built block theme is faster to ship and cheaper to run.
What actually makes a WordPress site fast?
Speed on WordPress is decided mostly by what runs on each request. We keep the plugin list short, move repeated database queries into a Redis object cache, serve cached pages from Nginx, Varnish or a CDN, and keep the autoloaded options table small - a common hidden cause of a slow front end and a slow admin.
- Images served as WebP or AVIF at the size they are displayed
- Scripts and styles loaded only on the templates that use them
- Imports and other heavy jobs moved to background queues, not page loads
- Every release profiled with Query Monitor on production settings
How is a WordPress site kept secure after launch?
Most WordPress compromises come through outdated or abandoned plugins and themes, weak administrator passwords and exposed login pages - rarely through WordPress core. Hardening is therefore mostly discipline: fewer plugins and each one actively maintained, updates tested on staging before production, two-factor login for administrators, least-privilege user roles, file editing disabled in the dashboard, and off-site backups that are test-restored.
The 60-day support window covers bugs in what we delivered. After that, the monthly retainer covers maintenance - core, plugin and PHP updates - alongside feature work, so the site does not quietly fall behind.
Can you move an existing site to WordPress without losing rankings?
Yes, if the migration is planned around URLs. Before anything moves, we crawl the old site, map every indexed URL to its new address, and carry over titles, meta descriptions and structured data. Content is imported by script, through WP-CLI or a custom importer, rather than pasted by hand, so formatting, authors and media links come across intact. The 301 redirects go live at the same moment as the DNS switch, and we watch Search Console coverage during the support window after launch.
